Why connect the writing of poetry with an appreciation of good food? On first consideration, the juxtaposition of poems and pastries might seem frivolous. Isn’t poetry sustenance for something more than the physical body?

Recently, I taught a workshop at a local college advertised as “O Taste and Write: Food Poems,” and perhaps a subtext of free food is why 60 people appeared on a Tuesday afternoon ready to write. And why not? Isn’t a poem that takes your head off and a sumptuous crème brûlée cause for celebration? Doesn’t each experience awaken its audience with a sensory jolt, tossing us deeper into the world?

I admit it. When pomegranate crisps and madeleines first appeared in my work, I was horrified. My years with Amnesty International, Oxfam America and as a Peace Corps Volunteer imbued me with a belief that poetry is serious business. I’ve worked in countries where famine was far more present than French cuisine, where neighbors shot neighbors for sport. Food kept me alive, and ready to dodge land mines and sniper fire for another day. So how could I move from poems about civil war in Somalia to poems of the cereal aisle?

Let me explain. After my first book, The Cartographer’s Tongue, Poems of the World appeared, focusing on my experiences in Africa and the Middle East, it seemed reasonable that I’d keep exploring human rights issues. I tried, as best I could, to call attention to the women and men I’ve met that lived more courageous and complex lives than my own.

I wrote about Yves-Rose, on her 16th birthday, finding her father’s mutilated body on the family’s front porch steps — a gift from the Ton-Ton Macoute; I wrote about Giovanni Soto, a Guatemalan street kid, made to disappear by the Guatemalan police; about middle-aged Bosnian Muslims bombed by their neighbors as they hid under the stairs in a spot meant for preserving potatoes, not people. In short, I wrote about political subjects. Poetry, to my mind, needed to change the world.

 And while I still believe that, still write poems concerning the civil war in Somalia and the ongoing war in Iraq, I also believe deeply in interweaving these poems with ones that focus on the direct daily needs of bread and wine. Food poems allow me to look at my subject sideways, to explore baked goods as a metaphor for grief or the aisle of a grocery store as a stand-in for childhood. I don’t worry about whether I am misrepresenting a plum tomato or placing a tiramisu in an unfavorable light. And the mix of watermelons and war crimes may be where my imaginative strength lies.

If poetry can change the world, someone has to read it. Someone has to be moved to care about a mother dodging bullets in Mogadishu, a young boy shot by Israeli forces in the political quagmire of Gaza City. I don’t want to conjure a world of despair but rather a world as vibrant and alive as any I have ever experienced. The comfort of a family supper or the Dreamsicles of a corner grocer might, in the end, prove more vital to the story than the type of explosives used or which political party abused its power. I’d like to share some ways that I’ve folded food imagery into my poems. Perhaps these suggestions might inspire others to create new work. Poems, pastries and politics might someday cook up an utterly different kind of cuisine, one that ameliorates the human spirit as well as the body.

Write a food poem of exaggeration
This is an opportunity to play. Write a poem exaggerating your appreciation or distaste for a food you know well. Go wild. I began a recent workshop asking participants to introduce themselves by naming a food they loved or hated. “I’m Stan and I loathe lobster” one older man proclaimed, “I’m in love with a wild salmon,” a nursing student confessed. “A cheddar sharper than I am ought be outlawed,” another participant offered. The results included a poem where a salmon stood in for an erotic lover and an aged cheddar cheese began a meditation for one woman’s self-reflection.

Try a historical appreciation of the eggplant or an ode to an artichoke
This poem requires research. How fun to delve into the history of what we eat. For a poem still in progress I’ve learned the lurid past of the eggplant and why the Imam fainted, as in the fabled Middle Eastern eggplant dish. While researching a poem concerning the fantasies of a lonely baker, I found one Web site epicurious.com that listed more than 800 different kinds of cake. Intersperse historical fact with your own taste sensations to create 13 ways of looking at an artichoke.

Challenge yourself to write a political poem that uses food as a central image
There was a common joke among Palestinians in the early 1990s before the creation of the Palestinian Authority that referred to the fact that the red, green and black colors of the Palestinian flag had been outlawed by the Israeli government. “Did you hear,” the joke went, “the Israelis have outlawed watermelons.” It’s a common sight to see farmers selling watermelons in late summer by the side of the road. In Gaza, watermelons were political. Write a poem where a food is inextricably linked with a social cause. In “First Supper at Salama’s,” a Somali man offers his country’s specially prepared bread and meat along with political commentary.

Ghazal for the Woman from Vitez
[Reprinted from The Cartographer’s Tongue: Poems of the World, White Pine Press, NY]

It’s the best watermelon in the world
but there’s no way to say it in words.

She had squatted in the space for apples and pears
under the staircase, a year, beyond the place of words.

Now she comes back with tea, examines me closely,
my out-of-date phrase book, my mispronounced words.

I ask for the toilet and she shows me the bedrooms, bombed
by neighbors who should have known how to use words.

We walk out to her garden in late afternoon light,
survey squash plants and corn stalks, we re-enter words.

In Bosnia the tomato is called paradise, sweetness
transferred from some other country’s words.

We drink rounds of whisky, call her sons on the phone
laughing because we have found our way out through words.

****

Psalm for the Corner Grocer

It’s not their hunger that calls them here,
not the free range eggs or the extra fresh

organic orange juice, not the pyramids
of potatoes: fingerlings and Peruvian blues;

not the marlin fillets, nor the ahi steaks,

nor the sound of the jazz tunes noodling
above the gourmet frozen food.

They come for the patriotism of the cereal aisle –
colorful cartons calling out their names;

to taste cheeses arranged like small children:

Asiago, crème blue, a drunken goat
spread from Spain.

Around the corner, a woman anoints
both arms with claret sauce

calmly as if in a darkened church where candles flicker, then go.

Is this how we once thought it best to live?
What mis-steps have we left behind?

At the check-out counter, under bags of edamame,
the grocer prays she’ll find Dreamsicles

and lady fingers, licorice twists and one ball of twine.