By Kashiana Singh

INTRODUCTION

There is no other source of writing that is as evocative as food. In ancient cultures, food has always been associated with healing, it is connected with gods and goddesses and mythology. Kitchens and Dining Tables have held moments of prayer, pause, and presence with food as a central character. Without a doubt, there is an invocation of all five senses. The synesthetic aura leads to readiness for nourishment and the spiritual setting enables gratitude.

Generations and cultures have poems and songs written and transmitted about harvesting food, making food, and relishing food with the community.

Food and poems open up our senses to the extraordinary and help us pay attention to specifics. These are both aspects of our life where we go inwards, where silence finds a resting ground. Both food and poems are created to gather hope, hold hands, and collect breath.

You are what you eat and you become what poetry you read. Come alive into your own body as you work your way through this lesson offering both food and poetry.

SECTION 1

Introducing Food – The Appetizer

Annapurna – The Goddess of Grains

The image of Annapurna, Goddess of Grains in the Indian Subcontinent is that of a beautiful goddess holding in her hands a vessel and a large ladle to supply food.

Reflection Time

Do you have any traditional, cultural, or personal traditions surrounding food? If so, what are they? 

Share with a partner, and write a few words about the prayers, chants, food offerings, aroma, and flavors you remember from this tradition.

SECTION II

Food as Meditation – The Process

Food and its process are both multilayered and multipronged. There is the process of preparation, the technique of preservation, and the presence of props. 

Poetry and its process also involves preparation, technique, and form. 

How does one inform or influence the other? 

Let us take one famous poem: Persimmons by Li-Young Lee

Read the poem out loud. Now focus on the below three observations and make similar observations about a fruit of your choice.

• The poet demonstrates that he knows the fruit well
• There is a clear step-by-step process to eating a persimmon 
• The poet describes the center of persimmons as a heart

Let us take one favorite, universal food: Bread 

A few questions:

How many types of bread have you had?

What is the best memory you have of eating bread?

• Who were you with? What do you remember of that moment?

Have you watched bread being baked? What do you remember about the process?

• Think in terms of ingredients, the movement of the maker, the fragrance, texture, and taste, how about shapes?
• Comparing and Contrasting different grains used around the world and textures of bread?

Poem Creation time:

Write a poem using the following three elements – 

Use two ingredients

●      Mortar and Pestle

●      Colander

Use two spices

●      Mortar and Pestle

●      Colander

Use two events

●      Birth of a baby

●    Holiday 

SECTION III

Food and Women – The Faith

The stories of recipes and poems across generations

Reading Poems –

1. Read this poem – Women are Cooking Outside by Michelle Whitstone, a poem translated from Navajo

Question 

What happens to a poem that travels across generations?

2. Read this poem – Filling Spice Jars as your wife by Kai Coggin

Question 

Preparations for milestone events and life markers usually begin days in advance. In this poem what is the preparation underway, how do you see the poet using the sensual and spiritual aspects of food, spices, kitchen?

Poem Creation time:

Write a few examples of cooking practice. 

• Use measurement, mathematics, and scale
• Then use bodily understanding, generational memory, and approximation
• Imagine an elder reading a recipe or teaching you how to cook your first dish

Begin creating a poem.

• Start a title – Do you wish it to be rooted in the food elements/the memory/the place?
• Write the body – Start with … I can smell….. and amid that moment there was row after row of paradise, ripe cilantro sprouting from a ground cover of black-eyed susans.
• Revise – Just as you would garnish or plate your best-cooked dish. Move things around, adjust sequence, create white space, Break the monotony, and Bring in a surprise element. Get more specific with the sensory details. 

SECTION IV

Types of Poems – The Buffet

It is all now laid out, let each pair of students pick a style, and start their creation process

●      A Recipe poem

●      A list poem

●      An ode to a food ingredient

●      The body remembers food

●      A dining table conversation

●      Write about the meal you would cook on the last day of earth

Allow yourself to start a few different ideas from the buffet.

Add emotions and pictures.

Flood the room with ideas, perceptions, deeper responses.

Find other poems and texts about food as a group.

Trade ingredients from your writing with a partner.

Keep these found items in your Poetry Pantry for the next creation!

SECTION V

The Gathering 

Create a time for pause, time for plating of the work of poetry creation, let the students lay it out, taste some, share some, show some of what they have spent time learning and generating –

• Decorate the dining area – Use Metaphors instead of names of dishes.
• Pin up the recipes and poems that the group has created.
• Develop collage layouts of poems created in the class, with sections of other contemporary food poems and pictures, photographs of family recipes or dishes.
• When studied and displayed together the poems and artwork tell a story.

SECTION VI

The Carrying

Writing about food or being a food writer are complex topics and I prefer we just open our minds to understand that there are broader, complex issues that find their way into the topic of food  — immigration, animals and plants in food, hunger, and gluttony in societies, systemic injustice, feminism, seasons et all. So while food is a great community builder, it also is a great divider – it has political and economic layers that cannot be overlooked. 

Reading Recommendations –

• Displeasures of the Table: Martha Ronk
• The Language of Food: Annabel Abb
• The Tassajara Bread Book: Edward Espe Brown

Section VII

The Sifting

Use a Food Collander to generate some words and phrases that students can use in their continued writing practice – 

Example –

• Mocha
• Tomato
• Cherries
• The displeasure of Brussel Sprouts
• Soup from a Campbell tin
• Heinz
• Milk
• Prayer as serene as a pasta b
• Cereal
• An Onion peeled to its kernel
• Bananas
• Custard
• Cake loaf as gooey as love
• Pumpkin Pie

Section VIII

The Practice

As you wrap the class, go ahead and introduce terms like Food Porn, Food Coma, Food Consumption, Food Abstinence, Food Memory, and Food Colonization – All of these are topics that can be covered in subsequent classes. This Lesson serves as an introduction to the more complex concepts of Food and Poetry.

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