The Butcher's Apron: New & Selected Poems

by Diane Wakoski

Overview

as some women love jewels, love the jewels of life

“All the poems in this collection,” Diane Wakoski writes, “describe the ongoing process of discovering beauty and acquiring an aesthetic sensibility via food”––seeing and savoring it, cooking and sharing it, reaching out to all creation and drawing it in, devouring it, lapping it up, literally becoming one with it. In the title poem, chosen by Adrienne Rich for inclusion in Best American Poetry, the poet recalls an early memory of delight in pure color––”Red stains on a clean white bib. . . crimson blood on canvas.” Blood and crisp cotton as ink and paper, bread and wine as flesh and blood, the meal as art and as sacrament––this is the stuff of The Butcher’s Apron, a feast for lovers of “the jewels of life.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781574231441
Publisher:	David R. Godine, Publisher
Publication date:	10/01/2000
Pages:	250
Product dimensions:	5.92(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.82(d)

About the Author

Diane Wakoski is a groundbreaking poet and the author of more than thirty books. Wakoski’s conversational, seemingly informal work merges the confessional and deep image to create compelling, story-like poems. The Poetry Society of America awarded Wakoski the William Carlos Williams Prize and Electric Literature called her a “legend.” She is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Michigan State University.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

    The Butcher's Apron

note: when I was a child, we lived in the midst of
orange groves on Russell Street in East Whittier,
California, just up the road from the Nixon
family grocery store, where I bought my popsicles
from old Mr. and Mrs. Nixon, father and mother
of the late president. When they expanded,
adding a much bigger butcher's counter and a
coffee shop, their son Don Nixon, later featured
in real estate scandals, became the butcher.

for Edward Allen

Red stains on the clean white bib,
the butcher's apron hanging like an abstract expressionist painting,
on the museum wall of my
childhood.

—the most we ever ordered—
a pound of hamburger
to be fried in the black iron skillet
till the edges formed an ugly crust
like a scab on a skinned knee/
The art of the grill
was not found in our manless house.

The beauty of the red on the butcher's
white canvas, which occasionally streaked like an etching
across the white butcher paper
in which he wrapped the chuck, never translated
to the food eaten: grey meats
like steel wool, canned vegetables
with the colors of hospital walls,
sliced white bread like old often-washed
sheets and pillowcases.

My shock one day in the school cafeteria
to see Carol Gregory
      whose mother sewed her
     dresses as elegant as those in
      Vogue magazine
unwrap a waxed paper packet of bright red
meat, in a puddle of something thin and dark/
to realize it was
Roast Beef,
the puddle
was beef blood! There in the Lowell School cafeteria
I saw my first still-life painting, beautiful and
different food among the thermoses
of milk, the wax wrapped peanut
butter or bologna sandwiches. Perhaps
I have added this detail:
      next to Carol's rare roast beef slices,
      another piece of waxed paper on which
      was spread
           several spears of bright green
           asparagus.
Food eaten by kids whose parents were rich
or had been to college
was different,
was like a painting?

My first generation American mother grew up
in a house with a dirt floor, went to school
in a one room schoolhouse. She drank German
coffee instead of milk
as a child. She lifted herself out
of North Dakota, became a bookkeeper
but never learned
about food, the telltale class
marking. In old age, she loves salty things like
Campbell's soups, frozen enchiladas in processed cheese sauce,
bacon white bread sandwiches, and hates the nursing hospital
where they don't salt the food at all.

Plath imagined blood red tulips in white hospitals
as I think of Georgia O'Keeffe's poppies.
My mother who voted for Nixon and hates foreigners
dreams of those red and white cans
which might hold Chicken Noodle or Tomato
soups. She's never heard of Andy Warhol who
mimicked such cans, just as a butcher I talked to in our Michigan
supermarket said that he had never eaten
shrimp, or knew what people did with oxtails. His apron
too had the same bright red stains, not yet faded into
rust. Crimson blood on canvas, the art
of childhood. Unhealed scars,
still capable of bleeding.

from The Emerald City of Las Vegas

Breakfast

In the Spanish kingdom
of my living room:
the morning sunshine.
A polished wooden table gleams;
silence is the reflection of burnished woods/pine,
maple, bamboo,
                     waxed to catch the yellow sun.
Outside the wall of windows,
more woods,
these turning to burgundy and gold,
russet,
scarlet,
the wind moving especially
the green leaved ones,
the branches fluttering and bowing,
my courtiers,
my trees.

