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Thanksgiving Menu Poem
a concept poem structured around the thanksgiving meal
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a concept poem structured around the thanksgiving meal 〰️
Welcome to the Thanksgiving Menu-Poem. This project is a conceptual meal served as poetry for the thousands of friends I would love to have at our home on Thanksgiving Day.
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 and art to bring everyone a tiny bit closer together.
Thanksgiving 2006
Some Food: A Feast for John Ashbery
Guest of Honor: John Ashbery
How contumely clear away the falling autumn leaves, winter is on the way! God Damn! What is it that I can do for you? Sincerely, what tribute can I make for, him, the The poet of our time. Pointedly, what would you do? I mean really what would you do? Ask over some friends, have some tannic wine and savagely cubed cheese. Have some oaf spill wine all over his shirt while his friend chats up the crowds. An inspired tribute indeed. Would you then maybe place his name on a library wall or against an elegant stack of columns in a green square in the park or ordain in his honor the local penitentiary’s infirmary? How indeed? If it were up to me, I would make this fancy meal, the best, most innovative of events for twelve hundred poets! Ask all to raise in toast, one glass of sparkling roses. Inhaling, saying nothing, drinking in the shooting stars of imagined evenings someplace else, we,
all alone among all of our friends.
It would be this silence
that would be the ultimate
honorarium to you,
my dearest,
Rockets, Geoffrey Gatza