What’s on the Menu? | Maya Stein
I approach new poems as I might step up to a buffet line. You know that feeling, right? The long acreage of tempting dishes, and the ensuing collision of color and aroma and flavor as you nose your way through? As I pony up to the table and approach the impending choices, I consider the different ways this meal might go. Do I pile the plate so every inch is covered, and the remoulade of one thing melds into the démi-glâce of another? Do I impose a restriction to keep things spare and tidy, perhaps more focused (and digestible)? Do I create an organizing principle—say, picking only vegetarian dishes—that helps limit my meal while still filling my belly?
Poetry, whether we’re reading it or writing it, presents a smorgasbord of choices, and everyone has a distinct appetite that provides a unique compass to help guide their navigation. When we can identify what’s at the core of our appetite and move toward the poems—and the meals—that meet us where our hunger lives, we are more than fed—we are nourished.
What I’ve always loved about buffets, and what I’ve equally loved about poetry, are the tendrils of abundance wafting through the lines. This sense of possibility, of agency, of a forward movement that leads us from emptiness to amplitude, from the outskirts of understanding to the center table of discovery. And much like food, poetry tilts our ear to the senses, wriggling awake the fibers of our nerve endings, pulling us into a world of calorie-rich aliveness. Whether I’m writing or reading a poem, I’m engaging in a willful act of creative nourishment, filling my belly with the sweetness of syntax, the umami of meaning.
Twelve years ago, as a newly minted stepmother to two teenage boys, I discovered the truth of the old aphorism, “The way to someone’s heart is through their stomach.” For years, I’d been leaning on poetry as nourishment to connect to myself; now I was leaning on actual nourishment to connect to the boys. I baked cookies and homemade bread and mac and cheese and meatloaf, researched kid-approved recipes, dove headfirst into the cookbook aisle of the local bookstore for ideas. I was setting the metaphorical table for a smorgasbord of offerings to them, not necessarily because food alone would bring us closer, but because I knew that speaking this language of meal- making—unspoken though it was—could meet us where our hunger was.
The upcoming Camden Festival of Poetry includes its own smorgasbord of offerings. In addition to the keynote by Pádraig Ó Tuama, you’ll find a delicious assortment of workshops to attend, including “The Poem on the Page” with Judy Kaber, “Activating Your Nouns & Verbs” with Arisa White, “The Art of Writing about Art” with John Paul Caponigro, “Into Wildness” with Kimberly Ann Priest, and “Thirteen Ways of Starting a Poem” with Kathleen Ellis. And I’ll be leading one focusing on “Blackout Poetry.” Comeone, come all – the buffet awaits! In the meantime, here’s a poem entitled “Devouring the Stew” that I wrote about dinner, among other things:
At dinner, my stepsons say things
I don’t understand, their language
culled from the antics of rising YouTube stars.
They show me the clips but even then,
the narrative is lost on me, distant as Pluto.
And it does feel sometimes like
we’re orbiting disparate solar systems,
our paths crossing in random galactic events
no astronomer could ever predict. Last night,
a meeting kept us from an intersection at the table.
I’d made beef stew in a cast-iron pot.
The carrots had been sliced with certain
tenderness, the potatoes scrubbed clean,
bay leaves gentled in. When we came home,
the boys had settled in their rooms; their bowls
lay emptied in the sink. On the stove, the outline
of a ladle, pale remnant of the meal
they’d plowed through.
The universe keeps expanding,
I’ve heard. But maybe the opposite
is also true.
Maya Stein writes poetry, makes crepes (and stews), still shoots a mean left-handed hook, and facilitates writing classes. She is the current Poet Laureate of Belfast,
