Careful readers of this space might know of our affinity for the poet Tony Hoagland, and his latest collection “Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty” has further stoked the flames of our admiration. One poem in particular, the poem from which the book likely takes its title, is especially relevant to our mission here: The poem, titled “Dialectical Materialism” begins “I was thinking about dialectical materialism at the supermarket,” and continues with as lovely and gruesomely jarring description of a middle-American supermarket as you are ever likely to find (if you’ve read better, please let us know). This supermarket is nowhere near California.

the complete poem, after the jump

Dialectical Materialism

By Tony Hoagland

I was thinking about dialectical materialism at the supermarket,

strolling among the Chilean tomatoes and the Filipino pineapples,

admiring the Washington-state apples stacked in perfect pyramid displays
by the ebony man from Zimbabwe wearing the Chicago Bulls t-shirt.

I was seeing the whole produce section
as a system of cross-referenced signifiers
in a textbook of historical economics

and the fine spray that misted the vegetables
was like the cool mist of style imposed on meaning.

It was one of those days
when interpretation is brushing its varnish over everything

when even the birds are speaking complete sentences

and the sun is a brassy blond novelist of immense accomplishment
dictating her new blockbuster
to a stenographer who types at the speed of light
and publishes each page as fast as it is written.

There was cornbread rising in the bakery department
and in its warm aroma I believed that I could smell
the exhaled breath of vanished Iroquois,
their journey west and
delicate withdrawal into the forests,

whereas by comparison
the coarse-grained wheat baguettes

seemed to irrepressibly exude
the sturdy sweat and labor of eighteenth-century Europe.

My god there is so much sorrow in the grocery store!
You would have to be high
on the fumes of the piped-in pan flutes
of commodified Peruvian folk music

not to be driven practically crazy
with awe and shame,
not to weep at the scale of subjugated matter:

the ripped-up etymologies of kiwi fruit and bratwurst,
the roads paved with dead languages,
the jungles digested by foreign money.

It’s the owners, I said to myself;
it’s the horrible juggernaut of progress;

but the cilantro in my hand
opened up its bitter minty ampoule underneath my nose

and the bossa nova muzak charmed me like a hypnotist
and he pretty cashier with the shaved head and nose ring
said, Have a nice day.

as I burst with my groceries through the automatic doors
into the open air,

where I found myself in a giant parking lot
at a mega-mall outside of Minneapolis,

where in row E 87
a Ford Escort from Mankato
had just had a fender-bender with a Honda from Miami;

and these personified portions of my heart, the drivers,
were standing there
in the gathering Midwestern granular descending dusk

waiting for the troopers to fill out the accident report,

with the rotating red light of the squad car
whipping in circles above them,
splashing their shopped-out middle-aged faces
with war paint the hue of cherry Gatorade

and each of them was thinking
how with dialectical materialism, accidents happen:

how at any minute,
convenience can turn
into a kind of trouble you never wanted.

In keeping with our new-found tradition of emulating the pop station here in wine country by dubbing Mondays “Music Mondays” we present you with Tom Waits singing (yes, singing) the poem “Fortune” from Coney Island of the Mind by Lawrence Ferlinghetti at the tribute to the poet this past weekend in San Fransisco. This version was recorded not by us but by another attendee, and we are glad he did.

Waits introduced the poem/song by saying that when he first read it when he was 15, it knocked his hat off. “I wore a hat then, and it was frequently knocked off,” he added. Tom basically turns the song into one of his bawlers, calling it “one of my favorite poems of [Ferlinghetti's], interpreted by myself.”

Marcus Shelby, whose band provided rock steady support to the poets and musicians throughout the show, accompanies on the stand up bass.

If we didn’t miss Brooklyn already, we do now.

Fuller versions can be seen here. (Via The Eyeball Kid.)

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.

The Butcher is as aware as anyone else that this month, April, is poetry month. New York magazine knows this too, and in inimitable form, it tells the tale of the tape, as if they were boxers, of the two poets who became the first-ever winners to share share a National Book Award jointly: Juan Felipe Herrera and August Kleinzahler. Our money is on Kleinzahler. If only because he wrote a poem named “Meat.” (He also once suggested that the U.S. government break terrorists by forcing them to listen to Garrison Keillor reading poetry.)

After the jump, “Meat“

Meat    

by August Kleinzahler 

How much meat moves

Into the city each night

The decks of its bridges tremble

In the liquefaction of sodium light

And the moon a chemical orange

Semitrailers strain their axles

Shivering as they take the long curve

Over warehouses and lofts

The wilderness of streets below

The mesh of it

With Joe on the front stoop smoking

And Louise on the phone with her mother

Out of the haze of industrial meadows

They arrive, numberless

Hauling tons of dead lamb

Bone and flesh and offal

Miles to the ports and channels

Of the city’s shimmering membrane

A giant breathing cell

Exhaling its waste

From the stacks by the river

And feeding through the night

Q: America, when will you be angelic? When will you take off your clothes?

A:

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(with apologies to Tony Hoagland)

The brisket writhes in the smoker.
The pulled pork dreams of returning to Memphis.

But when Adam Platt talks about barbecue, his voice is strangely calm.
Yet it seems that meat is rarely mentioned.

He says, The boxy whitewashed space looks more like a boutique beauty salon than a rib joint.
He says, The elf-like tables are set with chopsticks.
He says, You’ll find they can be quite palatable when soaked in yuzu.
He says, The well-trained, unfailingly cheerful staff are dressed in snappy charcoal-colored T-shirts and come at you in never-ending waves.

He belches as if recalling his childhood in Texas.
He shakes his head at a rub.

Flavored, tragically, with raspberries, he says and quotes his daughter. (“The ones at school are better, Dad.”)

He calls a desert a towering Buyanesque creation. This, he says, could tip even the most hard-bitten man into a food coma.