T.S. Eliot's Prose and Knowing Your Audience--Food-Making as Metaphor for Writing

The weather continues to drive activities and conversations here. Sidewalks are sheets of ice, and I executed a graceful 180 degree turn on a (thankfully empty) road in the car this afternoon. We've had several power outages today too, but they've all been brief, and strikingly silent, with the abrupt stop of the dehydrator's hum.

As I'm busy making my first batches of holiday goodies...

...I'm also down to the last couple days of finishing up my fourth "packet" to send to my MFA advisor. One of my readings for this month has been some of T. S. Eliot's essays.

I read a lot of Eliot's poetry when I was about 19; not so much since then. Reading his prose feels very educational and edifying, and sometimes alarming and startling. Some of what he says seems to make so much sense; some of his presuppositions on which he bases his forthright pronouncements are either falsifiable, or wrong, or outrageous politically.

What I did get from Eliot was one of the best arguments for using "conversational" language when writing poetry. I've often been irritated by people stigmatizing or proscribing "flowery language" or "big words" as excessive gestures in poetry: I happen to use words of more than three syllables in my regular speech! But Eliot's argument is connected to the music of poetry, and of the language that is poetry's milieu: that the music of poetry has to sound musical to speakers of the language, has to answer to the changing idioms of different periods.

In other words, we're back to the question of "knowing your audience," that I've worrited on about at least once before here. And with the two endeavors of holiday treat-making and Eliot-crunching going on side by side, it came home to me that as a culinary artist, "knowing my audience" is absolutely key to what I do. Before I lived in Alaska, I was a raw food chef, and often had to dance the line between my preference for using lighter, local, "what's on hand"ingredients, less oil, salt, garlic; and my "audience's" preference for more of those things and heartier fare. Of course, in the raw food environment, you'd likely come across sub-groups with "my" kinds of preferences, and at big events I often took it upon myself to make sure that there was something at each meal to suit those people.

Now, living here, I still enjoy turning out raw creations and light, plant-based food, but most of the people I make food for most of the time prefer the bread, meat, potatoes, lots of sugar and salt--and I make it for them!

There are some compromises--I did use the horseradish dressing I posted a few days ago to make a beet/cabbage slaw. It was just one large Full Circle Farms beet and one medium cabbage, julienned, with a double batch of the horseradish dressing.

And it was so wonderful, I forgot to photograph it until almost all gone. But--I knew that the people I was going to serve it to would like it even better with dried cranberries and (cover your eyes, vegans) bacon bits! And here's the compromise: this was going to be my main dish, likely for several days, and if it had those two added ingredients, I wouldn't be able to eat it! The bacon's obvious why not; I don't have a problem with dried cranberries per se; I do have a problem with the added sugar and especially the often added sunflower oil. So I brought the slaw along "straight," and brought a jar with those two "additions" to put on the side for people to add. Everyone was happy.

As for the goodies in the dehydrator, the bars pictured up top are, of course, delicious. But they have cacao nibs in them and chocolate sauce on them, and I really need to stay away from chocolate, as in not even lick my fingers, practically. And aside from that, they're mostly nutty bars, and I barely eat nuts at all because I'm afraid of omega-6.

The other two trays of the dehydrator contain teriyaki pumpkin and sesame seeds, and horseradish sunflower seeds...way too salty flavors for me and same omega-6 block for me!

But as I said recently, I get so much more pleasure out of preparing food than I do out of eating it that this is satisfying to me: I know that this food will be enjoyed. (And I believe that when it's enjoyed as food, things like "omega-6" are just technicalities.)

Now, how to bring this back to writing? How do I add the craisins and bacon bits to my writerly beet slaw so that my audience loves it too? How do I make the chocolate sonnets and candied essays without starving myself? 

Of course, part of the truth of the answer to this is that I don't want to write poetry that's the equivalent of McDonalds--or even of a mainstream upscale restaurant! In the food-preparation arena, the circumstances of my life situation have steered me to all the bread-and-meat-making. In the writing arena, I would liken this to having a tech-writing or other less-creative job involving writing that I took on just to pay the bills, until the writing that's closer to my soul can start to pay them. 

But making the nuts and bars is utilizing a skill in which I'm trained and believe I have some abilities, and for which there is an audience. Is there a kind of poetry like that that I might not so much enjoy writing, but through which I would have something cogent to offer?

I don't yet have the key to unravel this metaphor completely, but I hope you'll agree it's intriguing. And I think that acknowledging it's OK that not everyone likes my writing--that perhaps I don't want it to be the kind of writing that appeals to everyone--is an important step.

I'd love to hear your thoughts!