Marinated olives. How are Mo a role model for poems?

Some poems could benefit greatly from brining. Curing.

In the meantime, here's a poem-friendly culinary activity:

jar of good green olives (with pits)
lemon zest & a squeeze of juice
2 bay leaves
3-4 slices of garlic
fresh lemon thyme -- a few sprigs
olive oil
MIX

to which can be added:
chopped tomatoes
or almonds
or feta
or roasted onions
or carrots (raw or roasted)
MIX (Serve as tapas or on top of leaf lettuce, making what might loosely be called, a salad)

Bhutanese Red Rice Salad. How is Brrs aligned with poetry?

It's a matter of not having but having company arriving in a few hours. You are out of Bhutanese red rice. So you make the recipe with a 6 grain rice mix (Kagayaki). You leave out the rice vinegar but maintain walnuts, soy and edamame. You add more ginger. No one complains.

This is akin to reading poetry before an audience. Perhaps, you substitute one poem for another because you have the audience's best interests (and your poem's) at the forefront. No one complains.

Who stops to think of the powerful (palpable?) link that rice salads and poetry readings share?

(An aside: Highly recommended: Marie Simmons' The Amazing World of Rice (Morrow Publishers, ISBN 0-06-093842-0)

Potluck. What is the connection between potluck and a poetry reading?

Consider the 5 elements:

element of surprise
element of similarity
element of diversity
element of nourishment
element of the sweet & the savory

And what is the 6th element, you ask?

element of gratitude that one left behind a paper sack with 4 peaches

Casual food. What is casual in poetry?

There is no definition of casual food although there are too many examples to name.

For instance, goat cheese on crackers with a small bowl of mixed pistachios, walnuts, raisins, sliced dried apricots. Leftovers are sometimes said to be synonymous with casual food. However, I don't agree. Leftovers can lead to quite the uncasual. Each situation must be considered situationally. That you know.

& poetry? Well, elements of prose. Not natural speech; written prose. In poetry.

Breakfast salad tacos. How does a Bst inform a small poetry collection?

Both accommodate a loose structure relying on what is at hand & ripe. That is the sum.
The individual ingredients might include the following:
Persian cucumber
Feta
tomato
black olives
fresh basil
pistachios (oh, those again)
baby lettuces
tomato
pepper
lime olive oil

Think outside the shell, include fresh apricots.

Cohesive & unique. As in signature. As in voice.

Pistachios. How is editing a poem like enjoying pistachios?

Work is necessary to get to the sweetmeat.
You have something tangible (as in taste) when you finish.
The resulting color surprises (delightfully).


What might not be evident --pistachios & mangoes are in the same family. Both are vitamin-rich sources for editing & enjoying a poem.

Mango, tomato & avocado. How does mta relate to poetry?

If you assume as I do that food and poetry share love of the ripe and joy in color, then the connection isn't farfetched. The combination of mango, tomato & avocado serves as a colorful springboard for a salad either opening or closing the meal. Similar to an apt arrangement of words accommodating silence which can occur at the beginning or end of the poem. Throughout, actually.

Sake. Why is sake perfect to accompany the short poem?

Culturally it infused the Japanese short form as well as the poet. It offers clarity and then develops into a soothing fog.

It translates mighty well to the American ku.

And if your mind isn't turned to poetry, sake does sashimi proud. By the way, sake, sashimi and poetry are wasabi friendly.

Tea. How does the taking of tea leach energy from writing a poem?

Or put another way, do coffee drinkers squeeze more angst from each word?

Try an experiment. Drink several pots of tea in the early hours. Pick up a pen. Edit, if you can. No doubt, you'll be grabbing for toast.

And why, is angst necessary? Why squeeze words? Calm, the hurricane's eye.

Split pea soup. How does Sps and clarity relate to poetry?

One of my favorite soups is an adage for clarity in a poem. The fog is thick as slit pea soup.

Poetry & cooking adhere to laws of physics. A body (whether it be carrot or word) moves towards or away from. In this conversation, "from" denotes clarity. Same can be said of a line.

Now, what we haven't discussed is whether clarity good or bad. Or for that matter, fog.

Picnic food. How does picnic food mimic the editing process of a poem?

The genesis of perfect picnic food is what's in the refrigerator in real time. Here you go -- open said refrigerator (take notes as a detective would), take something out, put the remainder back. You have more; you have less. You are no longer clueless.

The page or digital screen is the refrigerator. Take something out; put something back (sometimes even the same amount). You have been editing that sweet, dear or spicy poem all morning and now you are ravenous.

Begin at the beginning -- open the refrigerator.

Chef salad. How is a Cs akin to provisional poetry?

First, let's define Chef salad. Left to the cook's whim & larder, a Chef salad does not need to include chicken or turkey or roast beef. In fact this morning here's what this cook presented:

baby lettuces
Santa Rosa plums
Persian cucumber
queso blanco
walnuts
shelled pistachios
fresh basil
olive oil
a generous splash of soy
pepper

So to get back on point. A Chef salad is finished when the chef says so. It may not have the look and taste of something academic. Provisional poetry speaks of and to the same language. Necessity.

Hand-crafted pizza. How is an H-CP a paradigm for editing a poem?

The ingredients are at your fingertips. For a poem this means the alphabet and all the sounds which it creates. For last night's hand-crafted pizza a fiesta of leftovers including sauteed Crimini & white mushrooms, fennel, roasted garlic, cheddar, fresh lemon thyme, pepper, olive oil, small flatbread. Baked @ 400 degrees. Cut with scissors and arrange the slices on a bed of organic lettuces.


Sipping red wine, you know when the editing works, an arrangement of leftovers. You can hear it; you can taste it. Yummy.

Edamame. What do edamame and haiku have in common?

Surprisingly, more that size. A weighted compactness. Of course, there's the ah-ha moment when the edamame is shelled and morsels popped into the mouth. Seasonal reference? It's in the genes.

Cobb salad. How is the Cobb salad quite like a Shakespearean sonnet?

Both are inventions to beguile the tongue.

The Cobb has almost 14 ingredients: Boston lettuce, Romaine, watercress, chives, bacon, eggs, Roquefort, chicken or turkey, avocado, Brown Derby's Old French Dressing which includes sufficient ingredients to swell the number to 14.

Both depend upon the eloquence of a line.

Make a Cobb (in honor of Robert Howard Cobb) and re-read Shakespeare's sonnets and contemplate whether William's wife wrote them. No doubt, she did the cooking.

Tuna fish casserole. Is Tfc a poetic form?

For five months we've explored poetic terms and forms. (Did she mean exploited?) Now we'll turn attention to foods and how they relate to poetry. Or how they don't.

Yesterday, a humongous bowl of tuna fish pasta salad was placed on the table by a poetic hand. This gesture of hospitality invoked the memory of tuna fish casserole with cream of mushroom soup. Simply, some foods are more epic than ku. Perhaps, Tfc is akin to bombastic language.

Kindly weigh-in on this matter and hold the mayo.