The Hungry Writer

I've started a new writing project based around food - you can take a look at the most recent blog posts here. Although, as Molly Wizenberg says, Food is never just food. It's also a way of getting at something else: who we are, who we have been, and who we want to be.  If you'd like to keep in touch with my weekly memoirs, you can become a Hungry Reader and follow the blog.

So, I wondered if you'd like to join me for a bite to eat, or something to drink, for this prompt?

Free write around the idea of food. Think of the food of your childhood, your likes and dislikes now, about the first ever restaurant meal you ate. What are the colours of food that attract you? Do you remember the first time you got drunk? Have you ever been in a situation where someone has fed you, or provided you with food because you were unable to do it for yourself? Have you ever grown your own food? Can you describe the first sip of cold beer, or champagne, or hot tea? Let your mind have a free rein - allow it to take you wherever it wants to go.

I never expected to write the following poem. I don't know where it came from... I definitely don't know a man like this! But the images arose during a free writing session. It's good to surprise ourselves sometimes.

Fat

Skinny women order his fish
fried in low-cholesterol oil,
batter as crisp and sheer as glass.
He teases them about goose-fat,
the slip of it, how it dimples
under fingertips, at the right point
of tenderness how it gives
to the tip of a tongue.

He dreams of women
whose flesh parts for him
like lard – their overlap, the spill
and pleat of them, his hands skating
over their suety gleam, their excess
rejoicing under his palms.

from Learning How to Fall

Write well.
L x

December Poetry Prompt 1 - Food

Food is on my mind. Not surprisingly since I seem to have eaten non-stop for the last three weeks! I always end up eating more when I'm doing less - lazing about on the beach and loitering in bookshops must use up far more energy than I realise : )

Although, to be honest, food is never very far from my mind. When I was teaching at the University of Kent, in the UK, one student remarked that I had never managed to last a whole seminar without mentioning food or drink. In the context of the seminar's theme, that is... But it's true that my novel, The Oven House, is full of foodie bits - coffee shops, poached salmon, kettle crisps, home-made soup, pesto sauce, ice-cream...

I also know that food plays an important part in my memories, from my dad's vegetable garden, to the tin of condensed milk my granny kept on the kitchen table to add to her tea, to the frozen peas I tried to outstare every time my mother put them on my plate and said, 'Eat them. They're good for you.'

Brainstorm for food associated with your childhood. Food you liked and food you hated. Food and drink that you weren't allowed to have. Treats. Special occasions. Fears and rewards.

Here's an old poem of mine to start you off.

Bean Picking
for my father

When the jungle of leaves
dropped their scarlet blossoms
we waited for them to grow
at first invisible against the green

but in August we pushed
between the rows with a colander
and your orders to leave the small
and not to miss the big.

The coarse underside of leaves
grazed our bare shoulders, sun
dribbled through the overlaps.
We smelt hot, uncooked beans

and tugged them from their stalks,
some solid bodied, plumping
along their length, others curling
like witches’ fingernails.

In the kitchen you topped, tailed,
and pared the spines away.
Just a plate of these’ll do me you used to say,
with butter and a drop of pepper.

At the end of Summer
you saved twelve maybe twenty
moist red hearts
to harden in brown paper.

Write well.
Lynne
x

May Poem Prompt 2

Among the Things He Does Not Deserve

Greek olives in oil, fine beer, the respect of colleagues,
the rapt attention of an audience, pressed white shirts,
just one last-second victory, sympathy, buttons made
to resemble pearls, a pale daughter, living wages, a father
with Italian blood, pity, the miraculous reversal of time,
a benevolent god, good health, another dog, nothing
cruel and unusual, spring, forgiveness, the benefit
of the doubt, the next line, cold fingers against his chest,
rich bass notes from walnut speakers, inebriation, more ink,
a hanging curve, great art, steady rain on Sunday, the purr
of a young cat, the crab cakes at their favorite little place,
the dull pain in his head, the soft gift of her parted lips.


Dan Albergotti
from The Boatloads
BOA Editions, 2008

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I've posted 'list poems' before, so I'm sure the idea won't be new to you, but it's true that they look easier to create successfully than they actually are . We need to find the right rhythm to carry the reader through the poem, the right blend of imagery (precise or general, concrete or abstract), general comment or statement, and, at the end, the reader needs to feel as if they've been exposed to more than just a list. There might be a sense of revelation, or surprise, or an insight into someone's experience that, somehow, informs our own.

I've read Dan Albergotti's poem several times and I'm still not exactly sure of what's behind it, e.g. is the 'he' of the title the narrator speaking about himself? But that doesn't matter to me because there's so much in the poem that speaks so clearly to me.

Here are a just a couple of things that stood out for me, but I could talk about every line:

1. The rhythm in line 2 that's broken into two parts - read it aloud and hear the precision and care contained in those three one syllable wordsthe of the final image: pressed white shirts

2. the miraculous reversal of time: coming after the title, and after the reading the poem to the end, then reading this abstract image again gives me that sense of regret that I've felt now and again in my life... if only I could go back an hour, a week, a year. Has everyone felt that dread at sometime in their lives?

3. How it begins and ends with food: greek olives, crab cakes. But that's probably just me - I love reading and writing about food :)

So onto your poem. Brainstorm for a title first - really brainstorm. Use the phrase - Among the things... and see what emerges when you write freely...

Among the things:
she'd like to forget
they never said
he said he'd never do
you will never miss

That's just off the top of my head... there must be dozens and dozens more.

Choose one and see where it leads you.

And here's a list poem of mine that was published a couple of years ago in the New Welsh Review:

Olives

Plump ‘Queens’ glistening in oil,
the size of small eggs, or little

beads of green stuffed with garlic, jalapeno,
or laced with herbs and sun-dried tomato,

or the glossy black ones we ate
in Juan Carlos’ bar on Carrer d’Albet

with white anchovies and litres of sweet cava
then walked home up Via Laietana

through Eixample, up Carrer
St Juan to the apartment we rented that year,

opposite the supermercado where I bought them in tins,
con huesos, or pitted – sin

huesos, the Spanish for olive pits and bones,
as I remember us then – our bodies

slipped free from their bones, the last time
we made love, the last time we made each other come.

Lynne Rees

I hardly ever write with a regular rhyme scheme but the rhyming couplets (mostly slant rhymes) felt right for the subject matter and music of the poem.

Write well. I look forward to reading your work.

Lynne