The Best American Poetry

This Week's Critic's Pick

Chocolate! Read about it here.

--sdh

Dining Out

This weeks critic's pick.

-- sdh

Snack

This week's critic's pick.

-- sdh

Diving Bell & Butterfly by Mitch Sisskind

The story of a man, pretty much of a fuck off, with some vague aspirations toward writing. But the gods were kind of curious as to what he might come up with. Since he couldn't seem to concentrate something had to be arranged.

With regard to his fucking off, the bad news was he had a stroke. With regard to his writing, the stroke was the good news. Now there was almost nothing else he could do except write. Plus (and this was the good part) he acquired a couple of achingly beautiful, infinitely patient nurses to help him. And they got it done! He wrote a great book, and about a week after publication he died.

Schnabel (means "beak" in German; "Halt dein Schnabel" means "Shut up") also got it done. Maybe the best movie ever about being a writer. As for the best movie about being a schmuck, that would be "Prehistoric Women" (1950.)

--  Mitch Sisskind

Mitch Sisskind's collection of stories,Visitations, came out in 1985. He edited The Stud Duck and has worked on such literary magazines as Columbia Review and Living Hand. He is also the author of numerous poems, including the one-line poem ("Dance on, you pigs! I will never get used to it") that appeared under fourteen different titles in Janet Benderman. He lives in Los Angeles.

-- DL

Food and Happiness

Sadness and good food are incompatible.  The old sages knew that wine lets the tongue loose, but one can grow melancholy with even the best bottle, especially as one grows older.  The appearance of food, however, brings instant happiness.  A paella, a choucroute garnie, a pot of tripes a la mode de Caen, and so many other dishes of peasant origin guarantee merriment.  The best talk is around that table.  Poetry and wisdom are its company.  The true Muses are cooks.  Cats and dogs don't stay far from a busy kitchen.  Heaven is a pot of chili simmering on the stove.  If I were to write about the happiest days of my life, many of them would have to do with food and wine and a table full of friends. 

                                              -- Charles Simic, The Unemployed Fortune-Teller
                                                  The University of Michigan Press, 1994

--sdh

Yesterday Was National Frozen Food Day by Jennifer L. Knox

What did you have for dinner? I like David Byrne because he says that frozen food, Dilly Bars, TV, prefab houses, Appleby’s and shopping malls—all the things we take as evidence of Man’s Fall from his Intended, Natural State—are in fact the pinnacles of civilization.

What have been doing with ourselves for the last 10,000 years? Well, through trial and error, we figured out how to raise, kill and fry chickens; how to grow apples and bake them into little pies; how to collect the milk from cows and churn it for eternity until it turns into creamy butter; and how to slap that on a boiled, mashed vegetable that we found buried in the ground. Then we figured out how to manipulate aluminum, put food into aluminum (these days into plastic) and froze it. There's a million little steps in the process involving advanced knowledge of biology, chemistry, horticulture, agriculture, metalurgy and zoology. We packaged it (psychology), and now we can eat all that wonderful food, anytime we want, in less that 10 minutes.
—JLK

Gastronomical Perfection

   I feel now that gastronomical perfection can be reached in these combinations: one person dining alone, usually upon a couch or a hill side; two people, of no matter what sex or age, dining in a good restaurant; six people, of no matter what sex or age, dining in a good home.
   Three or four people sometimes attain perfection either in public or in private, but they must be very congenial, else the conversation, both spoken and unsaid, which is so essential a counterpoint to the meal's harmony, will turn dull and forced. Usually six people act as whets, or goads, in this byplay and make the whole more casual, if, perhaps, less significant.
   The six should be capable of decent social behavior: that is, no two of them should be so much in love as to bore the others, nor at the opposite extreme should they be carrying on any sexual or professional feud which could put poison on the plates all must eat from. A good combination would be one married couple, for warm composure; one less firmly established, to add a note of investigation to the talk; and two strangers of either sex, upon whom the better acquainted diners could sharpen their questioning wits.
-- M.F.K Fisher
   An Alphabet of Gourmets

Quiz:  Name the poem written by W. H. Auden in response to this passage.

                                                                                                             --- sdh