Kevin Young on Poems of Food and Drink - NYTimes.com

?I think this okra is delicious,? Kevin Young said during lunch on Wednesday at a Midtown robata restaurant.

The man should know. A prolific author, as well as a professor and curator at Emory University, Mr. Young is enough of an okra connoisseur that he?s written a poem about it.

Then again, he has also written poems about pork, boudin, hot sauce, catfish, crawfish, grits, sweet potato pie, pepper vinegar, turtle soup, fig preserves, gumbo and a squash called cushaw. The majority of his gastronomic verses appear in ?Dear Darkness,? a 2008 collection in which food plays a pivotal role in his musings on memory and loss and family history.

So it only makes sense that Mr. Young, 41, whose wide-ranging body of work includes an astonishing book of poems about the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat and another that incorporates the doomy lingo of film noir, was chosen to put together a food-verse anthology that Bloomsbury plans to publish later this year.

Called ?The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food & Drink,? the book will cull about 150 poems by the likes of Mary Oliver, Lucille Clifton, Donald Hall, Seamus Heaney, William Carlos Williams, Frank O?Hara and William Matthews, whose ode to onions has at least one diehard fan here at Diner?s Journal.

?In the introduction, I talk a lot about how food and poems are related,? Mr. Young said. ?They are both, to me, necessities.?

And if you happen to have a favorite food poem, now?s the time to let us (and Mr. Young) know. He?s got cheese covered, and plums, too. But as he hones the final lineup for ?The Hungry Ear,? there seems to be at least one gap in the menu.

?I actually need more pork poems,? he said.

Source: http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/08/poems-that-make-you-hungry/

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