The meteoric rise in Bon Appetit's cultural cachet has (wonderfully) flooded my social feeds with beans. Like 20 minutes ago the magazine's boss published an article about how good bean broth is, and because I have radicalized myself on YouTube cooking shows, I am very excited to make bean broth and to look through the 86 bean recipes posted at the bottom of the article. Incidentally, I'm not sure who is responsible for this new whipped instant coffee trend (it's also called Dalgona coffee, and a quick glance at Wikipedia tells me it started in South Korea during their lockdown), but I guess that's going on the menu next. So it's going to be beans and whipped instant coffee this weekend, friends.
All of which, of course, reminds me of Gwendolyn Brooks's famous poem, "The Bean Eaters." You can find the poem in Brooks's Selected Poems, available at your local bookstore, if it's still delivering.
A few thoughts:
• The gentrification of beans risks altering this poem forever. Before BA and the pandemic popularized beans, this poem was about an ancient couple—"this old yellow pair"—who keep on keepin on "in their rented back room" despite the fact that their life has become rote and kinda bleak, buoyed only by their dim and occasionally painful memories. Now a weekend of eating beans quietly on a creaky old table that metaphorically reflects our proximity to death sounds somewhat relaxing and less like a poetic elevation of a couple that society has cast aside.
• The balance of plain speech and song in this poem reveals Brooks's mastery of the lyric. My favorite example of this is in the line "But keep on putting on their clothes / And putting things away." The repetition of "on" and "putting" recalls the phrase "on and on," and of course the repetitious acts themselves. The language is doing what the subjects are doing—it's a classic lyrical move done in a plainspoken style, which is the best kind.
• The other genius moment in the poem is the list at the end, when the speaker becomes one with her subjects and begins to free associate a little, getting lost in the memories the way the couple does. It's amazing how much of a life Brooks can create out of a few expertly gathered objects: "beads and receipts and dolls and cloths, tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes." You see children long since moved out of the apartment, mounting bills, nights of casually smoking cigs, simple adornments decorating a simple, hard, but fully lived life. Also, because I can't help myself, listen to the way Brooks links all those seemingly disparate objects together with sound, pairing voiced and unvoiced consonants (as well as the more obvious internal vowel rhymes); the "B" in "beads" with the "P" in "receipts," plus the "D" in "dolls" with the "T" in "tobacco," and the "V" in "vases" with the "F" in "fringes."
