Declined – 2013

Happy Thanksgiving 

Hurray! It’s Thanksgiving once again, another November, another year gone by, and another time to feast with dear friends. This is the twelfth Thanksgiving Menu-Poem but we are celebrating in a new fashion this year.

For the past twelve years we have had a Thanksgiving menu-poem up and available for you to read and enjoy on Thanksgiving. Beginning in 2002 with a poem to honor Charles Bernstein, I began a series of poems, using a menu that I could prepare, in a feast of words that could be presented if we had a table large enough to fit all of our poetry friends.

This is year is no different and we had a poem ready to go, however the poet who we were to honor this year kindly declined. Being from another country whose ideas on thanksgiving are different from our own, if not very similar, he felt that he could not support this holiday. We have written a nice note explain his position which is posted below and on our Thanksgiving Menu-Poem page.

Since the project was completed and presented to our guest of honor, who wishes to be left nameless, there was little time to begin on a new work. So we decided it was best to keep this honor in place and announce his wishes. His ideas are very important to understand and devour while we sit and consume. We should also understand the cost this feast represents. We will certainly be back next year with a new, full menu poem! Hurray!

Even though we are not celebrating and we still might want to have something to read, to the right is a list of our previous eleven Thanksgiving Menu-Poems. But, if you are looking for something new and fun to read, here is a sneek peek of my new book, Apollo. 

It has often been said that Marcel Duchamp gave up art for chess. Geoffrey Gatza has reversed the process, and produced a sumptuous “souvenir program” of a performance of Stravinsky’s ballet Apollo, framed by an elaborately-plotted chess game between Duchamp and his female alter-ego, Rose Selavy. The results are stunning.    —John Ashbery