Hello and welcome to the 2019 Thanksgiving Menu-Poem. This is the eighteenth incarnation of the Thanksgiving Menu-Poem! Our guest of honor is the magnificent Michael Basinski. This series began in 2002 with a Menu-Poem to honor Charles Bernstein, and since then this series engages Thanksgiving as the basis to celebrate poetry, poets and the poetry community. Being a trained professional chef I have blended my love of food and poetry into a book-length work as a feast of words to bring everyone a tiny bit closer together.

This project is a conceptual meal served for the thousands of friends I would love to have over to our home, gathered around a table to celebrate Thanksgiving Day. Since it is unavoidably impossible to even consider doing such a thing in real life, I have designed an imaginary menu of foodstuffs that reflect upon the guest of honor as a person, a poet and their poetry.

This year our guest of honor is Michael Basinski. I have had the wonderful opportunity to work with Mike over many years. BlazeVOX has published several of his books, including Trailers, All My Eggs Are Broken and we have a new book in the works, titled, Salvage.

Over the decades Mike has been a friend, a mentor, a supporter and guide towards my understanding of what it means to be a citizen of the poem. I have long admired how Mike can interrogate a poem and find all the right answers. Like a word that is spoken too often and lost all meaning, my belief in language falls out of existence in a Basinski poem. I find comfort in the charisma and struggle pasted and Sharpie-drawn into his collage poems. And his work in Fluxus leaves me feeling woozy. I hope that this menu-poem adequately expresses my appreciation for Mike while creating a sense of harmony that interprets my understanding of his work.

The Menu

The menu-poem series gets its title and general direction from the spoonerism, of sorts, from a line in the Mother Goose nursery rhyme, Sing a Song of Sixpence, where a pocketful of rye plays a significant role. This rhyme documents a 16th-century amusement, to place live birds in a pie, as a form of entremet, which is a surprise dish served in between courses. In this case, twenty-four birds were placed in a baked piecrust and allowed to fly free when the pie was cut open. It must have been an amazing spectacle, if not an outrage. But do be assured, our meal has only imaginary farm-raised geese and they are slowly cooked in a fireplace.

The structure of the menu takes the form of classical prose architecture. And our story starts with the variety of senses the autumnal season brings with it: aromas, temperature variations, mixed textures and flavor combinations.

The Wines and Beverages

The wines and champagnes are French and Californian with one exception, an icewine from the Niagara region of New York, which is very near our home. It is plucky and sweet, slightly viscous and will be an even match huckleberry ice cream crêpe with Bartlett pears and a dark chocolate dipped gooseberry. The main course is accompanied with a mature Chateauneuf-du-Pape, which will be a delight with the slow roasted goose and figs. A Boulevardier is a delightful aperitif that sets a relaxing opening to the meal. It is a mixture of bourbon, sweet vermouth, and campari. Its creation is attributed to Erskine Gwynne, an American-born writer who founded a monthly magazine in Paris called Boulevardier, which appeared from 1927 to 1932. It is red and lightly sweet, bitter, citrusy and herby.

The Poem

The poem is not a poem at all; it is a prose piece about a poem. As you will notice rather quickly, this story features a family of rabbits as our protagonists, do not be alarmed. Michael Basinski is not genera loyal in his method of exploring the poem, so I think this is a fitting piece for our celebration.

This story, A Rocket Full of Pie, is part of a collection of strange stories for wild children, titled The Albatross Around the Neck of Albert Ross. It will be available in 2020 from Lavender Ink Press, located in New Orleans. There are two illustrations that go with this story. They have been collaged from a sales catalog, ripped paper and color pencil. It was a fun time creating this project and if you feel as I do, a bit of fun is needed at this moment in time. Hurray!

Michael Basinski is a Western New York-based text, visual, and sound poet whose work is heavily influenced by Fluxus, the interdisciplinary avant-garde art movement that gained international attention in the 1950s and 1960s for its emphasis on chance operations, collective or anonymous authorship of artworks, and ephemeral gestures. Basinski performs his work both as a solo artist and in conjunction with the performance/sound ensemble Buffluxus. (In typical Fluxus fashion, the collective’s name has multiple variant spellings, including “Bufffluxus,” “Buff/Fluxus,” and “BuffFluxus.”) In an introduction to his work on the Poetry Foundation website, Geof Huth writes: “Michael Basinski creates visual poems that are colorful cacophonies of text and shape. His handwritten poems, which often serve as scores for equally exuberant sound poems, are filled to the margin with broken lines of text that curl into one another, read from different directions, and are often filled with nonsense words of his own invention.”

In a particularly informative 2002 interview with the poet, Donna Longenecker observes: “Basinski’s poetry is visual in form–text merging with color, images, and symbols–collages that convert metaphor and myth into a landscape that begs to be touched as much as it is read. It also incorporates sound–from the familiar sound of a squeaky sneaker to glossolalia. His work is meant to be explored the way one reads maps, at times relying on a key to plot and decipher the journey. … His tools are simple–magic markers, highlighters, colored pens, and copy machines. The work brims with color, with clippings of medical textbook drawings, newspaper ads or botanical drawings, typographical symbols and his own renderings inserted into and around the text much like breadcrumbs left for a traveler tramping his/her way through a mythological–or real–forest.”

Basinski’s own description of his artistic method is considerably less straightforward, as this characteristically playful, willfully obtuse statement for a 2005 exhibition/performance amply demonstrates:

“Opems are my pomes, a forms of improvisational manuscript poeming with variable entry points and without time restriction or bondage that calls for a concentration of performed poetic trajectories as they originate via the keys with any opem. Make them umbleuttphabite and others.”

Basinski is a native of the East Side of Buffalo, N.Y. whose family has been in the area since 1879. He earned an associate’s degree in Chemistry from Erie County Community College and a BA, MAH, and PhD in English from the University at Buffalo. He is the curator emeritus of the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries at the University at Buffalo.

Among Basinski’s many books of poetry are Poems Popeye Papyrus (Slack Buddha Press), Of Venus 93(Little Scratch Pad),All My Eggs Are Broken (BlazeVOX) and Trailers (BlazeVOX). His poems and other works have appeared in many magazines including Poetry, Rampike, Dandelion, Kenning, Lungfull, Lvng, Generator, Western Humanities Review, Vanitas, and Public Illumination. He has also released an audio CD of his collaboration with musician Don Metz, entitled Funginii.

In a preview of a 2006 live performance of the latter piece, Geoff Kelly writes: “Funginii, according to Michael Basinski, … are part-fungus, part-genie. They are raucous, magical, woodland creatures who hide your car keys in strange places, hold incense in Mayan structures, and inspire strange and compelling verbal and musical orchestrations that manifest entirely through improvisation. If that sounds a little like elf-rock to you, you’re poking around under the wrong tree: Buffluxus is even further out than that. The Buffluxus musicians—Don Metz, Karen Yacobucci, Douglas Manson, Matt Chambers, Basinski, Leah Muir, and Chris Fritton—improvise music and sound poetry, Metz’s guitar work at turns holding earthbound or launching spaceward a choir of words, near-words and sounds. … Funginii features music by Metz and words by Basinski, as well as improvised video and handmade film by Brian Milbrand and Tom Holt. Metz and Basinski are veteran strange agents, and Friday’s collaboration will surely, as it has in past performances over the years, yield a unique, ephemeral wonder.”

 For examples of Michael Basinski’s poems, visual works, and other writings, visit http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/basinski/.

From the Burchfield Penney Art Gallery