Culinary synaesthesia
So, this morning I half-glanced at Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems on the coffee table and for a second I thought-- what if the "Lunch" in the title referred to the poems themselves rather than the circumstances of their composition. I've been thinking about this all day: if various poems, books, etc. were food, what sort of food would they be?
O'Hara's lunch poems would be, I think, black and white cookies, quintessentially postwar New York, popular, animated by contrast. Marx is roasted root vegetables, turnips or, more likely beets. Langland is, obviously, a Ploughman's, Margery Kempe is rice pudding with a twist, cardamon pods, perhaps. Troilus and Criseyde is figs, Romeo and Juliet is blancmange or anything with almonds, really, the Canterbury Tales are some sort of roast fowl, I believe, though I'm not quite as clear on that, the Sherlock Holmes stories are licorice allsorts, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is most certainly sushi (uni nigri comes to mind).
And so on and so forth. I have to go play quizzo now, but what do you think?
O'Hara's lunch poems would be, I think, black and white cookies, quintessentially postwar New York, popular, animated by contrast. Marx is roasted root vegetables, turnips or, more likely beets. Langland is, obviously, a Ploughman's, Margery Kempe is rice pudding with a twist, cardamon pods, perhaps. Troilus and Criseyde is figs, Romeo and Juliet is blancmange or anything with almonds, really, the Canterbury Tales are some sort of roast fowl, I believe, though I'm not quite as clear on that, the Sherlock Holmes stories are licorice allsorts, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is most certainly sushi (uni nigri comes to mind).
And so on and so forth. I have to go play quizzo now, but what do you think?