The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food and Drink

by Kevin Young (Editor)

Overview

Food and poetry: in so many ways, a natural pairing, from prayers over bread to street vendor songs. Poetry is said to feed the soul, each poem a delicious morsel. When read aloud, the best poems provide a particular joy for the mouth. Poems about food make these satisfactions explicit and complete.

Of course, pages can and have been filled about food's elemental pleasures. And we all know food is more than food: it's identity and culture. Our days are marked by meals; our seasons are marked by celebrations. We plant in spring; harvest in fall. We labor over hot stoves; we treat ourselves to special meals out. Food is nurture; it's comfort; it's reward. While some of the poems here are explicitly about the food itself: the blackberries, the butter, the barbecue--all are evocative of the experience of eating.

Many of the poems are also about the everything else that accompanies food: the memories, the company, even the politics. Kevin Young, distinguished poet, editor of this year's Best American Poetry, uses the lens of food - and his impeccable taste - to bring us some of the best poems, classic and current, period.

Poets include:
Elizabeth Alexander, Elizabeth Bishop, Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Robert Frost, Allen Ginsberg, Louise Gluck, Seamus Heaney, Tony Hoagland, Langston Hughes, Galway Kinnell, Frank O'Hara, Sharon Olds, Mary Oliver, Adrienne Rich, Theodore Roethke, Matthew Rohrer, Charles Simic, Tracy K. Smith, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Mark Strand, Kevin Young

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781608197613
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	10/16/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Kevin Young is the Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, newly named a National Historic Landmark, and Poetry Editor of the New Yorker. He is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose, most recently Brown; Blue Laws: Selected&Uncollected Poems 1995-2015, longlisted for the National Book Award; and Book of Hours, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize for Poetry from the Academy of American Poets. Named University Distinguished Professor at Emory University, Young was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Kevin Young is the author of six books of poetry, most recently For the Confederate Dead, winner of the Quill Award in Poetry and the Paterson Poetry Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement. He is also the author of Dear Darkness and Jelly Roll, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and won the Paterson Poetry Prize. He is the editor of four other volumes, including Everyman Pocket Poets Blues Poems and Jazz Poems, and the Library of America's John Berryman: Selected Poems. He is the Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing and curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University.

Editorial Reviews

The good news about The Hungry Ear…isn't that it sidesteps bad poetry (it doesn't), but that it also delivers such a groaning board of things to love, from Seamus Heaney on oysters and Lucille Clifton on collard greens to Theodore Roethke on root cellars and Jane Kenyon on shopping at an IGA.
—Dwight Garner

The New York Times

A groaning board of things to love, from Seamus Heaney on oysters and Lucille Clifton on collard greens to Theodore Roethke on root cellars and Jane Kenyon on shopping at an IGA . . . What a great meal.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“This anthology is a feast!” —Library Journal, starred review

“The ‘horn of plenty' is an appropriate figure for the anthology, as Young brings to the table a refreshingly flavorful selection of poets.” —Booklist

“Here is gustatory poetry for all seasons . . . The taste of milk, the taste of apples, the taste of wine, bread, cheese, the company of loved ones, the prescence of friends, all here, tripping off the tongues of some of the country's, and world's, most gifted poets.” —Alan Cheuse, NPR.org

From the Publisher

"The world begins at a kitchen table," Joy Harjo says at the beginning of this anthology, edited by National Book Award finalist Young, featuring poems in homage to all things comestible. In his introduction, Young says that the making of poems is akin to the making of a meal—both are acts of creation and sustenance. While poetry may be more permanent, with each making the eater and reader consume beauty, internalize it, and thrive. "This anthology revels in the many tastes all around us, some of which we need poetry to help describe," says Young. Indeed, the selections represent a wide range of the world's renowned poets, from Elizabeth Alexander to Paul Zimmer, from Baudelaire to Belieu, and celebrate topics as varied as picking blackberries, eating beans, and drinking beer for breakfast. Young includes a poem "with a cucumber in it" as well as Ginsberg's "A Supermarket in California." There are poems about pork and pot roasts, coffee and cookies and cola. The book is arranged from fall harvest to sumptuous summer, so that "the cycle of life is shown here in its ups and downs—as only poetry can." Or, as Li-Young Lee says, "O, to take what we love inside,/ to carry within us an orchard… ." This anthology is a feast! VERDICT Essential for all poetry collections.—Karla Huston, Wisconsin Acad. of Sciences, Arts & Letters, Madison

Library Journal