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 2018
Sur le Bout de la Langue
Guest of Honor : Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Hello and welcome to the 2018 Thanksgiving Menu-Poem. This is the seventeenth incarnation of the Thanksgiving Menu-Poem! Our guest of honor is the magnificent Rachel Blau DuPlessis. This year our guest of honor is Rachel Blau DuPlessis. I have had the wonderful opportunity to work with her over the past year publishing her book, Around the Day in 80 Worlds. We had such a good time it was a natural decision to ask her to be this years guest of honor.
I had been in awe of the work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis for an embarrassingly long amount of time. Her poetry is exuberant, assiduous and intelligent. I find myself returning again and again to her long poem Drafts. Amongst her lines I always find new ways of looking at the world, new questions to dwell upon, with, as always, no ready answers in sight. I find comfort in the charm and resistance pasted into her collages. And I hope that this menu-poem adequately expresses my appreciation for her while creating a sense of harmony that interprets my understanding of her work. Or instead of harmony maybe a better word would be a free-translation, or an invocation of the intentio Walter Benjamin discusses in The Task of the Translator. I hope you enjoy this meal, the menu and the poem. Have a Happy Thanksgiving!
Rockets, Geoffrey