WHEN YOU COME TO A SILVER FORK IN THE ROAD, TAKE IT

Tags

Food, Henry David Thoreau, Manchester, Mark French, pie, postaweek2012, Silver Fork Restaurant, Vermont, Walden Pond

                           

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  So many choices.  So little time.  

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In 1856, Thoreau wrote in his journal: “My themes shall not be far-fetched. I will tell of homely everyday phenomena and adventures. Friends! Society! It seems to me that I have an abundance of it, there is so much that I rejoice.”

Thoreau appreciated what is truly important in life ~ food, shelter, clothing, fuel and a few simple tools. He borrowed an an ax to build his cabin. He grew beans for fun and barter. He whittled pencils. And he lived about fifteen minutes away from his mother.

It’s a Walden Pond tradition to leave a rock near Thoreau’s hut.  But I think this visitor really gets it.

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(Photo courtesy of Teeny Pies)

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Thoreau’s intention during his time at Walden Pond was to strip away all superfluous luxuries and live a simple life. I’m all for that.  But good food, like a teeny pie, is not a superfluous luxury.

Thoreau thought a lot about his diet. He only spent about twenty-seven cents a week on food, frugal for even the 1850′s ~ rye, cornmeal, potatoes, rice, beans, a bit of salt pork, molasses, and salt.  He mostly ate grains and vegetables and flat bread, some fish… and once, a pesky woodchuck.

But Thoreau left the woods quite regularly to dine out with friends.  He was known to dash across the fields anytime the Emerson’s rang their dinner bell. Rumor has it that Henry would even steal pies from his neighbor’s windowsills.  I think the Teeny Pies blogger, saving the world one pie at a time, is onto something.

For me, going to the Vermont woods is a simple pleasure.  And when the dinner bell sounds, I make a beeline for the village of Manchester, a place “as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves.”  Straight to the Silver Fork.

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The Sliver Fork is an intimate six-table restaurant owned by award-winning chef Mark French and his wife Melody. It’s got an insanely friendly vibe. The masterful chef, who has received many Silver Fork Awards, comes into the dining room to chat, his wife works the bar and his daughter serves the tables. You truly feel like a guest in their home. The menu is inspired ~ impossibly stellar plates prepared with an abundance of fresh local ingredients. Thoreau would rejoice. It’s opulence on a fork.

So save room for pie.  And this.

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Toni 1/13/12

SILVA RERUM : SOMETHING TO GNAW ON

Tags

Commonplace book, Henry David Thoreau, Literature, November Poem a Day Challenge, poetry, Poland, postaweek2011, Robert Lee Brewer, silva rerum, what's in my journal, William Stafford, writing

Pursue, keep up with, circle round and round your life…. know your own bone: gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw at it still.                        ~Thoreau

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Henry David Thoreau kept a journal, filling it with observations and reflections, literary excerpts and personal comments. Journal-keeping isn’t new. It used to be called commonplacing. The journal, or commonplace book, had yet another name, silva rerum, meaning “a forest of things”.  A silva rerum was a multigenerational family journal kept by members of Polish nobility in the 16th-18th centuries. In Poland, the silva rerum is a writing tradition, and excerpts from notable examples are, er, commonplace.

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Commonplace books were a popular way for people to record striking passages they found in their reading. Remember the electrifying effect that some thoughts had on you when you encountered them for the first time?

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The commonplace book is a way of memorializing those striking passages that you can return to for renewed inspiration. I’m too disorganized to have my own commonplace book. But I do jot down quotes, poems, ideas and lists in one notebook or another, on a post-it or across the back of the nearest envelope or cereal box.

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The poet William Stafford sat down with a pen and paper, took a look out the window, and waited for something to occur to him. He filled his journals with entries about simple things like farms and dead deer and winter. He wrote about the West and his parents and cottonwood trees. He even wrote a poem about …. his journal.

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What’s in My Journal

Odd things, like a button drawer.

MeanThings, fishhooks, barbs in your hand.

But marbles too. A genius for being agreeable.
Junkyard crucifixes, voluptuous
discards. Space for knickknacks, and for
Alaska. Evidence to hang me, or to beatify.
Clues that lead nowhere, that never connected
anyway. Deliberate obfuscation, the kind
that takes genius. Chasms in character.
Loud omissions. Mornings that yawn above
a new grave. Pages you know exist
but you can’t find them. Someone’s terribly
inevitable life story, maybe mine.

