During the COVID lockdown, I experienced the same kind of brain fuzziness that so many people did:hours slid together, the calendar felt abstract, my ability to remember details felt like trying to wrestle in mental Jell-o. I started journaling my five senses every day to recall at least small scraps of my day and keep a record of moments. Of the five senses—sight, touch, sound, smell, and taste—I often started with taste since I knew which memories to look for. As soon as I remembered a flavor from dinner, I would keep thinking about cooking and the smell of the onions hitting the butter in the pan, and the textures would come and I could feel the paper exterior of the garlic bulb. Other sounds and sights also arrived on the tip of my thoughts, and I could journal about dinner if nothing else.
Over time, all I had to do was pull out a cutting board and my brain would go quiet. Gone were the thoughts about changing laundry loads or answering emails or figuring out how to pay the next bill or tackling another to-do list item. I was utterly present and sorting bell peppers by color. By writing about food, I accidentally created more peace for myself, a greater chance of staying in the moment, especially if those moments were connected to food.
In my first two years as poet laureate of Kansas, I’ve centered a lot of my initiatives on food. I’ve done a community-based poetry video project called Poetry Harvest that featured poems by Kansas poets about fall and food. I created poetry Mad Libs for National Poetry Month featuring food poems by Kansas poets. Recently, I also included poems about food in the state fair on posters next to exhibit halls and on one of the stages. One of my poetry talks for libraries and community centers is also called Memory Feast and focuses on how poetry about meals can help us connect to our past. But my upcoming project is my most ambitious attempt to unite these interests: a poetry cookbook.
I asked twenty Kansan chefs to contribute recipes that would be accessible to everyone—ingredients that could be sourced at food pantries, farmers’ markets, or at the grocery store. I then paired those twenty recipes with twenty poets who have responded to these tasty snacks, meals, and desserts. I wanted to bring together rich poems that engage the senses and recipes that represent Kansas’s rich agricultural offerings. But I could never have guessed the amazing range of recipes I would get, from those who let me pull from my garden to create something new, to those who make use of the state’s tradition as a cattle producer. The poets who responded showed me how much emotional range can be found in bierocks, how much joy can be found in the mess of baking, and how we can connect to both ourselves and our communities with each meal. They took up the task with such care and love, sometimes even making the recipes to inspire their writing, sometimes incorporating the language of the recipe, and at least once so far, made plans to eat at that particular chef’s restaurant to experience the exchange of food and community in person.
In addition to pairing these poems and recipes, the back of the cookbook will also contain “recipes” for poems. I want this cookbook to be an anthology of nourishments—recipes, poems, and “ingredients” for new literary creations. The dishes can be made to recall old memories or build new ones. The etymology of company is to “share bread,” and I believe sharing poetry can also accomplish a similar goal.
Poems are emotional nourishment. They ask readers to pay close attention to the world, but poems about food have the additional power to remind us of personal and cultural histories through all five senses. Food is an excellent connection point wherein we can plant the seed for creativity and conversation. As we work to address social change through the arts, I believe poetry can be a place of nourishment, a bounty, a feast.