I have been away from the stove to tend to some pressing personal and professional matters for the last few weeks but thankfully the inter webs keeps its furnace going to bring freshly baked talent to our plates: check this out to get a serving of poetry in English and Spanish courtesy of the always courageous and inventive Marco Balbona.
Mark my words, this young chef is going places!
This was the freshest batch of bread, then you took a slice and saw a green dot and you thought of its minute finger burrowing through to its heel.
This was a red and juicy strawberry, scarlet red and shiny, but it turned to mush in your mouth and left the sour taste of gone off wine.
This cheese held such promise: once firm now crumbling like the ancient marble of a Roman ruin. How can it taste of nothing?
But we keep going back, endlessly hungry, we keep going back.
One afternoon you think that you are grilling prawns, the whiff of brine and salty smoke invades the kitchen and your nose. Then you look down and you take in the choreographed massacre on the pan. Bodies transfixed by fire pile up glistening like the corpses of soldiers at the battle of Thermopylae. You have become one of the cruel all seeing gods of Ancient Greece. For a moment you toy with the idea of turning the dead into a glittering constellation in a distant galaxy.
Never mind beauty and pain: with a faint turn of your wrist you toss them one more time over the fire. Now you are ready to devour them.
Sometimes I feel like a blank canvas, sparsely blotted by experience. There are days when I take the steps through my section of the maze of this gigantic formicary and I barely register my surroundings. Days where life is perched on the bare bones of subsistence, as we know it in post-capitalist societies. The senses are dulled, vacuum packed, the knife with which I slice time has a blunt edge. They are days where temperature is tame; colour is cream, brown fading into beige; all music turns into static; eating is only registered because my plate is suddenly empty and my hand suspended in the act of driving nothing to my mouth.
The world is a poorly sketched backdrop and if I get close to you and you and you, I will see you have no features on your hastily drawn faces.
They are days without smell.
Not tonight. Tonight the air was grater-sharp as I rode my bike uphill to an unknown part of town. Rows of houses reeled before me: the peaks of their neo Tudor roofs promised Poe-like disturbances behind their walls. It was dark and damp with the slate sheen of a close Irish night. I turned round to look at the oncoming cars and they rode by spectrally: headless drivers behind the wheel. I knew nobody and nobody knew me. The world was menacing but new for all that. I felt hunger and cold, I barely knew where I was going. I had to pay attention. On a bike in this dark damp god-forsaken night in an unknown part of town, I was a fragile body.
This is how lambs feel in the company of wolves, a trembling catastrophe.
There is a moment, on a night like this in an unknown part of town, when you turn round to go home and the path is new and the familiar to which you move is fire and shelter.
Tonight I turned towards home and in that moment, wheeling my bicycle in the darkness, I smelled grease and potatoes wafting out of a chip shop.
And then I remembered.
3. You are sitting a few feet away from the stove: the steady waft of a simmering stew caresses your nostrils. Red wine, tomato, beef, and herbs conspire to pull you out of your reverie with their heady aroma: a bitter saltiness that will bring flesh and soil to the tip of your tongue. Before that you heard the sizzle of the onions on the pan, imagined their silky skin browning under the coat of olive gold. And this moment of imagined pleasure is more intense than the savouring of it: a finger lingering over the key that will sound the last note of a symphony; a bird of prey about to clutch the skin of its victim; a perfectly ripe orange dangling from its branch for one last second.
Photograph by Eliseo de Brétema
I have the unlikely key to turning the kitchen into a beauty parlour: a tin of dressed crab. Tightly packed and the size of a make up compact, it promises side way glances and a blush as deep and red as the crab’s carapace. The crab daintily moves away from the vanity table and on to the wardrobe to get dressed, his flesh as white and delicate as the lace on a petticoat. Open the tin though and it delivers a sobering paradox: the crab is not dressed; he is a naked, battered and broken exile.
