Taste

Gastronomic Poems

Francis Raven

BlazeVox [books]
Buffalo, New York

Copyright 2005 Published by BlazeVOX [books] All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the publishers written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews. Printed by CafePress.com in the United States of America ISBN 0-9759227-8-5

Cover art by Aloysius Werner Book design by Geoffrey Gatza

First Edition

Breakfast Shopping List

The constancy of breakfast comforts. The ability to choose eases the mind into the days work. Almond-Raisin Granola http://www.epicurious.com/run/recipe/view?id=102619 From epicurious.com: 17,000 recipes cooks can search and critique. The individual reviewers sphere widens with every new webpage. The urge to discern overwhelms the urge to create. Ingredients: 3 cups old-fashioned oats (no new-fangling) 3/4 cup shredded sweetened coconut 1 cup cut-up nuts almonds or walnuts 6 tablespoons pure maple syrup 6 tablespoons (packed) dark brown sugar 1/4 cup vegetable oil 2 tablespoons warm water 1 cup dried fruit Some directions: Mix up the dry ingredients. Mix up the wet ingredients. (This is the Gross Part (GP) of making granola. Every cooking experience deserves a GP for added mystery.) Spread the mixture on a greased cooking sheet. Bake on low heat (like 250F) for 1.5 hours or more. Stir every once in a while. Its nice to make granola in the afternoon with a beer. ***

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Fruit Smoothie Ingredients: 1 banana (frozen) a few berries (frozen unless really expensive) maybe some mango juice to taste about three T yogurt possibly some chocolate nibs or nuts if youre feeling wild. Some direction: Blend them up.

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Ingredient: Egg
For Allen Weiss The childs finger follows In an orbit Around ellipsoid shell, Accidentally drops it. The idea flows Over straw. Some live, Thats to say, Eggs are complete objects; Man is but a partial representation. Pass the crimson egg of spring Around the table To the one you love, Etch it with gold, Bury it for dreaming culmination. Do you remember that photograph of Marilyn Monroe lying down on a sofa Cracking eggs into a cup of milk? Appropriate sentence structure Of fames prowess Bending and birthing The static image. Egg cracks: A paradigm for fertility; And when fried A model for cultured fertility, Civilized sexuality On a plate In a diner Over easy. The yolk is the idea born, Not yet conscious, Full of protein. Humans inner fruit Fulfill prerequisites for language. Birds outer eggs Required for flight.

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Have you ever tried To fry a seed On a summers sidewalk? It doesnt work. It doesnt even get the budwhite. Nothing, just milky and absolute. The egg ingests all And is nothing because of it: World into the omelets curd. But rots (Is eventually the cruel Communication of sacrifice) And stinks. We fold Our bones Slowly Within its Milky juice. Man, microcosm in the seed: Souffl fluffs up existence. Sacrifice is the shape; Phoenix rising from its greasy fried form. Daybreak concentrates in the center: Life is experienced in the eating; Incorporating the sum of lunar eclipses. The cosmos of the souffl Folds over the content of an open sky, Flickering its stars violently, Into a hungover Sundays omelet. The decoration of the apocalypse Lines the curves of any good birth.

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Taste Conversation
In taste and color there are no friends. The taste, but not the smell, of cyanide, is lethal. In the future, all tastes will be manufactured in Flavor Alley off the New Jersey Turnpike, using a mixture of natural foods and river water. How will I know if I taste the same flavors as you unless I eat the whole dish? When youre trying to describe the flavors you taste in a wine my advice is to start simple. Say fruity instead of raspberry notes. As you get better at tasting youll be able to move your descriptions into more complexity. If its fruity, is it citrus, berry, or apple? Then you just keep getting more and more complex. Taste metaphorically means styleintimately connected with the self and subjectivity. In order to taste something you have to take it in; the other has to become part of us, if only for a minute. Therefore, the eater becomes less of a racist with every bite. Weve always wanted to eat like the Jetsons; we just repressed these desires to fit in with the dominant paradigm of sloworganic-heirloom food-systems. If you eat the whole dish you wont taste the same flavors as me because I wont taste anything. Ill just be sitting here, hungry. Besides, this

