John Barton

The Book of Marmalade

Its Antecedents, Its History

and Its Role in the World Today

A social good, our mothers would buy

Oranges to scrub and quarter, sly

Winter light slicing through steamed-up windows

While in copper saucepans on gas stoves

The wedges boil for five fierce minutes

In still-pure tap water to permit

In each house a release of sourness—

Life’s aftertaste meant to cool for hours

Till the peel is spooned out, cut in chunks

Each rank imploded fruit having drunk

Itself to a slick spongy softness

All adept cooks revere, slipperiness

A domestic duty shared, measured

Syrups reheated with beet sugar

Stirred in and held in tender balance

Cup for cup, nothing left to mischance

About how to decant clear viscid

Residues in sterile jars, liquid

Wonder gelling in back-porch larders

Year in, year out, the gem-bright languor

Of candied family sins spread on toast

Across the suburbs from coast to coast

Our fathers thumbing through classifieds

Pencils sharpened, want ads underlined

While, eyes averted, we’d sit alarmed

As open-mouthed they chewed, sticky crumbs

Jammed in front teeth and whiskers rinsed off

Before they’d race time to the office

Clock hands spinning faster, our own kids

Looking up, then away, as we slide

Slathered bites of croissant to our lips

A store-bought sweetness smearing pink slips

We fear await us, fiscal meltdown

Looming large as we commute to town

Skyscraper hopes in dwindling supply

On big-box shelves, though we may rely 

On little changing, on aspartame

The truths we’re cooking up not to blame.

 

ORAL SADISM AND THE VEGETARIAN PERSONALITY

 The cookbook you gave me I’ve thrown away

—Its rhetoric of grains and pulses cut

Too leanly: strict, its measurements outweighed—

Or aimed to—the body’s craving to stray

And voice unasked-for grumbles, each bouquet

Of digested inner darkness released

In scorned enmity—me no masterpiece

In politesse, you’d agree, though item

After item your recipes required

Could humble me, whims not said verbatim

I’d brown in olive oil, nuance unmired

By onion’s sweetness, the fresh garlic’s lyre

Not plucked with zest, each plate a tuneless mess

Of noisome glop, not piquant bouillabaisse

Yet you’d dig in with relish, doctrinaire

On how sharp tastes butcher us, sacrifice

Whipping blind faith into cream for éclairs

Such brightness beat gaseous, if not light

With vacuum-forced air, an olfactory spice

You’d keep coughing up as buoyant virtue

To cutthroat rancour, hunger’s déjà-vu

Language’s game an endangered species

Its gristliness herded inside reserves

For meat surrounding cities, obsequies

You’d found in rules you felt at last conserved

Long-compromised menus banning hors d’oeuvres

Those tangy canapés apt to assault

Our taste buds, impel tongues to ache with salt

Foie gras, and eggs, urge them to lick pathways through

To this paradise of auditory

Fullness where all meanings each sound accrues

Are hunted down or sown and picked, set free

Or tamed, filleted or thrown back unclean.

Each appetite denied an extinction

An open field shot of all distinctions 

 Your fruitless book not writ to roast me whole

Or stuff me up with herbs, its fading words

Worthy, just, of nature verses by souls

Mouthing vain soliloquies undeterred

By death, their awkward lack of scope absurd

So, however pellucid each rhyme might be

I’m deaf, my game-keeping ear out of range.

These two poems are part of a series of nine poems that were inspired by The Diagram Prize. Founded in 1978 at the Frankfort Book Fair and awarded each year by the British book-trade magazine, The Book Seller, the prize recognizes the oddest book title of the year. Until 2000, the winners were selected by a panel of judges; in the years since, the public made the final decision

When I first learned of the Diagram Prize, I was amused, of course, but I immediately saw in the winning titles a poetic potential. The challenge became to find a compelling subject that also matched each of the winners I chose to write about. I found that while the titles themselves were unabashedly, if unintentionally humorous, the poems that resulted were not. I hope the contrast between their serious content and the frivolous nature of the titles will appeal to readers and even comment on the social concerns that emerged from the series while I worked on it.

The titles of “The Book of Marmalade,” previously published in Crave It: Writers and Artists Do Food (Toronto: Red Claw, 2011), and “Oral Sadism,”  previously published in the Literary Review of Canada, are respectively the Diagram Prize winners for 1984 and 1986. Like all the poems in the series, both were written using a set form. The former is in knittelvers, the German equivalent of heroic couplets; the latter is the rime royal, an old British form, perhaps drawn from the French.  I cribbed the rules for both from Robin Skelton’s The Shapes of Our Singing: A Comprehensive Guide to Verse Forms and Metrics from Around the World (Eastern Washington, 2002).

John Barton’s ten books of poetry include Hymn (Brick, 2009) and For the Boy with the Eyes of the Virgin: Selected Poems (Nightwood, 2012). His sixth chapbook, Balletomane: The Program Notes of Lincoln Kirstein, appeared with JackPine in 2012. His eleventh book, Polari, is forthcoming in April 2014 from Goose Lane. He lives in Victoria, where he edits The Malahat Review.