The kettles boiling now—
             one with water to scald the pot,
             the second with boiling water for the tea.
This morning,
scented Earl Grey,
another courtier, this one perfumed,
a dandy, one of those too-beautiful
men I cannot resist.

On my pine and yellow canvas chair
I rest, drinking the tea,
from a white bone china cup. A remaining crumb
from last night's crusty French bread
is being dazzled on the table's surface/ now
an opal, a pearl, ivory,
a minor jewel dropped from the chest.

In the south window
four sweet basil plants have reached the
height of 18 inches each,
their lime green leaves pungent when
touched/ I give each a little clear water
and pinch off forming bud clusters.

This morning, against all rules,
an egg,
poached in water containing a few drops
of white rice-vinegar, its soft oval body
resting in a poaching cradle of tin,
on three tiny legs, its stiff upright handle
remaining cool
above the boiling white water.

Now, I turn out the egg on a plate
of translucent orange bordered with yellow and black. It
lies there with a vulnerable film over the yolk
while I take my small silver scissors and snip
four large leaves from another basil plant,
this one growing in the kitchen window.
The silver blades slice the leaves in ribbons over
the cooling egg.

Alone, at the kitchen table
with my plate, my single
herbed egg, a goblet of
iced water with a fresh sprig of mint,
also from the kitchen window garden,
and my china cup of hot tea, I sit
down
in my morning kingdom.

Everything
we will ever have
is present
in each day's life. There is no more.
Thus, I need
this morning's royalty,
the immortality of the flesh,
the music of wood,
my perfect view of the autumn swamp.

from The Magician's Feastletters
and Emerald Ice

The Helm's Bakery Man

The Helm's man came in a yellow truck,
with a hard-shelled top, like a beetle.
Sometimes when I am in bed at night
I remember his donuts and fresh bread,
white-sacked,
sliding out in the smooth wooden tray.

I sleep under a quilt patched with roses and signs of the zodiac.
Nine swords hang over my bed.
In the chest beneath me
are bones.
Each sword has cut some part of me,
and I cling to the sword,
keeping close the memory of an eye or an arm
or a heart.

Sometimes I wake up at night.
Saturn glows like a ruby.
Outside,
around me,
it is dark,
but I hear the flutter of enormous wings.
It is a hard life,
with bones under you
and swords over your head.
But it is everyone's life.
At night under the blanket of the zodiac
I hear a little toot,
see the yellow truck come down my old street;
and there is the Helm's man,
asking what I want today, as I hand him my nickel.
"A bun," I say.

And he gives me one with the moon
in white icing decorating the top.

from Discrepancies & Apparitions
and Emerald Ice

Table of Contents

Introduction	9
I	A California Girl
The Butcher's Apron	17
Breakfast	20
The Helm's Bakery Man	23
Saturday Night	25
The Lessons of Smoked Fish, Bear Claws & American Barbecue	28
When Canned Peaches Turn into Maplelight	31
Un Morceau en Forme de Poire	33
Amaryllis on Thames	36
Night Blooming Jasmine	37
In San Francisco	39
Making a Sacher Torte	40
Peaches	45
Ode to a Lebanese Crock of Olives	46
My Mother's Milkman	49
Love to My Electric Handmixer	52
Perfume	53
Teacup Feet	65
II	The Mirage of Desert and Ocean
The Orange	69
Image Is Narrative	71
Braised Leeks & Framboise	74
Nell's Birthday	76
Grain	79
Viennese Coffee	81
The Fear of Fat Children	83
Salad Flowers	86
Eating Flowers	89
Violets	91
Pamela's Green Tomato Pie	93
Whole Sum	96
Pears	98
Human History: Its Documents	99
Orphée	101
Using Heather's Wooden Spoon	103
Breakfast at George & Molly Wickes'	106
George Washington's Autumn	108
III	A California Girl Moves to Michigan via New York City
The Coffee Drinker	111
Letter with the Ring of Truth	113
A Californian Fights Against the Old New England
Traditions	117
Clint's Bottle of 1977 Châteauneuf-du-Pape	119
Eggs	120
The Pumpkin Pie	122
Apricot Poem	128
What Would Tennessee Williams Have Said	130
Sue's Diet	134
Gabriella's Influence on Our Vision of Plato's Cave	136
Lunch with Miriam & Toby	138
For Clint in East Lansing While I Am Sitting on the
Adriatic Coast	139
Robert Waxes the Car	141
Orchids at Oldsmobile	143
Having Replaced Love with Food & Drink	146
The Dark Procession Reviewed	147
Opening the Sunrise	150
IV	On the Banks of l'Eau de Vie
When Breakfast Is Brought by the Morning Star	153
Our Lady of the Chanterelles	155
Mole at Chloe's	157
The Tango Lesson	159
Costa Rican Coffee	164
Crème Brûlée	165
Roses & Grapes	166
Eating Grapes with the Algebraist	168
Robert's Spaghetti Sauce	170
Scalding the Pot	172
A Short Fable of Endurance and Pity	173
Diet Moons	176
Parkin	177
Sally Plum	180
Eating a Plum on the Terrace	182
After Edward Hopper's Marbletop Table: A Sestina for Anne
Waldman	184
The Dangerous Hermit	186
Light Poem for the Lion Painter Who Bakes Scones in
Michigan	188
Sestina to the Common Glass of Beer: I Do Not Drink Beer	190
V	Greed, Part 14: The Greed for Purity
Preface to Greed, Part 14 / The Night Rides	195
Part I. Gloves of Fire	201
Part II. The Midas Chocolate	205
Part III. Finger Ears	209
Part IV. Medea's Summer Eyes	213
Robert's Yellow Tomatoes	215
Part V. Goddess Gold	217
Part VI. Raven or Serpent	222
Part VII. Nighthawk	226
Part VIII. Polishing Light	231
Part IX. Meeting the Ice Queen	235
Part X. Desert Carp	239
Part XI. Honoring the Discovery of Zero	244
Part XII. Morning's Scarf of Gold	248
Part XIII. The Morning of the Enchantress	252