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casserole is pretty homogeneous as far as I can see. The important thing is to be right and to have everyone you talk to agree with you, if they know what theyre talking about. Food can never be distant enough to be considered art because taste is always within. Aesthetic distance is in danger of disappearing because food is always there for a practical reason, to nourish us. Whats new with taste? What will be the new cilantro, the new basil, the new gorgonzola? Haute salt is passing out of todays mouth. Real fruit has to learn from synthetic fruit flavor bursting in your mouth. Natural food leaves much to be desired. Now place the crumb of sourdough on the tip of your tongue and taste the salt that combats the action of the yeast you taste when you move the bread towards the back of your mouth. Im thinking apples, but I dont want to have to take it back. Taste divides its time between discernment and sensation. Excess does not equal a gourmet experience. What if another countrys food is your comfort food? Does that make you a pornographically inclined exoticist? I mean, when Im sick or I break up with someone all I can eat is Pad Thai for days. But taste, the subjectivity of taste, is informed and manufactured like everything else, with the complex of dynamics generated by existing power structures, conformity, and the media.

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What were trying to do is increase the complexity of the taste profilea longer beginning, becoming, flourish, and finish. Taste is the lowest sense in the hierarchy of an intellectualist: sight bears knowledge, taste brings indigestion. Im not a glutton. Im a gourmet, bachelor, intoxicated chef. But some detractors seem to think that gluttony is merely noticing good food and trying to attain that blissful state. Smell is the early warning system. Taste is the immediate emanation of what is imminently possible. Vietnamese food is so interesting because Vietnam was conquered so many timesfirst by China, then France. Each country left their influence on that semi-permeable alimentary membrane. Thus, hoarding and sophistication underline their cuisine. In grade school, we should be taught to distinguish between tastes the way we are taught to discern shapes, numbers, and words. Our palates are educable, one must hope.

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Liquid: Tea
1. We must boil all water in the country for health reasons; Kills bacteria, cleans our souls. The edict was released, by the well-cloaked emperor, on official parchment. One day while writing slight poems and inhaling Jasmine petal fragrance, wind gusted, charged fire under water. Coals turned red in a powerful admiration of the gale, limbs fell, unattached tea leaves blew throughout the scene. They whispered unassumingly into uncovered pots of boiling water and inevitably steeped into a rich amber elixir. The emperor, being an inquisitive scientist, decided he would taste the liquor, and soon felt, naked, inquisitive, quick witted, humorous. Thus, tea was born of his pores. 2. Leaves unrolling in boiling water expose the plant in our drink, showing us nature in this technological rush. Its currency poured over the spring garden; petals floating. A sunrise cup is not an alarm clock,

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but wind slowly burning off the fog. A good strong morning cup with the New York Times on the porch: eternal and definitively temporal. 3. The poem, like tea, must be steeped for the perfect amount of time; too much and the poem will be but bitter directness, too little and the flavor will not cohere. Rich tan elixir raining on the mountains; flowing finally into the swamps murkily hiding language in the folds of poetry. Suddenly, the tea poetically becomes the metaphor for the unrushed full mind sharing, opposed to the quick brutality of coffee; How do you get your caffeine? Bean versus leaf. 4. Black tea dries for two or three days, fermenting into fullness, leaves shriveling, tastes sphere expanding from green teas brilliant astringency [often steamed to seal leafs secrets and prevent fermentation]. Drying alters leafs attitude into character. But character doesnt change the world.

