"This is one of the shrines," Ontjes said, pointing to a framed grilled-cheese sandwich. "This is the one to Emily Dickinson. Her face has miraculously appeared on this sandwich." She laughed again and pointed across the room. "The other one is Walt Whitman."
Ontjes is a visual artist and poet and the poetry editor at the Seattle Review, and she refuses to disclose how she got the likenesses of Dickinson and Whitman onto white bread ("I maintain that it's a miraculous apparition that sprang from the toaster"). Ten years ago she staged something called "Waltz of the Mobile Food Vehicles" in a Los Angeles parking lot, and she also did totally absurd things when she lived in Alaska, but the shrines she's putting together for the Seattle Poetry Festival this weekend aren't merely absurd. They're also intended to be inspiring and pointed.
The shrines are the dual centerpieces of what she's termed the National Grilled Cheese Poetry Booth. Ontjes is on the board of Eleventh Hour Productions, which produces the festival, and according to a grant application she recently wrote, the National Grilled Cheese Poetry Booth comments on "the odd parallel" of the Academy of American Poets and the National Dairy Council "each claiming the month of April for promotional purposes." She goes on: "How arbitrary, capricious, and peculiarly American to create an annual campaign for an art form, poetry, that by definition defies expiration dates."
Of course, as well as being a critique of the ways that culture and ideas are marketed to people, Ontjes' genuflection to Dickinson and Whitman is genuine. (Dickinson is "the fountainhead for poetry that plays with language, that is not primarily concerned with telling a story but with the joy of a made thing" and Whitman is "the founder of completely opening yourself, and the spiritual connection that happens when an artist does that.") In addition to the booth, festivalgoers will be able to order piping-hot sandwiches and buy DIY Grilled Cheese Poetry Sandwich Kits. The kits come in small metal lunch boxes and include one checkered napkin, two slices of bread, toothpicks, floss, a booklet of couplets about cheese (Ontjes solicited them through literary magazines), and an individually wrapped slice of American cheese with a quote on it from G. K. Chesterton. The quote: "Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese."
The National Grilled Cheese Poetry Booth will be at Richard Hugo House (1634 11th Ave, 322-7030) on Saturday and Sunday, April 30-May 1, 11 am to 6 pm, along with tons of scheduled events (see www.poetryfestival.org).
