The poet Kevin Young put together The Hungry Ear, an anthology of poetry about food and drink. These poems get to the heart of our shared human experience around food. Listen to this NPR interview with Young to hear what he has to say about the book, and sample a few of the poems for yourself.
Elizabeth Alexander, “Butter”
Lucille Clifton, “cutting greens”
Billy Collins, “Litany”
Lynn Emanuel, “Frying Trout While Drunk”
Joy Harjo, “Perhaps the World Ends Here”
Robert Hass, “Meditation at Lagunitas”
Brenda Hillman, “Food”
Honoree Jeffers, “The Gospel of Barbeque”
William Carlos Williams, “This Is Just To Say”
Kevin Young, “Ode to Gumbo”
Also, look at this series of poems about food from tweetspeak: Eating and Drinking Poetry.
We’ll be reading a lot of articles in class about food issues and food science, but bring us more of a sense of food experiences. We can smell the BBQ, feel the juice of apple dripping down our chins and the see the the stain of the berries on our fingertips when we read poems about cooking and eating. These sensory details often evoke memories that are among our strongest shaping experiences–of being with friends and family, of participating in communal traditions, of becoming human and becoming one with a human culture.
Questions for Consideration:
- What kind of memories do these poems evoke for you?
- What social role does food play in your own life?
- What are some of the strongest sensory details (sights, textures, smells, etc) about food in these poems? What are some of your strongest sensory memories regarding food or drink? How do those sensory memories, when evoked, influence your feelings or behavior? For example, what do you feel or think when you smell coffee? How about the cookies that your grandmother made for you when you were a child? How about the meal you once ate with someone who is no longer part of your life? How is food, and the sensory memory of food, tied to our emotions and our thought processes?
- How do the speakers in these poems characterize their own relationships to food and community?
- What poetic techniques are employed in these poems in order to heighten the reader’s experience?