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Food poetry is a style of poetry that can be emotional or prosaic, with no structural prerequisites. Poets choose a subject and burst into ideas, describing taste, texture, smell, and appearance. Food can be a metaphor, and there are connotations related to it. The paraphernalia of food shapes the content and themes of poems.
Food poetry is a style of poetry dominated by food. This can involve food in general or a particular type of food, from pomegranates to potatoes or oranges to oatmeal. These poems can be emotional, as Aristotle believed, or more prosaic. Some may even be a recipe in poetic form. While many may be about the food itself, others are about related ideas, memories, or may have metaphors captured within.
There are no structural prerequisites for food poetry because food is a thematic element rather than a governing constraint. This means they can take the form of a haiku or Shakespearean sonnets at the whim of the poet. The structure can be chosen first, with the poetry of the food squeezed into its frame, or the subject is chosen first and the frame built around it.
Creating poems about food begins with choosing a subject. Once a subject has been chosen, the poet bursts into the brain of all possible ideas regarding that type of food and what message he wants to convey with it. He can help, of course, if the poet has food on hand. This allows the poet to describe the taste, texture, smell and appearance of the food. With informal ideas pushing and flattering, fragments of verse often form and reveal the nature of the poem.
The prosaic poem only describes the food or its preparation. In this, try not to attach symbolic images to food. A good example of such poetry is Robert Frost’s Blueberries. Another is Persimmons by Li Young Lee, which simply describes the fruit being cut and the narrator’s response:
“It wasn’t ripe or sweet, I didn’t eat
but I looked at the other faces».
Other versions of food poetry can be full of sensual appeal. The idea is to conjure up images of fresh food to whet a person’s appetite or to bring back nostalgic memories. Such poems are typically rich in imagery and emotion. The poem may be about food alone or it may include the poet’s memories and associations, some of which may hit the mark, while others may not.
Food can also be a metaphor: the direct replacement of one superficial form for another, but with the same deeper meaning. Sometimes this can put the two ideas side by side, as in the case of AA Milne’s use of dessert to show the problem with Mary Jane in Rice Pudding. It can also mean the use of food imagery to add depth to the poem’s meaning, as with Shakespeare’s use of food verbs in Sonnet 75.
There are a number of connotations related to food. It is often used as a substitute for love, which makes sense if the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. Food is also used as a metaphor for the human body, particularly with peaches and melons; a man can also have a cucumber nose and cauliflower ears. Such metaphors rely on the reader/listener’s ability to understand the subtext of the verse.
The paraphernalia of food, be it Shakespeare’s food and verbs related to eating or the tools needed to make food, also shape the content and themes of the poems. In Guzman Lopez’s Taco Shop Canto the history of San Diego is equated to the history of a barrio, commenting on how the former war town “became a crossroads for taco shop culture.”
