The below essay-poem or assay, a kind of fragmented poetics, is based on a panel presentation I delivered at ACCUTE in 2022. “At the Table: Food Writing and Identity” was a creative writing panel organized by Sue Sinclair. It was her call for papers that led me to observe the degree to which the poems in When a Folk, When a Sprawl were not simply, as I had come to imagine them, “folk” poems, but also “food” poems.
In a recent online writing workshop with Hoa Nguyen, the class, of which I was a part, was invited to partake in an extensive exploration of Lorine Niedecker’s folk poetics, with “folk” designated as an aperture for ambivalence and instability, rather than any simple belonging with an imagined rural, working-class collective. The “folk” impulse in Niedecker is largely present in the oral qualities of her poetics, or of what the literary scholar Peter Middleton, describes as “placing speech in a poem.” What I am interested in exploring here is how my decision to place the speech — as I imperfectly recalled it — of my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother in the poems of When a Folk, When a Sprawl invariably had the effect of placing food (and the attendant cooking, eating, and cleaning) in the poem. Just as Middleton refuses to take the placement of speech in a poem “for granted,” I want to similarly refuse to take the placement of food in a poem for granted. As an alternative to universality, a folk poetry with emphasis on speech and food makes claims for specificity of place and culture. The chapbook When a Folk, When a Sprawl seeks to capture the sensations and rhythms of my childhood home in Prince Edward Island (PEI): placing home-speech alongside place-based representations of the everyday (e.g., the pantry, the bathroom, the vegetable garden).
It was an autobiographical impulse that led me to food-writing, for in my recall of home I could not help but recollect its foods: their preparation, smells, and tastes. Repeatedly, the recurrent word-image that most strongly impressed itself upon my writing was distinctly without nostalgia or romance — it was rot. These poems trouble popular conceptions of food writing. While relishing in the sensory detail, they reveal that our eating behaviours and those memories associated with them have the potential to be destabilising forces, refusing any tendency to universality and thus disrupting neat categories of past or present, self or other in what Rachel Blau Du Plessis has called, in Niedecker’s folk poems, their “webbing of relations.”
I am interested in exploring whether it is possible to plumb the affective themes and condensed forms of Niedecker’s poetry without the rural isolation that fostered her writing. Unlike Niedecker, who lived in rural and isolated Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, according to Middleton, “until her death,” I have now lived away from home for as many years as I ever lived, as a child and teenager, in the rural and isolated Canavoy, PEI. I envy the “intensive poetic practice” a solitary, rural life allowed Niedecker: I do not, however, envy — nor do I intend to romanticize — the “poverty” and “walls thin” that “foreclosed” her writing table (Niedecker, “Property is poverty—” 194–95). Working through what I call “bad recall” and intensive sensory description, When a Folk, When a Sprawl is a series of folk poems with a difference: a difference apparent in the intrusions of the urban present-day and the failures to take (in the mouth or otherwise) the lessons of childhood or adolescence.
As I said above, these poems are open to the fault lines of bad recall: meaning, their speaker is not afraid to get it wrong. Folk writing must dwell in the gaps of memory. Make a mockery of that thin line between reality and dream. This surreal impulse is particularly useful in writing about the less appealing undersides of food writing: whether that be rot, putridness, or scarcity. These poems are open to slippages, miscommunications, and accidents. They conjure up care-givers and the rooms they stood in. They ask if that care was enough, if that room was really as you now imagine it. They ask the reader to position themselves in relation to the memory, to stop looking and instead to feel. Reading the poem as if with eyes closed, What smell wafts in the transformed memory? This representation of the past is under constant interruption. Keep your eyes closed, return to the poem, and ask: What smell from the present moment interrupts this recall? Is your partner cooking hard-boiled eggs? Are they pouring concrete down the block? This chapbook is interested in exploring what happens when child or adolescent sensations overlay themselves on the present moment, and vice versa. What is of primary importance here is that by “specific reference” — to an object like Niedecker’s “granite pail,” the rotted-through potato, the carrot tops, or the fish doused in oil — this act of reflection carries us through time itself:
Remember my little granite pail?
The handle of it was blue.
Think what’s got away in my life—
Was enough to carry me thru. (“New Goose” 96)
Lean in to the unpleasant details. Is that black mold in the ceiling tiles of your childhood? Are you sucking in your present potbelly as you conjure up past images of care or its absence? Did you also vomit up neon coconut shreds after sneaking that tray of desserts and a stash of alcohol into a friend’s bedroom during a community wake? Write it all down: past or present, reality or dream. When it is a folk poetry, time and its bodies sprawl.
Jessi MacEachern is the author of the poetry collection A Number of Stunning Attacks, as well as the chapbooks Television Poems (above/ground), You Do Not Like Animal Sounds (Ghost City), and Ravishing the Sex into the Hold (Model). Her new poetry collection Cut Side Down is forthcoming with Invisible in 2025. She is the 2022–24 reviewer of Poetics for Oxford University Press's The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory and is currently working as an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Bishop’s University. When a Folk, When a Sprawl is her second chapbook with above/ground press.