Celebrating 100 Poems

You may have already read that the reason I began this website was because my daughter asked for my favourite recipes. Since then, everything has grown – the site, my daughter’s cooking repertoire, the scale of the project!

I started with food, and then, through food, began to explore.

As someone who keeps handwritten recipes, and bakes in vintage CorningWare, I’ve always been interested in how ordinary objects preserve memories and connect us to the people of our past. For more than a decade, my fruit has been arranged in an orange and yellow bowl my mother bought decades ago. A mug, an Olympic souvenir brought home from overseas just for me, contains the best tea. There’s a slim fork and spoon from my childhood I use when I’m home alone.

None of these pieces are valuable heirlooms.

But they are my historical artefacts. When I touch them, it’s like there’s a lifeline from my hand to my heart.

The decision to engage with something else historical – public domain art – began as a practical problem. How do you fill a website with images? One answer was to supplement my own photography (yes, they are my photos of my meals), with stock images from Pexels and Rawpixel, such as those you see on my home page under “Savoury”, “Sweet” and “Writing”.

A second answer was to turn to the public domain. And the more I looked at the art of the past (like Pissarro’s painting of the apple trees above, or more obscure pieces), the more I was inspired by the stories I saw within. I’d written ekphrastic poetry (poetry in response to art) before. Here was a way to continue that practice and publish the poems myself.

I enjoyed the constraints of limiting myself to food-related art.

The still lifes and fields and kitchens were domestic spaces in which I was comfortable having a conversation across time. I made a decision to work my way through (sometimes archaic) poetic forms, often informed by the artwork itself. That way, I could learn more about history, more about art, and more about poetry. Win, win.

And so here we are, 100 poems later.

To me it was a natural progression. The writing grew out of the same place as the cooking – food, creativity, family, memory, inheritance, preservation. It’s hard to tell in the Pissarro painting if the woman’s buckets are full, or about to be filled. That’s kind of where I am, too.

To circle back to the beginning, the website’s at least doing one job well. My daughter, whose kitchen is now a place of experimentation as well as nourishment, reports that she does indeed regularly reference some of her old mother’s old recipes.

Win, win, win.