The combo of Ada Limon’s new poem in The New Yorker and all of this talk of meat has me thinking of Heather McHugh’s “Philosopher Orders Crispy Pork,” which you can find in her book, Upgraded to Serious, available at local bookstores.
A few notes:
• In this poem, McHugh presents yet another episode of the ancient battle between the head and the heart—or, in this case, the stomach. In the first half of the poem, she guiltily and self-deprecatingly celebrates the (im)pure bodily pleasures of eating pig, her “gulpable semblable.” With all that consonance and assonance in those lines, her language is as lush as her love for the animal. But then she makes a huge turn. After a few sentences crispy pork, her language sharpens and tightens, and she then proceeds to distill all of literary theory into a seemingly tossed-off parenthetical. It’s incredible:
(My life! Such as it is! This
liberality of leaves! The worldwon’t need those seventeen more
poems, after all, there being
so few subjects to be treated. Threeif by subject we mean anyone
submitted to another’s
will. Two if by subject we meantopic. One if by death we wind up
meaning love. And none if a subject
must entailthe curlicue’s indulgence of itself.)
• Here, McHugh jokingly but accurately reduces poetry’s possible subjects to the relationship between God, the State, and the individual (I think), either death or love, love, or poetry itself (“the curlicue’s indulgence of itself”)—depending, of course, on what we mean by “subjects.” (Words always give us an out.)
• McHugh’s reference to her own poem in the last line suggests that she sides with the position of my first college poetry teacher. When I told that teacher I wanted to write love poems, she took a sip from her gin and tonic and said, “Unfortunately, poems are only about poetry.”
