FARGO — I’m a sucker for a good poem. And, if you haven’t guessed by now — I'm also a sucker for good food. Pair the two together, and you’ve found my love language.
When I was living in Montana, I taught poetry to elementary school students through a nonprofit I co-founded, Young Poets. It was perhaps the best job I ever had, especially on the week where we incorporated food into our writing prompts. Using Galway Kinnell’s “Blackberry Eating,” l would introduce the idea of how a word feels.
Kinnell was famous for using words that have “mouth-feel,” like “overripe,” “unbidden,” and “certain peculiar words / like strengths or squinched , many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,” as he described in the poem. Being a child of the West, I haven’t ever picked a blackberry from a bush, but I know what it feels like to come across wild strawberries or raspberries in the woods, or the greatest luxury of all: huckleberries, those tiny splats of deep purple indulgence that bring all the bears to the yard. The lesson, adapted from the Poetry Foundation , encourages students to taste a blackberry, but to employ all their senses.
What is a blackberry like? How does it look, feel, AND taste? Silky like a cat? Smooth like a stone? Tart, as if the sugar was removed from Kool-aid? Students come up with so many brilliant metaphors to describe the feeling of a blackberry, just as Galway did. “I love to go out in late September / among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries / to eat blackberries for breakfast / the stalks very prickly, a penalty / they earn for knowing the black art / of blackberry-making.” The other not-so-secret secret for teaching poetry to children (or anyone, really): chocolate.
Rita Dove does this indulgence right in her poem, “Chocolate.” Velvet fruit, exquisite square I hold up to sniff between finger and thumb— how you numb me with your rich attentions! If I don’t eat you quickly, you’ll melt in my palm. Pleasure seeker, if I let you you’d liquefy everywhere.
Knotted smoke, dark punch of earth and night and leaf, for a taste of you any woman would gladly crumble to ruin. Enough chatter: I am ready to fall in love! (Does it get much better than "dark punch / of earth and night and leaf"??? Looking for more poetry? I enjoyed Daniel Neman's recent column for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch , "These are the flavors of summer," which got me thinking about food and poetry.
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