Hello and welcome to the 2018 Thanksgiving Menu-Poem. This is the seventeenth incarnation of the Thanksgiving Menu-Poem! Our guest of honor is the magnificent Rachel Blau DuPlessis. 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 Rachel Blau DuPlessis. I have had the wonderful opportunity to work with her over the past year publishing her book, Around the Day in 80 Worlds. We had such a good time it was a natural decision to ask her to be this years guest of honor.

I had been in awe of the work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis for an embarrassingly long amount of time. Her poetry is exuberant, assiduous and intelligent. I find myself returning again and again to her long poem Drafts. Amongst her lines I always find new ways of looking at the world, new questions to dwell upon, with, as always, no ready answers in sight. I find comfort in the charm and resistance pasted into her collages. And I hope that this menu-poem adequately expresses my appreciation for her while creating a sense of harmony that interprets my understanding of her work. Or instead of harmony maybe a better word would be a free-translation, or an invocation of the intentio Walter Benjamin discusses in The Task of the Translator.

The Menu

The menu-poem series gets its title and general direction from the idiom, sur le bout de la langue, French for on the tip of one’s tongue. This idiom refers to the phenomenon of failing to retrieve a word from memory while suggesting that you will be able to recall it shortly.
Starting with the variety of senses the course of the meal follows the autumnal season with aromas, temperature variations, mixed textures and flavor combinations. The structure of the menu takes the form of a classical Italian formal dinner but our meal will not be limited to only Italian cuisine. The dishes emulate cooking methods from many traditions, Chinese, Ethiopian, Japanese and Thai, Russian and French as well as a few American favorites.

The meal opens with many small dishes and non-alcoholic drinks. The Aperitivo and Antipasto courses offer a variety of flavors and texture combinations. The crisp lobster tempura and lemon contrasts the softness of the ginger crepe and ice-cold caviar. A similar theme develops with the soft Roquefort Soufflés and the brittle Gruyere Tuiles.

The Zuppa course is a flavorful nage, which is a broth prepared with white wine, aromatic vegetables, and herbs, in which the crayfish and John Dory is poached with saffron and fennel. The next course is a Jingisukan Style Grilled Hokkaido lamb. It is quite literally named Genghis Khan style and is delicious. The lamb is sliced thin and cooked on a uniquely shaped convex grill shaped very like a Mongolian helmet. The Hokkaido lamb is cooked communal-style by the diners themselves on a tableside grill.

The main course of this thanksgiving meal is the turkey, the Grande Tradizione, Italian for grand tradition. Served in the style of an Ethiopian stew, a roast turkey wat with spicy cardamom lentils it is accompanied by a sour-dough injera. Injera is a large flatbread with a slightly spongy texture made from teff flour.

Many of the courses have two components, one hot and the other cold. This effect is to create a dynamic sensation in the mouth, examining how flavors interact with varied temperatures. This is dramatically highlighted in the Caffè course where pieces of candied soursop are frozen in liquid nitrogen then served on an ornate spoon with piping hot soursop jam. The effect will be quite sensuous and gratifying. The meal concludes with a contemplative vintage grappa from Piedmont

The Wines

The wines and brandies are French and Italian with one exception, an icewine from the Niagara region, which is very near my home. It is plucky and sweet, slightly viscous and will be an even match the rosemary scented stone fruits and bold cheeses. Other beverages include a white Armagnac, a vintage grappa, rich Italian roast coffee, Acqua e Menta, which is a mix of sparkling water and mint. Gingerino is a delightful aperitif that sets an easy opening to the meal. It is red and lightly sparkling, sweet, bitter, citrusy, spicy and herby.

The Poems

The poems themselves are based around four letter words. Prior to processing the pieces, I gathered up the complete list of four-letter words in English. I divided them into an excel spreadsheet, alphabetized them and then assigned a color to each lettered section. You can see a full grouping of the colors in the final poem-collage, Supporting Characters. The assigned colors of the four-letter words follow throughout the series. Many poems use only four-letter words and many do not. There are limits to text art experiments substituting in the space of poetry, but 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!

Poet, editor, and scholar Rachel Blau DuPlessis earned a BA from Barnard College and a PhD from Columbia University. Her special interests are in modern and contemporary poetry, especially issues of gender, the long poem, and cultural poetics. She is one of the foremost critics of her generation, and her works of scholarship include Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (1985), H.D.: The Career of That Struggle (1986), The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice (1990), Genders, Races and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934 (2001), Blue Studios: Poetry and its Cultural Work (2006), and Purple Passages: Pound, Eliot, Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley and the Ends of Patriarchal Poetry (2012). As editor, her books include The Selected Letters of George Oppen (1990) and, with Susan Stanford Friedman, Signets: Reading H.D. (1990). With Peter Quartermain, she coedited The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics (1999) and with Ann Snitow, The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women’s Liberation (1998; reprint 2007). She is affiliated in an editorial capacity with journals such as Journal of Modern Literature (JML) and with book series on poetry and poetics from the University of Alabama and Iowa presses.

DuPlessis’s major work as a poet is the long poem Drafts, which she began in 1986 and published the final installment of in 2012: Surge: Drafts 96-114. Other books in the project include Drafts 1-38, Toll (2001), Drafts. Drafts 39-57, Pledge, with Draft, unnumbered: Précis (2004), Torques: Drafts 58-76 (2007), Pitch: Drafts 77-95 (2010), and The Collage Poems of Drafts (2011). As Patrick Pritchett has noted, DuPlessis’s work as both a scholar and critic is based “on the logic of the provisional and the contingent.” Drafts is itself an open text, ongoing and investigatory; in the words of poet and critic Ron Silliman, “DuPlessis’s Drafts begins more with questions than answers, literally in Draft 1 chasing a bird in the bush, sensing that the right answers need to be further questions.”

A professor at Temple University for many years, DuPlessis retired in 2011. In 2012, she was a Distinguished Visitor at the University of Auckland. She has also held an appointment with the National Humanities Center in North Carolina and a residency at Bellagio sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation. DuPlessis’s many honors and awards include a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, the Roy Harvey Pearce/Archive for New Poetry Prize, Temple University’s Creative Achievement Award, and grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Fund for Poetry.