Editorial Reviews

Wakoski's 25th book of poetry is also her second selected, complementing Emerald Ice: Selected Poems 1962-1987 by covering work written between 1988 and 2000. Wakoski, a California native who has lived in Michigan since the mid-'70s, uses the selections to lay thematic emphasis on, as her introduction notes, the "beauty or the lack thereof" found in preparing and eating food. Using a kind of plainly spoken, autobiographically grounded line, Wakoski allows her fascination with culinary imagery to lead her speaker through a reflective self-analysis in the face of the aging process: "Had I/ learned/ to draw/ rather than eat, I am sure/ that I would have found less anguish in my life." The book is divided into five sections, the last of which contains a new part of Wakoski's long poem "Greed," an examination of her self-described "obsession about purity": "At once she learned that saving something/ meant giving it up./ That is, if you saved your chocolate,/ you couldn't eat it." Wakoski is a dedicated independent, long refusing to align herself with any particular camp or aesthetic, and her work can tread close to an isolated process of self-mythologizing (the speaker often compares herself to Medea and Medusa). The work tends to be strongest when it is most self-consciously outspoken--"Silence is not a good opponent/ for injustice and unfair treatment./ It participates/ in a way I still can't allow myself." (Feb. 15) Forecast: Wakoski has been dutifully published by Black Sparrow for years, and it will take some high profile reviews to lift this book beyond her constituency. This may be the time for it, though, since this volume, despite the skew toward comestibles (food-centered collections take note), completes a two-volume selected. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

"Where do our roots start?/ In what we eat,/ or what we read?" asks Wakoski in a poem called "Letters with the Ring of Truth," part of her latest volume of poems. The California-born poet, whose prolific career began in a loose association with the Beat poets of the late 1950s and the Deep Imagists of the New York poetry scene, centers this volume largely on the harvesting, purchasing, preparation, and enjoyment of food. Some of the poems (like "Braised Short Ribs") can even be followed as recipes: "And a cup of dry/ red wine added and reduced by a third/ before adding the beef stock and/ the browned short ribs." There are poems of pumpkin pies that will not set, of flower petals used in salads, of ham sandwiches Wakoski ate as a child. Wakoski's feminine gentility pervades this volume, which can't be read all at once rather, it must be dipped into now and then, as if one were sticking a finger into a pot of honey. Highly recommended. Judy Clarence, California State Univ. Lib., Hayward Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

”Wakoski is a dedicated independent. . .self-mythologizing, autobiographically grounded, at her strongest when most self-consciously outspoken. The Butcher’s Apron: New and Selected Poems may lift her above her cult constituency.”––Publishers Weekly

”Dipping into this volume is like sticking your finger into a pot of honey. Highly recommended.”––Library Journal

From the Publisher