2: Uncertainty: Seconds, minutes, hours, buzz like uninterrupted static leaving the taste of copper in your mouth. Here food is like punctuation: time is a long paragraph that needs to be chiseled. A bite of a carrot becomes a comma; a square of chocolate, a semi-colon; a glass of wine, a colon. Of course, you are waiting for the full stop, but you know that the full stop is never food. The full stop is someone’s face, someone’s voice.
The Hop House: Korean food; a pint of Guinness; a close friend, smart, loving and up for a challenge. Inspired by a fine anthology of Portuguese poems, we talk about translation, about poetry before and after the Carnation Revolution. And then of Spanish poetry before Franco’s death and of the great Basque-Spanish poet, Gabriel Celaya. Before we know it camaraderie and bravado push us to walk the tight-rope of bringing poetry alive in another language. And blow-by-blow we try to revive the boxer so that he can bounce back onto the ring. This is the result:
Poetry is a weapon loaded with the future
When you no longer expect to be privately moved
But your heart beats on beyond consciousness.
Ferociously alive, blindly exalted
As if your pulse was beating against darkness.
When, about to fall, you look straight into the clear eyes of death.
You tell the truth: the wild, terrible, loving cruelties of truth.
You say these poems that open up the lungs of those who, suffocating,
Demand to be born, to be rhythm, to be the law of everything beyond themselves.
With the speed of instinct,
With the lightning of a miracle,
With palpable magic, in our hands
Reality turns into its twin.
Poetry for the poor, poetry that is as necessary
As our daily bread,
As the air we breathe thirteen times per minute
To be and, in our being, be a glorifying yes.
Because we live blow by blow, because they hardly
Let us utter our names,
Our songs cannot be pure ornament without sin.
We are getting to the heart of everything.
I curse poetry conceived as a cultural luxury
By the lukewarm
Who wash their hands, sit on the fence, do not commit.
I curse the poetry of those who do not take sides until they are stained.
I make mine all faults; I feel all suffering within me,
And I breathe in all songs.
I sing, and I sing and,
Singing beyond my private sorrows, I grow.
I would like to give you life, to provoke your actions,
And I measure carefully what I can do.
I feel I am an engineer of verse
And a workman who with others works the iron core of Spain.
Such is my poetry: instrumental poetry,
At one with the blind beating heart of oneness.
Such is my poetry: a weapon loaded with a growing future
That I am pointing at your chest.
It is not poetry conceived drop by drop:
It is not a beautiful product. It is not a perfect fruit.
It is like the air we all breathe,
Like the song that expands everything we carry inside.
Words that we all repeat
That we feel as ours until they fly: they are more than what we say.
They are what we need: nameless.
Screams in the sky and deeds on earth.
Gabriel Celaya
Although I believe restrictions can spur creativity, the richness and complexity of genre in all its forms being a point in case, I sometimes resent the self-imposed restriction of blogging about food or even writing a blog where food is an excuse to write about everything else. Some days I am not hungry and my mind is far from my stomach. Those days I think that writing can be hard enough without having to use food as a metaphor for the colourful debris that wafts in and out of my brain. Today is one of those days. This last week has been one of those weeks. As an example, here are some of the thoughts I had as I cycled home battling the wind this evening. None of these can be readily linked to food, damn it.
-We age physically but our character is set much earlier than our body. One day we realise that young bodies have drawn a line between them, and us; that we are seen as old, or older, even though relatively little of our intellectual/emotional self-image has changed. Another day, feeling particularly wearied, we realise the currency that is energy. We realise that we are not that far from the day when comfort will become our sole priority and that that day our spirit will be fully subdued by the limitations of our body; The day when the only wearable shoes will be a pair of slippers. That day we will feel as old as those who are still young see us.
-How can I use food to write about the jolt to the heart when my bike is pushed off course by a gust of wind? Or about the mundane exhilaration that follows when I regain my path and hold on to my cap about to fly off without accident or even mishap? How the hell do you write about these feelings via food?
