a poem AND a squash
Squash which my sister-in-law gave me from her garden.
There is something about squash that defies time. They keep extraordinarily well without any refrigeration, and, cooked slowly, yield up the sweet, full flavour of autumn as well as anything. Perhaps that’s why Padraig Regan in his poem Notes on Various Squashes says, Yes, I realise there’s more to life than perfectly describing the perfect squash, but I can’t imagine what that might be.
A quick search of squash poems (not to be confused with the sport) reveals a similar enthusiasm. There are even forums for squash haiku – why not? - and this eulogy from the Pennsylvanian poet, Robert Francis, who, born in 1901 and who lived in New England, home of the pumpkin, is exuberant in its praise:
How lush, how loose, the uninhibited squash is.
If ever hearts (and these immoderate leaves
Are vegetable hearts) were worn on sleeves,
The squash's are. In green the squash vine gushes.
I’d never really thought about vegetables as uninhibited, so perhaps it’s true that in life, as well as in art, poets can open your eyes to new ways of thinking about, and seeing, even the contents of your salad drawer.
In Poetry, September, 1958, A Tale of a Poem and a Squash makes its first appearance:
Let me take this acorn squash, grown in my garden,
And place it beside a poem grown in a hothouse.
You will notice the difference at once.
Taking the conceit about life and art further, Reed Whittemore (1919-2012), poet laureate to the Library of Congress, invites us to imagine the vegetable as ‘fat, self-contained’ – think Robert Francis’ ‘lush and loose’ - while ‘a poem’, he says, as well as being ‘anaemic’, is ‘colorless, tasteless, the clearest evidence/ That a poem does not make a squash’. But in his own actual poem about the squash – there it is, vividly portrayed for us, in all its fatness - he confesses in a poetic reversal that his garden has ‘as a matter of fact no squashes’. Instead, he gathers only ‘a few old tomatoes of rhymes/ And a mythical rosebud or two in the hope that these items/ Will store well against winter’. In addition, he leaves us to question what ‘a poem grown in a hothouse’ might be - something rarefied, delicate, carefully cultivated away from the weather of the world, or forced, never a product of its natural habitat, whatever, or wherever that might be - art and life as the relationship between the imagined and the possible.
Overall, this got me thinking of poems about other vegetables. Pablo Neruda wrote an Ode to the Artichoke and one to tomatoes, and, straying into the fruit aisle, one to an apple, a lemon and a watermelon (itself related to that uninhibited squash). For the brave there is Erica Jong’s Fruits and Vegetables, first published in 1971, which, according to the blurb, ‘offers a glimpse into the daring, erotic imagination of a young author of great promise. Here is a writer who puts metaphors in her oven, fruits and vegetables in her bed. In her title poem, Jong considers the character of the onion: Not self-righteous like the proletarian potato, nor a siren like the apple. No show-off like the banana. But a modest, self-effacing vegetable, questioning, introspective, peeling itself away . . .’
Jong’s titles offer a tantalising glimpse: ‘Two More Scenes From The Lives Of The Vegetables: 1. Borscht’ and ‘Two More Scenes From The Lives Of The Vegetables: 2. Carrot’. I have one about broccoli, which started life with the title Poem with a Broccoli in It, after Robert Hass and his Poem with a Cucumber in It, but as far as life and art go in the vegetable world, I have only once actually tried to grow potatoes - proletarian, prolific - and courgettes, with very little success. Perhaps I should have stuck to writing about them. The courgettes appear in my poem Even in Pristina we get ready for winter, which also considers relationships with food, and gardening, through my first encounters with a Kosovan friend called Renata, who had to flee her home in Pristina in 1999, during the Balkan war. And, of course, there are many countries in the world where the tiniest plot of land is expected to yield a substantial amount of food, what Czelaw Milosz described as the ‘purple-black earth of vegetable gardens’.
But back in the world of poetry, Wallace Stevens, with his 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird is one of the pioneers of this other kind of extended imaginative enquiry. Helen Vendler discussing Stevens’ poem and his choice of number writes,
There are thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird because thirteen is the eccentric number; Stevens is almost medieval in his relish for external form. This poetry will be one of inflection and innuendo; the inflections are the heard melodies (the whistling of the blackbird) and the innuendoes are what is left out (the silence just after the whistling) …
- a moving between abstract and concrete which Padraig Regan’s musings follow, in something of a similar pattern to Stevens, in his 13-stanza squash poem. The Merriam Webster website also plays with this concept to offer a guide, Poetic Forms: 13 Ways of Looking at a Poem as does Jane Smiley’s 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, which, although it considers more than 100 novels, riffs on the same image.
Eccentric or not, maybe keep it real, and take a vegetable from your fridge or better still your garden (or someone else’s) and look at it in, say, 13 ways… or check out the nearest hothouse for inspiration. Try ‘Two More Scenes From The Lives Of The Vegetables’, or failing that, you could always write your own compleat guide, or read William Carlos William’s poem The Red Wheelbarrow and replace wheelbarrow with your favourite vegetable. Because maybe everything does depend on a beautiful ripe squash.
In other news…
My poem House, after Gillian Carnegie was published in Alchemy Spoon 4 (Body)
The issue is full of wonderful poems and the launch will be on YouTube on September 11th at 7.30pm.