Tag: paris review

Poetry and cooking

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

As someone who loves both, I was so pleased to see this inventive political poem in the Paris Review archives:

Little Cambray Tamales

          (makes 5,000,000 little tamales)
        —for Eduardo and Helena who asked me
   for a Salvadoran recipe

Two pounds of mestizo cornmeal
half a pound of loin of gachupin
cooked and finely chopped
a box of pious raisins
two tablespoons of Malinche milk
one cup of enraged water
a fry of conquistador helmets
three Jesuit onions
a small bag of multinational gold
two dragon’s teeth
one presidential carrot
two tablespoons of pimps
lard of Panchimalco Indians
two ministerial tomatoes
a half cup of television sugar
two drops of volcanic lava
seven leaves of pito
(don’t be dirty-minded, it’s a soporific)
put everything to boil
over a slow fire
for five hundred years
and you’ll see how tasty it is.
Claribel Alegría
Translated by Darwin J. Flakoll

New Year’s Resolutions

Posted on by Meryl in Philosophical

I read this about New Year’s resolutions in the Paris Review this morning:

“One estimate suggests that almost half of Americans make New Year’s resolutions, and yet fewer than 10 percent successfully follow through… It might be tempting to do away with this farce altogether, but before we commit to being noncommittal about the New Year, it’s worth thinking through some of the options.”

So here’s an option. My approach to this tradition is “aim low and succeed.” Some examples from past years:

No movie theater popcorn
Only good chocolate
Learn to make better salad dressings

I’m happy to report that I was able to sustain each of these resolutions, and they improved my life by a small increment. This year?

Get more massage

I have great hopes for this. Oh, you looking for something a little more uplifting? How about this:

“You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”
Martin Luther King

Memorial Day

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

This poem came to me from The Paris Review, sent as part of their daily email awhile ago. Somehow it seems apt for Memorial Day.

The Dirt and the Willow

All summer long
while other trees
reached for more
light the willow
unfurled streamers
down into its own
streetwise shade
lower and slower
until the silvery
tip of its lowest
leaf had reached
the limit set to
its inverted growth:
dirt’s intractable
horizontality

Enough it thought
if willows think
these accretions
are taking me
nowhere
Whereupon
it came to its annual
decision to drop
everything it was
doing and dieJust try
the dirt wisecracked
not unkindly but
the willow was
aquiver with indignant
self-pity and wouldn’t
sit still for such “sitcom
optimism

It’s easy
for tombs to talk
about eternal recurrence
to equate one string
of proteins with another
the wailing child
and the ailing mother
tombs have nothing
to lose o what’s the use
you’ll never understand

On the contrary said the dirt
that’s what I do best
now why don’t you just rest

 

Tom Disch  (this link takes you to a remembrance of the poet by Dana Gioia)

A poem from Paris Review

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

I get lots of poems from various sources in my in box every day. This one I really like, problaby from his new book, Felon Poems:

Blood History

The things that abandon you get remembered different.
As precise as the English language can be, with words
like penultimate and perseverate, there is not a combination
of sounds that describes only that leaving. Once,
drinking & smoking with buddies, a friend asked if
I’d longed for a father. Had he said wanted, I would have
dismissed him in the way that the youth dismiss it all:
a shrug, sarcasm, a jab to his stomach, laughter.
But he said longing. & in a different place, I might
have wept. Said, Once, my father lived with us & then he
didn’t & it fucked me up so much I never thought about Continue reading “A poem from Paris Review” →