-Why is politics so damn interesting in Spain right now and so dull in Ireland, in spite of the very necessary and well-attended marches and protests against water charges? My guess is that, like a family where its elders have avoided facing their traumas, Spain is now seeing its younger generations fearlessly question their compromises, and venality. Spain’s new party Podemos has the preternatural seriousness of adolescence, a time when we believe that, unlike everybody who came before us, we will never be weak or abject. Somehow the closer I come to explain this excitement about politics is the time I read the opening chapter of Cortázar’s Hopscotch ten times in a row, because the poetry of his prose seemed extra-terrestrial and also at some point achievable to rather limited scribes like me. That is as good a definition of youth as I can think of, the time when you still think that if you only tried/were interested/made an effort you could write like Cortázar, Yeats, or Emily Dickinson. There is no image of food that can allow me to follow this thread of thought.
-And then I thought that the challenges posed by this blog are attractive because for some reason I have the kind of brain that finds allusion, irony, symbolism, metaphor, and everything that is displacement and indirection profoundly compelling. I tire quickly of fact, of fitting the triangle in the triangle-shaped mould, and the square in the square-shaped mould, and the circle in the mould that is round. I teach and my intuition is that the hammering of facts and factoids that passes for education is linked to the perpetuation of capitalist ideology, with its utilitarian and cumulative thrust. That only the study of language, our first and most profound exercise in abstraction, can give us the critical detachment that we need to be full citizens.
-Following from this I find figurative art and realist literature far stranger than impressionist, expressionist, abstract art or poetry. The latter are close to magic, which we need, but how odd it is to try to create something so like its model.
-Somebody from Taiwan viewed this blog yesterday. I have no idea what they were looking for when they threw their little pebble to skim the surface of this virtual ocean or why it hit the bottle with the message I flung into that same sea more than a year ago. Sometimes it feels like the Internet is masterminded by Jorge Luis Borges.
-This is the point at which I get off my bike. Thanks for reading.
Public personas can be extremely limiting for an artist, crippling even. They distort and bend the work out of shape to make it fit into a worn out mould. How useful is it to present Shakespeare as a peerless genius we must be in awe of no matter what? Some of my best conversations with students have sprung from questioning that assumption and in my quarrels with his plays I come to deeply enjoy them, like the testy challenging flawed but irresistible lover that pisses you off but makes you laugh and moves you like nobody else.
Amongst poets, Sylvia Plath has been particularly ill served by her posterity. Mention her name and you will be within a couple of minutes of an ill advised joke about ovens and heads or, worse still, some hackneyed platitude about her tragic end. But you know what? She was a fine poet in spite of, not because of, this tragedy: her best poems are brave, inquisitive, they can be dark, but they are also vibrant: buzzing with energy and wonder. She worked hard at her writing too, her poems are not the result of depressive trance but of a life long engagement with her craft which started when she was a young girl.
I am currently reading her only novel, The Bell Jar, considered to be autobiographical, and her voice is delighting me: it shows glimpses of the darkness and intensity of depression but it is also deeply intelligent, wry and filled with the observant curiosity of those who mine the minute for gold. It is simultaneously bold and tentative, self centred and yearning: a fine self portrait of a young woman taking her first steps into adulthood. It has aged very well, I think, proving that intelligence can resist the restrictions our culture imposes on female agency, even a culture on the surface as restrictive as that of the 1950s. We need more tales of young women’s rich inner lives: stories where they give shape to their experience and where art (or work, or nature, or the tapestry of day-to-day life) is as important or more important than romance.
Sylvia Plath was not a martyr. We should think twice before we glibly label her a suicide, and attribute her fame to the way she died. What I know of her work demonstrates that she was present and engaged with life. And she had an appetite. In The Bell Jar she writes:
My favourite dishes are full of butter and cheese and sour cream. In New York we had so many free luncheons with people on the magazine and various visiting celebrities I developed the habit of running my eye down those huge, handwritten menus, where a tiny side-dish of peas costs fifty or sixty cents, until I picked the richest, most expensive dishes and ordered a string of them…
I correct myself: there’s one thing about limiting expectations when it comes to fine writers. When you actually engage with the work with an open mind, you will be pleasantly surprised.
A Fistful of Olives 