poetry / culinary poetics
What Language is Food? The Latest “Interview with a Poet — Pseu Pending”
The inextricable love of delectable poetry
Humans invented cooking with fire, fermentation, and fuming. We are the only species that extensively curate food. (Seu)
Zay Pareltheon, owner and editor of the juried publication The Howling Owl, surprised me with an exciting conversation a year after the first interview. His editorial notes are most humbling.
…It’s not only an interview with a poet, but a multi-lingual poet with multi-layered skills ( … ) I was so taken with her new works on delectable food that I thought it important to follow up with a unique interview… (Z.P.)
I definitely did not expect it.
Interview excerpts
(updated)
Zay: What is your history as a writer? How long have you been a writer and how did you begin?.
Seu: It started in the museum education days of my adult expat years. A creative approach to research papers led to writing for a magazine. It was sporadic but exceedingly satisfying. I picked up where I left off at age seventeen when I veered to an art career at university. My then English teacher discouraged the notion of a creative writing path, deeming it unpractical. But two further years of English literature classes in between buoyed my love for writing.
Zay: Here at The Howling Owl, you have practically begun a new genre as a writer — Poetry about Food — Gastronomical Delights. How did that begin?
Seu: I hadn’t thought about it that way until you commented, “What a new genre you are creating here…”, in response to my recent food poem The Secret Behind Beautiful Aging, though I have been investigating culinary poetics since 2022. Your comment gained on me.
Growing up in a family culture that takes food far beyond sustenance, taste, and plating, the culinary arts have organically made an impression on me since a young age. My mother would concoct herbal soups to keep us healthy, understanding every item entering us influenced our body constitution. Eating is an art form backed up by historical practices.
Humans invented cooking with fire, fermentation, and fuming. We are the only species that extensively curate food. If that’s not convincing enough, most of us likely remember someone cooking for us. I have pure appreciation for devoted chefs, especially when away from home. My gratitude for being taken care of is immense. Writing about food becomes a natural desire.
We know ancient literature exalted food. The robust Roman, Chinese, Egyptian, and Greek love affairs with gastronomy carry on.
I can’t help recalling Christina Rossetti’s lengthy piece Goblin Market, released in 1862, about freeing women from social constraints, including sexual constraints, written under the fictional guise of exotic fruits. The concentration on gastronomic delights in this piece is stunning, and food wasn’t even Rossetti’s intent.
But Goblin Market is fictional, whereas I’m committed to writing about delectables I have tasted and liked, for authenticity.
A recent look into the Poetry Foundation’s newish collection on Poetry & Food excites me to no end. No lack of poets on this topic, including Sylvia Plath and, in more recent decades, one of my favorites Li-Young Lee. Even though in this collection, the poets mostly wrote food into their poems — not necessarily poems about food — opening up this contemporary realm is thrilling.
I guess I did start something new here on THO. It’s fun to explore food as sensuous and cultural creations. Especially when we derive life’s messages from it.
Zay: Do you ever try the recipes for your Gastronomical Delights? What’s that like?
Seu: Not really. There’s not nearly as much joy in copying the chefs’ artistic creations. But I do get inspired.
I’ve inherited only a fraction of my mother’s culinary talents (a legend of a woman herself), yet do remember her informative and entertaining stories, poems included, at dinner time.
Zay: Tell me about your writing process. How do you begin a piece? How do you revise?
Seu: Capture the emotions. Research. Feel the rhythm when developing the piece. In revision, ask if the punch is coming through. Sound it out. Cut any fluff. Fact check. Refine word choices. Perpetual thinking is a habit.
Wordsworth’s thought of “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquility” best describes my creative process.
In my writings on life’s nuances, contemporary art, or gastronomic delights, the objects are merely points of departure. I often attempt to get across a message of social relevance.
In food poetry, I pay attention before, when, and after the item enters my mouth. As I’m partial to elements of the ekphrastic approach, the featured image is crucial. My good old iPhone is a good friend.
Have you noticed closeups of cooked organic matter? They could be exasperatingly unappetizing if not done right. Among the many challenges of candid food photography in restaurants are the ambient lighting and the lack of control over how the dish shows up. But I love candid pictures for authenticity. No tripod. Often taken stealthily. Finding the right frame is all in the eye.
A fun point. I created a new use of the tildes~~always a pair~~specifically for my culinary poetics, for reasons including graphics. If you have been following these, you might have noticed I reserve them for pleasurable/uplifting/playful/positive instances. Occasionally I use them as leads or breaks where periods would be too abrupt. One needs to bear in mind the unconventional use of punctuation when reading these poems, as explored by many, many poetry writers, especially in recent decades.
Zay: What struggles and what triumphs do you find in writing?
Seu: ( … ) When dear readers respond with their interpretations, I’m thrilled. Let me respond with this:
all interpretations are valid
reflecting the viewer’s life experience
artists might surprise themselves
as they wake up to discoveries unforeseen
contrary to the initial intention
community’s ways are a cabinet
forming their collective views
tradition too has its way of interpreting
with or without imagination
set by rules ancients wrote
A symbol equals B
or numerous cultural Cs
interpretations morph with time
fads. social sentiments. world events
novel philosophies
fickle i say. deep i say. life-changing i say
it lives
by the minute
even the artist’s interpretation shifts
with timeArt is not still.
Zay: You write in English, yet that is not your native language. Do you write in other languages? How do you view writing in English?
Seu: Growing up bilingual in English and traditional Chinese has its advantages — as if one language checks the other, I question each word/phrase for its use and authenticity in expression, especially in writing, even though it slows me down. And because English is not my mother tongue, I do not fall into the trap of cliches and jargon as easily. Plus, cultures enrich one another.
If you’re curious, my first article on Medium was in Chinese, in December 2020. A piece on the joy of certain exceptional culinary delights! But I very quickly discovered there isn’t much of an audience here for the Chinese language. So I switched to English.
I struggle with the right words even when not writing poetry. A perfectionist? Words are cultural. My thoughts flow in the language I write in, which often frames my philosophies in that particular culture when writing in prose. Yet how I write poetry gives me freedom of the source regardless of culture. Poetry allows me to voice what prose complicates.
The famous Tang Chinese poet Li Bai’s verses were one of my earliest introductions to verbal poetry, years before I started reading adapted Shakespeare around age 9. For me, the workings of most formal poetry, which I willfully alienated at a more mature age, lived in the past. I said it before — I love Michelangelo, but we don’t need another Sistine Chapel.
I don’t talk about my childhood life in the British colonial world much, lest people judge. I’m American, in case you’re wondering, but have been living overseas as an expat for so long, in 7 countries across 3 continents, I sometimes forget the American ways.
We write in accents. In the non-English speaking worlds of different cultures, I strive to connect. Then back in the States in an American-English speaking world, I get corrected sometimes by people who show their false superiority as native speakers — with their provincial accents. It’s somewhat amusing.
Huge thanks to Zay for extricating these thoughts.
Pseu Pending (Seu)
my nom de plume
