Painstakes: A Recipe

Elissa here ~ The prompt for this particular post was to write a poem in the form of a recipe. I have deviated from the form of a recipe, but I’ve focused on the theme of recipes and cooking. If you will, the poem is a recipe detailing all the emotional baggage associated with food and family and cooking and growing up and whatnot (the point being that a recipe doesn’t always involve step-by-step instructions).

A pinch of this, a dash of that.
That is the way of things.
Cooking, much like coming of age,
cannot always be conquered with a family recipe.

What, are you just going to
eat out the rest of your life? mother says.
Are you going to hire a cook?
If only you could make that much money.
As a writer.

 Stepfather can cook, but is too much of
“a cook.” Everything too rich, too
complicated.
Sometimes life is already too tart
for dark chocolate and raspberries.

Father cooks, but doesn’t
even keep butter and salt around.
No milk, either.
You ask for a carton, and
a box of cereal, but
by the time you return to his house
the cereal is stale and the milk
is sour.

Our food says so much
about whether or not we’re okay.
The spongy, off-brand mac & cheese
crammed into your elementary-
school thermos, the jelly on your
peanut-butter-&-jelly turning
the wheat-not-white bread to mush.
That alone
could make you cry.

Leftovers three days in a row,
lost all moisture, lost all motivation,
and you take the car keys,
slip out quietly.
The grimy diner down the street
gives you eggs, bacon, hash-browns, all
smothered in gravy, in relief.

When you return home, the house is hushed.
In the dark, you thumb through
the shelf of recipe-books
beneath the wine rack
and next to the napkins.

Visual poem explication

Hi! It's Clara.

 

For my project this week, I did the prompt "visually explicate a short poem." It's not actually the one assigned to this week but whatev, it's a small rebellion.

For my poem I chose Mercy Killing by Kenneth Burke. Here's the poem:

Faithfully

We had covered the nasturtiums

Keeping them beyond

Their Season

Until, farewell-minded,

Thinking of age and ailments,

And noting their lack of lustre,

I said:

"They want to die;

We should let them die."

That night

With a biting clear full moon

They lay exposed.

In the morning,

Still shaded

While the sun's line

Crawled towards them from the northwest,

Under a skin of ice

They were at peace.

Here's the image I created for this poem:

So! Just to sort of explain myself, there's a couple elements I want to talk about. The background is a tarp, the kind you use to cover plants and mulch piles and other garden-y stuff. The flowers are, obviously, nasturtiums, and that's about all there is to see. I pitched everything into a purple-y blue tone (STAY PURPLE) because this poem felt very cool and calm to me. I also wanted to find a way to keep it close to the ground, and sort of confined, because though the poem is dreamy it does feel quite grounded to me. That's why I used a tarp, since I know them in relation to mulch, plants, etc., and they've always struck me as something deeply tied into gardens and the natural world. Yet, I hoped to sort of use the blueness of the background to play off of the lines about the night sky. I don't know, tell me if you think the poem works with the image!

:-) -Clara

The unacknowledged legislators during the Industrial Revolution

Percy Bysshe Shelley said, "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world" during the Industrial Revolution in the midst of the Romantic Movement. While you would not think Romanticism is very political it was clear that the Romantic Poets felt it was necessary for them to speak out against the Industrial Revolution. Poetry was used to inspire awareness of the social problems that new technologies brought with them. For example, William Blake's poems about chimney sweeps in his Songs of Innocence (1789) and his Songs of Experience (1794). Both provide descriptions of the hardships children endured as well as providing a cynical review of the industrial revolution. In the "Chimney Sweeper" from Songs of Innocence, the character named Tom Dacre has a nightmare. 

As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight -- / That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack, / Were all of them locked up in coffins of black/ And by came an angel who had a bright key/ And he opened the coffins and set them all free; / Then down a green plain leaping, laughing, they run/ And wash in a river and shine in the sun./ Then naked and white, all their bags left behind, / They rise upon clouds and spot in the wind;

Throughout the course of Tom Dacre’s dream Blake’s rhetoric condemned what industrialization did to the workers.  The soot that encases the sweeps is their coffin. Their air is polluted and the reality of death is upon them. When they are liberated from the difficult work they will in the end transcend. Blake also emphasizes the purity and beauty of nature when the sweeps are released into a meadow, “down a green plain” “laughing” and they’ve left their “bags” and their burden “behind.” 

Blake's political agenda is what makes this poem so satisfying. Many united around his words and convictions. They were even later used to advocate for child labor laws. Sociologists look at political movements because the way people organize to bring about social change is of large scale concern for them. Historians argue that patterns repeat themselves. For example, poetry advocating for civil rights of LGBTQ members might help raise awareness today of their struggles and lead to protests down the road-- or one could argue this has already occurred-- but sociologists have a different theory. 

Our world is very different than the one Blake lived in, and it's very different from even a generation ago. We're less community focussed. We take care of ourselves. Everything feels immediate. So can we expect poets to still act as an unacknowledged legislator if we ourselves fail to unite and pressure our governments to represent community interests? I think more and more Poetry and literature, and criticism, and writing will become our legislators because we read for the sake of reading, for our own self indulgent sakes. And so even in the face of our more self-absorbed day to day lives we will still be exposed to political agendas and new ideas. We will still have discourse, I just fear that our writers will not amplify our voices and we will become to complacent to amplify theirs. 

If you have any optimistic examples please comment and let me know. I suppose I was just in a cynical mood when I realized that I had to apply the prompt to today, not just history.