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Attitude flips the order, turns the cup in revolutions of rich water. Whereas character develops slowly, steeps in the choice of selfhood. Delicate green leaves can't handle being burnt. They must almost stand alone, too much heat ruins them, milk and lemon both overpower. 5. Tastes: Round English Breakfast with a low questioning voice, almost beautifully passive aggressive. Ceylon Dry pucker couched in milk. Dry wind forcefully pushing the mind forward. 6. And they simply took the first leaves and the bud. Escaping form, light liquor leaking languidly from the leaves. Pick the top three leaves off for me. Dont crush them; roll them slowly in tight balls. The higher the altitude the better the cup. Up cooler air mountains, leaves grow slower producing brighter maltier fluid.

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7. The perfect mug floats on a river upstream filled with three sips of pucker and two of boldness. How thick was that mug's lip? How fast does the tea flow? How large is its capacity? Where is that perfect mug? At least, where is its shadow? The cup becomes a metaphor for the relationship between soul and body. What then is the mouth of the cup a metaphor for? Our mouths or our eyes? 8. Steeping the tea: Color infuses patterns with veins like fractals and spreads across mugs bottom, diffuses across era's conflicting ceremonies. Squeeze the bag, deeper color drips slowly: Remove the leaves so bitterness doesn't also bloom in the afternoon cup. 9. Your astringent hair, sweaty almost aimless, is given shape (weighted to a single wave) by the body of the liquor. There is a difference between the astringency of green tea and the bitterness of steeping stems.

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Astringency sets you awake on the pins of your mind. Bitterness merely dries, numbs the soul.

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Grocery Coffee
Coffee canister falls, a death opens. Wine glasss knife lies on the pulse of late summers jam; canning, I know where I live all year long.

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Sunny Side Up
For Libby After the drunken night, After the courses were forgotten, Breakfast was made: Lox for most, But a fried egg for her. I broke it on the pan, Ready to transform from liquid to solid, But she took over, Massaging the yolk, Strangely. Finally slipping Onto her plate; Lifting With fingers To her lips And slurping it in As one would gulp an oyster.

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Morning Meat
Fatty bacon, Purchased at my mothers cheap store, Sizzles Away its whiteness, Burbles burn onto my hand; As its redness finally pushes itself Into the forefront of the scene; As its fat renders into the pan, Creating a deeper and deeper pool. I place the miniscule final product Between paper towels. Fat remains in the pan. And the question we all must ask is: What do we do with it? Youre not supposed to pour grease down the drain. Ive heard that before, But the full force of its irony finally hit me: Youre not supposed to pour it down the drain Because it hardens and eventually clogs the pipes, But you eat it all the time And what do you think it does to your arteries? Well, it clogs them Just likes the drain (could give you a heart attack) or cause for a plumber depending Righteous health knowledge reluctantly Ate a piece of bacon and some eggs.

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The Problem of Corporate Poetry

How could I be a corporate poet? I would feel bad, first of all. But the main problem I foresaw Was that fellow poets would think less of me For selling out to the system. Corporate poetry is a new and specialized field, Not of poetry, But of advertising. What were the blurbs we would write? Poetry, however, could not think singularly, But kept veering off to the margins of products. There were things to be said, Points to be made, But the poems wouldnt stick to them. The poems about tea kept talking about Zen or coffee And the chocolate poems were worse, Spouting off, as they would about sugar, slavery, jungle sweat, And worst of all lifestyles. In the end, the advertising poems ended up being a bust; Even though I loved Scharffenberger chocolates and Fat Tire beer Verse about such subjects rang flat into The ground: it was better just to eat and drink.

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Lottophilia
There was a period of years, I liked to call The Contest Years, when I entered several games, of luck and skill mixing in sandy entropy. Not that I ever won, but Id search for opportunities on the internet; Not that I went in for online casinos, but You get Vegas odds or better but You'll be in with the crowd that has been enjoying our casino since 2001. but We have over 25 games for you to choose from. but Relax and bask in the raunchiest gaming parlor on the internet. No, I was more paranoid than your average lottophiliac. I stuck to contests slightly less guaranteed to transform me into a lonely obsessive sleepless gambler. So, when the local chocolatier announced an essay contest to describe either your favorite truffle or a memory of their chocolates (100 words or less) I had to: From the time I submitted the two essays until I received the savage rejection notice I dreamt of how I would spend the winnings ($100 worth of chocolate). Share them with friends or hole up with my chocolates and write a book of poetry about them, which I could sell back to the company for a lot of money, making me a real corporate poet?

