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advertising, best tweet of the Superbowl, braciole, cooking, dunking in the dark, Food, guacamole, Joseph Bathanti, Kevin Young, Nemo, poems, poetry, postaday, postaweek 2013, social media, The Hungry Ear, winter storm
Tuck in your napkins, people. Today’s post is all about food. Food in verse, that is.
………………
Sometimes poetry is more than just poetry.
The Hungry Ear is a collection of poems that celebrates the pleasures and sorrows of food. Kevin Young cooked up, er, edited this book. He says that, much like the best meals, the best poems are made from scratch.
I like the sound of that. It’s the way we do things in my kitchen. Fatto a mano.
My Grandmother made braciole. I bet poet Joseph Bathanti’s did, too.
Braciole is a Sicilian dish and, yes, it starts with a hammer. Unless you have a butcher in the village like Lina’s.
……………………….
Braciole by Joseph Bathanti
With the cast iron claw
hammer – burnished
silver in endless
bouts of fire, forged
in Manfredonia,
Puglia,
by my blacksmith
grandfather, Paolo
Battiante, arrived
at Ellis Island
on the Luisiana,
out of the province
of Foggia, 1907,
where his name
was altered, like so many,
the hammer secreted
in his tunic –
my mother pounds
on butcher block
flank steak to temper,
then lays on each softened tongue
olive oil, garlic, parsley,
salt and pepper, before
trussing them into scrolls
bound with string
from Stagno’s Bakery,
and dropping them
into the incarnadine majesty
of the sauce to roil
the rest of our lives. Amen.
.
.
.
Here’s a Poetic à la carte menu to whet your appetite ~
Butter http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/audioitem/1902
To Eat of Meat Joyously http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poems/eat-meat-joyously
Speed and Perfection http://www.phys.unm.edu/~tw/fas/yits/archive/hirshfield_speedandperfection.html
Artichoke http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=7611
.
Food is pop culture. It’s who we are. It sustains us. It connects us. So does poetry.
Finally, an Homage to Guacamole. Make some today. If the timid-but-stormy Clownfish is torqued to the limit, tomorrow we’ll be dunking in the dark.
Do you have a favorite food poem?
Or one you wrote from scratch?
Toni 2/6/13
I wrote one a while back called ‘Spice and Flavour; might post it one of these days.
There’s no better time than now….the last WP email was in celebration of reruns. Go for it!
Thanks, will do.
It’s a long one, so look out for Part 1.
We Women Who Write love it when writers emerge with their great stuff. Heads up everyone for Spice and Flavour!
Patty
Here’s Part 1: http://poet4justicedotwordpressdotcom.wordpress.com/2013/02/09/spice-flavour-1/comment-page-1/#comment-1021
Thank yo so much for this post! The video of Signora Lina is priceless and I felt as if i’d been transported back in time to my youth. I noticed how she used the same two-pronged fork to stir the braciole as well as the cooking pasta. It may vary from family to family but in ours, Mom’s generation and those before all used forks far more than they did spoons. My generation is the opposite.
I should be going to bed but now I want some braciole!
My mother was always forking things too. Hmmmm. I sense a 420 Character Piece on mothers and forks.
Patty
Never can figure out how Toni can love food so much and still weigh little more than
100 pounds!!!! Wish she would share her metabolism.
Toni’s our hero(ine).
Patty
My mom made braciole all the time…. I can still taste it…. By the way, not remembering the Italian word for hammer tortured me… My trusty Italian dictionary rescued me…. the word is martello. Loved your post.
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