The CEA Forum - Winter/Spring 2008 - WE ARE WHAT WE SAY WE EAT: WHAT'S ON THE MENU IN THE POETRY CLASSROOM?

Oct 15, 2026

Upload by SANS

A forum article titled “WE ARE WHAT WE SAY WE EAT: WHAT'S ON THE MENU IN THE POETRY CLASSROOM?” examines how recent American poetry uses food as language, training readers to hear, speak, and physically inhabit metaphors. It argues for a pedagogy grounded in embodied ethics: reading with mouth and ear strengthens the unity of mind, body, and spirit. Close readings of poems—including Kinnell’s “Blackberry Eating” and Chasin’s “The Word Plum”—treat pronunciation and salivation as signs of real incarnation, while noting that love, appetite, and speech act shape meaning and classroom sharing.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLiterature

FormatPDF

Pages5

Reading Time8 min

AccessFree to download

WE ARE WHAT WE SAY WE EAT: WHAT'S ON THE MENU IN THE POETRY CLASSROOM?

Food as poetic language in the classroom

Incarnation: mouth, ear, and speech act

Close readings: “Blackberry Eating” and “The Word Plum”

Teaching ethics and sharing poems

The CEA Forum Winter/Spring 2008: 37.1 Next: Book Reviews WE ARE WHAT WE SAY WE EAT: WHAT'S ON THE MENU IN THE POETRY CLASSROOM? Tom Getz What's on the menu in a class reading recent American poetry are plums, grapes, blackberries, and apples; eggs, and bread with peach butter and honey; oxtail soup; water, coffee, tea, and wine; trout, beef, lamb, chicken paprika, and Genoa salami; corn tortillas, chili con came, beans, rice; quiche with broccoli, bacon, cheese, and spinach; root vegetables; and chocolate, chocolate globs, and spumoni. However, to list food like this􀳦as though it were merely factual, not actual, not an activity􀳦is to miss the wonderful onomatopoeia and synesthesia􀳦the kinesiology􀳦of food when it is experienced through poetic metaphor. What are on the menu are cherries: "the fleshy sweetness packed / around the sperm of swaying trees"; plums: "delicious / so sweet / and so cold"; and "green chile con came / between soft warm leaves of corn tortillas." To speak and hear food in the poetic mouth and voice and ear is why we are what we say we eat in recent American poetry. With a nod to Shakespeare, if food be the food of love, eat on. A great pleasure we can have as careful readers of poetry, since we may love to eat, but we may love language even more, can be sharing poems with students in which we are what we say we eat. In these poems, the act of speaking and the food of which we speak are of the mouth, of the body, which seems obvious enough, yet, in a time of increasing abstraction or dissociation of sensibility, when many mouths are seen, often with horrified grimaces, behind glass (TV) and most food is eaten without participation in its preparation, we need vivid reminders. One test of incarnation is if we ourselves or other readers with whom we are sharing a poetic meal salivate, but if we do salivate, it will be at the sound and rhythm and physicality of language as much as at the anticipation of putting actual food into our mouths. It will be at the substantiality of words as they form our sustaining act of speaking poetry. In the poems I have in mind, we enact an incarnation of word and body and appetite which is often impelled by love􀳦sexual and/or spiritual. Fundamentally metaphor, this poetry is a language of actual incarnation, though of course vegetarians are welcome at the table. The purpose in focusing on poetic food is to combine a pedagogy with an ethics. To accomplish this, we need to emphasize the importance of reading with the mouth and ear􀳦speaking and listening􀳦as a way of actualizing and animating the relationship between mind and body and spirit, in other words, as a way of becoming more whole. Galway Kinnell's sonnet "Blackberry Eating," like many of the poems ripe for tasting, begins with love: "I love to go out in late September / among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries..." (24) . The crucial simile, 􀳦as words sometimes do,􀳦 begins the sestet: the ripest berries fall almost unbidden to my tongue, as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words like strengths or squinched, many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps, which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well, in the silent, startled, icy, black language of blackberry-eating in late September. One of my students (Alexis Key) called this the "smorgasbord of Ss poem." In our performance of the lines, articulated syllables form an icy, black language, which is the "language / of blackberry-eating." Words in the mouth are like berries in the mouth, and the "like" almost disappears in an identity of word / berry. Each word is a berry, multi-faceted yet singular􀳦a little synthesis of the one and the many. In Helen Chasin's "The Word Plum" the word "plum," rather than the plum itself, is delicious, though I would suggest that in this poem and others the sense of "speech act" is so strong and so intimately linked with the act of eating that any sense of plum as mere fact or object-in-itself melts or b

FAQs

Why are “Blackberry Eating” and “The Word Plum” used as key examples?

Kinnell’s sonnet frames language as the “black language of blackberry-eating,” while Chasin’s poem treats the word “plum” itself as delicious, linking pronunciation directly to eating, pleasure, and speech act.

Oct 15, 2026

Upload by SANS