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I think they wanted something more along the lines of life is a box of chocolates, but I wrote: 1) Can a food create an entire world through taste alone? Can it urge you to imagine silk and orchids? Is it possible for a bite of chocolate to haunt you for weeks on end? The English Butter Almond Truffle does just that at the moment you think least possible, namely, the most earthly moment. Yes, it is at that moment where the idea of anything transporting you from your tired feet is challenged, where we need to ask these philosophical questions, and where a well placed truffle can rescue you from your insipid answers and send you toward dawns image. 2) The melt and crunch that is toffee; butter realized as hard pleasure. The creaminess of the toffee is cut, but not severed, by its sweetness. The element of life is kept together through the nuttiness of the posture, by a noise in the mouth that wakes the taste buds. The flourish of California almonds puncturing the chocolate flies across the plate, but the toffee is still one, unshakable. *** Now Ill admit I shouldnt have won the Parkay contest (you know, send us your best lines for the tub of butter-like spread to read aloud) but it was easy to enter, internet-form embarrassing now. Showing them off will help me be more myself; help me be freer in that third type of Kierkegaardian freedom: When I do it my way I spread on the Parkay. Give your dessert its luxurious squirt. Since I entered these poetic nuggets I probably dont own them. As the Parkay website helpfully reminds:

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Submission of any entry further constitutes the entrant's consent to irrevocably assign and transfer to the Sponsor any and all rights, title and interest in the entry, including, without limitation, all copyright. I certainly shouldnt blatantly list my entries in open air. In the future Ill probably have to whisper them in your ear.

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Foundation
Some common ground Closing its mouth Around A meal Surfacing On the crest Of the next idea.

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Tasting Notes: Waking Poetics

Ohh, odes about food and other things, ohh. *** My black coffee hot coffee deep coffee Your amnesty sugary amnesty *** Peeled orange playing with your vocabulary laughter with self fate. *** Juice tang drip, precisely subtle orange. One-flip cottage-cheese pancakes on the range. *** With food Can we ever get away from nourishment? Can that old aesthetic feeling bounce around, signify the circular argument of art on a plate? *** The independent realm of perfect berries. Where is the seed in each fruit? Where is the fruit in each fruit? Am I calling you a peach because of some real feature that belongs to you? *** (Ask for a new espresso machine, borrow one, the threads are stripping.) Espresso pen new notebook Christmas break

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Coffee roasted elsewhere Lindt orange chocolates decaf tea for lover spicy pepper preserves *** Clementine Clementine twice boiled twice drained, finally cooked in threaded syrup for an after dinner greeting with chocolates silk shawl. *** Can I make it too? Espressos crema wafting off in the distance of Lake Michigan. It helps if you turn the machine on, even if it is merely borrowed. Espresso and a clementine angled cloud in cup peel and peel on counter. Lemon rind clarifies espresso, rounds the liquor. *** Full bitter within the stone; even a smell, not of death, but of what brings death full, as if you were to smell the stretched mouth of a gun, (and even as intimate and exotic as a Persian rug) that bitterness, that almond waft hammered from a peach pit, but before: half a pecks fuzz made you sneeze

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*** Odes, yes, but also other things places, cups of tea, specific corks. *** I dont want to read the news today. Id rather try food. Not comfort food, but something new, something that challenges me out of this war mentality. *** Orange Orange Orange Orange Orange Orange Orange Orange Omelet Omelet Omelet Omelet Omelet Omelet Omelet Omelet *** Food poetry cant just be tasting notes with shortened lines.

half an island of flesh encrusted: cobblers secret.

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