A Poet’s Meatloaf Recipe
Meatloaf is an art form. Like collage, like poetry, like a devastating change-up, a good meatloaf is a delicate balance of flavors and textures, carefully combined by a master hand. But you don’t have to take our word for it. A poet laureate has our back: In Donald Hall’s poem “Meatloaf,” published in this week’s New Yorker, the art of creation is celebrated:
Buy two pounds of cheap fat hamburger
so the meatloaf will be sweet, chop up
a big onion, add leaves of basil,
Tabasco, newspaper ads, soy sauce,
quail eggs, driftwood, tomato ketchup,
and library paste. Bake for ten hours
at thirty-five degrees. When pitchers
hit the batter’s head, Kurt, it is called
a beanball. The batter takes first base.
This poem revisits a series Hall wrote 25 years ago called “Baseball,” addressed to dadist collage artist Kurt Schwitters who died in 1948 (who was German, and probably not a Red Sox fan as is Hall). There were nine poems (one for each inning) with nine syllables to each line and nine lines to each stanza.
The poems lament the pains of mortality and the joys of baseball but lack any serious references to ground beef. It may have taken 25 years to correct that oversight, but better late than never.