 

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These days, there’s online versions of commonplace books.  (I wonder, do they call them an e-commpnplaces?)  http://www.poets.org has a new feature called Notebooks where you can create online anthologies to share. You can also made special notebooks for friends.  http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/544

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Hmm, lots of places to collect the poems you are submitting to the November Poem A Day Challenge. Here’s the prompt for Day 6. You can find whatever day you’re looking for under Editor’s Blog, Poetic Asides. On his blog, Robert Lee Brewer says poets are more than welcome to jump in and start poeming along, even if they’re a day or week late to the party. The more the merrier, and you’ll still be just as qualified to send a chapbook in December. So get poeming!

http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/poetic-asides/poetry-prompts/2011-november-pad-chapbook-challenge-day-6

Imagine  ~  a book of thoughts, ideas, and poems being called commonplace.

Gnaw on that.

Toni 11/6/11

ARS POETICA ~ A SINGLE LEAF

Tags

ars poetica, Beat Generation, David Budbill, de-clutter, Garrison Keillor, Gary Snyder, GoodWill, Henry David Thoreau, National Poetry Month, nature, poem, poetry, postaweek2011, simplify, spring, stories, The First Green of Spring, The Three Goals, They Drink Tea, writing, Zen Buddhist

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I discovered Gary Snyder last year when I went in search of a poem for a photo/verse contest. He is a Zen Buddhist who traveled the world and made the decision to sink or swim as a poet. He’s also a mountaineer, environmental activist, philosopher, and member of the Beat Generation. Snyder believes that nature is a temple, whether you are walking a trail breath-by-breath, sailing an ocean, tending a garden or peeling garlic. Travel light and make contact with the world ~Snyder’s voice is in the honored tradition of Thoreau.

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“fewer the artifacts, less the words,

slowly the life of it

a knack for non-attachment.”

-Gary Snyder

Tis the season to de-clutter.  We clean out closets, drive to GoodWill, maybe even toss some of our worldly goods into the trash. (The teapot is a keeper.) Simplify, simplify. But how many of us live in a ten-by-fifteen foot cabin like Thoreau?  He wouldn’t accept a doormat from a friend because of the time it would cost him to shake it out.  He pitched the limestone rocks that he kept on his desk out the window when he realized that they required dusting. And he had only three chairs~ one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.  Thoreau gave us a vision for how we might live.

Twelve hundred years ago in China, P’ang Yün loaded everything he owned onto a boat and sank it in the lake.  After that, so the story goes, he lived like a single leaf.

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Imagine what that would be like. Unencumbered. Traveling light on life’s journey. No distractions. With focus and intention. P’ang Yün sank all his possessions and freed himself to devote the rest of his life to his family, to Zen, and to poetry. Simplify, simplify.

Poetry sharpens your vision and ups your gratitude.

And you can tuck a poem in your pocket.

So come travel light with me during April. You’ll meet new poets, rediscover old favorites.  Hang onto your beret –  it’s National Poetry Month, the time when we celebrate the goodness of lines on the page.

There’s a truckload of poems out there. Some aren’t all that memorable.  But there are many that get read at weddings, ceremonies and memorial services, poems that make their way into our lives. Ones where the lines vibrate off the page. Garrison Keillor says poems makes us love “this gaudy, mother-scented, mud-bedaubed language of ours.”

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So come and read them here.

(Thank you, Poets. If your poem appears here, I own the book that contains it.)

A poem a day, more or less.

You’ll be soul-deep in something extraordinary.

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#1

The First Green of Spring

by David Budbill

Out walking in the swamp picking cowslip, marsh and marigold,
this sweet first green of spring. Now sautéed in a pan melting
to a deeper green than ever they were alive, this green, this life,

harbinger of things to come. Now we sit at the table munching
on this message from the dawn which says we and the world
are alive again today, and this is the world’s birthday. And

even though we know we are growing old, we are dying, we
will never be young again, we also know we’re still right here
now, today, and, my oh my! don’t these greens taste good.

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Want more of the talented Mr. Budbill??  http://www.davidbudbill.com

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Toni 4/3/11