What Does Food Have to Do with Poetry?

Each month we feature a guest post from a contributor to Poetry’s current issue. Dorothy Chan’s “Triple Sonnet for Black Hair” appears in the November 2019 issue. Previous posts in this series can be found on the Editors’ Blog.

Food has everything to do with poetry. I like to compare poems to appetizers. Appetizers are a tease—they’re the palate whets filled with nonstop allure. Think about which dish sounds more enticing only based on the sound of the words: “octopus ceviche in young coconut” or “rotisserie chicken with mashed potatoes”? Your mouth simply has more fun when you say “ceviche” and “coconut.” Bonus: alliteration. I’d argue that poets, when looking at a menu, first fall in love with the sound of the dish; then the food comes out and we fall in love with the sight of the dish. And when we finally eat, we fall in love with the taste. This sequence is what I call the “sensory tease.” And appetizers, those sexy little plates, are the ultimate teases of any menu. They make you beg for more. After all, “amuse-bouche” translates literally to “amuse mouth.”

I want my poetry to be that continuous tease of the appetizer: the sonnet sequences, the triple sonnets, the full-bodied odes, the recipe poems—I’m really trying to make my favorite forms sound like a tasting menu here. I want my poems to whet readers’ palates, to make them beg for more, to make them start back at the beginning over and over again—the continuous tease of the poetic, the seduction in the mouth, the seduction of the poetic.

Whenever people ask me what my poetry is about, I always answer: “food and sex.” And then I joke that I’m mighty proud of claiming the two greatest things in the world as my subjects. And then I say that “food and sex” make the world go round. But when you think about it, it really is true. Maybe with my poems I’m trying to provide sustenance. To say the very least, poetry does provide much-needed sustenance. “The Buffet Dream” from Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon’s second collection, Open Interval, is a poem that has always sustained me. It is a sestina about hunger. Van Clief-Stefanon’s speaker opens with:

In the buffet dream this is what I want —:
Everything I can swallow:
What is hot —: What is cooked —: What is sweet —:
What will fit on my plate —: What will drive me from
      sleep
with longing —: This is hunger : —
before the first bite crosses my tongue, waking.

I love Van Clief-Stefanon’s choice of the six sestina words: “want,” “swallow,” “sweet,” “sleep,” “hunger,” and “waking,” all of which evoke the desires of the speaker. The speaker also gives us as a cataloging of food in the poem’s third stanza, which further brings out desire in a sensory way:

                        silver bowls of fresh berries and zabaglione : — as waking,
just once, to bright lemon tarts with single sprigs of mint someplace where
     sleep
has wrought miracles.

I want to taste those fresh berries and zabaglione and lemon tarts and sprigs of mint. I want to taste them over and over again. A great poem, like a great meal, leaves you full and happy.

In order to make the audience feel full and happy, though, both the chef and the poet need the right ingredients and a dash of style—poetry, like cooking, is about ingredients, precision, and improvisation. That little extra sprinkle of something. Poetic ingredients: your poetic language, your voice, your tools. Poetic precision: getting the right word. Poetic improvisation: breaking the traditional form. That little extra dash of something: what I call the “x factor” or “Chemical X,” that special something that makes the poem pop.

European-style cooking is generally more about precision and measuring out exact ingredients. But I think a lot about how Asian-style cooking relies greatly on improvisation. I love the Cantonese lobster dish my mother cooks. I love how each time I eat it, the amount of soy and ginger varies. That’s the beauty. And that’s how poetry should be. Sure, we have beautiful traditional forms like the sonnet, the sestina, the villanelle, but what’s even more beautiful is breaking those forms and contemporizing them. Van Clief-Stefanon’s “The Buffet Dream” is a contemporized sestina. The poet doesn’t just repeat her six words; she gives us variations of those six words. For instance, “swallow” becomes “swallows” and then “swallowed.” This move gives the poem more dimension and surprise—in fact, the reader might not even notice it’s a sestina at first.

All my friends know that I have a super soft spot for the sonnet. I might actually love the sonnet more than I love food or sex. Yes, I know—that’s a grand statement. Anyway, my poem in the November issue, “Triple Sonnet for Black Hair,” contains a whole cataloging of a Hong Kong wedding feast, filled with roasted pork and abalone and swallow’s nest soup with crab meat and lots of other good stuff. Food in poetry is fun because it lends itself to the cataloging device. And I think that the sonnet is the perfect form. It’s concise yet expansive. It’s romantic: fourteen lines, just like Valentine’s Day. It’s in pentameter, so it mimics the way we speak, and when there’s good conversation, don’t we want more and more? Why have one sonnet when you could have three? Or a hundred?

For me, the sonnet is the ultimate “amuse-bouche” of poetry: it’s that palate whet that makes you want more and more. I always go back to Shakespeare’s “Dark Lady” sonnets, particularly Sonnet 130, and the power of the last couplet: “And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare/As any she belied with false compare.” I’ll always have a soft spot for Norman Dubie’s first collection, Alehouse Sonnets. And Jonterri Gadson’s “Rapture” from Blues Triumphant is a sonnet sequence that I frequently teach.

I believe the mark of a great poem is one that makes the reader go in a round: you finish reading the poem, then you are prompted to start back at the beginning, and then reading becomes a nonstop, infinite action. The sonnet, with its concise form, allows the reader to do just that. There’s a special power in that last line. I think of Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon’s sonnet “Eight” and its last line, which reads, “praise God. I’ve learned to call on other powers.” Here, the speaker signals the infinite with her plea to “other powers.” In addition, when flipped on its side, the number eight becomes infinity. Sure, the tonal shift and power of the last line may prompt us to re-read the poem again and again, but to begin, the title “Eight” already hints at the infinite. That’s the amuse-bouche. We simply keep going and going.

The idea of the sonnet as nonstop and infinite is a reason why the crown of sonnets exists. I think of Beckian Fritz Goldberg’s sonnet sequence “Lucifer’s Crown” in Never Be the Horse, particularly these lines from the third sonnet:

Flesh, flesh became the world and he was it:
The garden odors were like his staircase
fallen, clove on jasmine, on shaved cedar,
on punk loams, on mineral gladness.

I love the directness of flesh on flesh, coupled with the sensuality of “clove on jasmine, on shaved cedar.” Fritz Goldberg gives us that sensory tease.

And fun fact: while standard crowns contain seven sonnets in a row, mine contain eight sonnets in a row, because eight is the lucky number in Chinese culture. Eight is also the number of dim sum dishes my grandmother orders. Now I’m craving dim sum. I’m craving shumai and Chinese ravioli and pork buns. I’m also craving more poetry—what a continuous tease.

I remember what Dubie, my poetry dad, once told my MFA cohort during our first workshop at Arizona State in Tempe: “Stay healthy. Eat well. Otherwise, you can’t produce good poems.” From that moment on, I took Norman’s wise words to heart. I needed to take poetry seriously, and as much as I loved a good fast food run and happy hour cocktails, I knew I had to regulate those binges. I started cooking more. I started trying out my mother’s recipes from Hong Kong. A week after that workshop, she sent me a package of Chinese dried mushrooms. I made a delicious meal that night. I wrote a poem.