Food Poetry: (Two Untitled Poems)
The intersection of food and poetry is a natural one: both are subjects that concern themselves with experience, memory, sense, and self. In honor of National Poetry Month, we’ve asked some of our favorite poets from around the world to share works—each poem in print for the first time overall or in English—that fuse the poetic with the edible.
(Two Untitled Poems)
by Dmitri Alexandrovich Prigov
A pound of seafood salad
Procured from the delicatessen
Where is the harm in that, I ask—
Hardly need for any confession.
A bit of it I ate myself
And fed my son, my own begotten
With the very same stuff
Then we settled by the glass
Of the transparent window
Like two male pussycats
So that below us life could flow
Now I'll fry up a cutlet
And boil a drop of soup
Lay them out, let stand
And crack the window open
Onto the yard and straight away
Leap into the sky and fly, fly
And fly, and hither I'll return
To munch a bit if I so choose
Dmitri Alexandrovich Prigov_ (1940-2007) was a key member of the late-Soviet artistic underground, his literary oeuvre includes more than 36,000 poems, three novels, numerous essays and plays, but Prigov—trained as a sculptor—was also a prolific artist, exhibiting widely in Europe and Russia in the last 20 years of his life._
Translator Matvei Yankelevich_ is the author of the poetry collection_ Alpha Donut (United Artists Books) and the novella-in-fragments Boris by the Sea_ (Octopus Books). He is the translator of_ Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms_ (Overlook/Ardis). He is one of the founding editors of Ugly Duckling Presse._
PREVIOUSLY:
Keep Reading
Continue to Next Story
