Arnold Zwicky's Blog

In a segment (“A Readable Feast: Poems To Feed the Hungry Ear”) on this morning’s Thanksgiving celebration of food poetry on NPR’s Morning Edition, from Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s “Oysters“, mulling over the experience of eating the shellfish:

Our shells clacked on the plates.
My tongue was a filling estuary,
My palate hung with starlight:
As I tasted the salty Pleiades
Orion dipped his foot into the water.

… I ate the day
Deliberately, that its tang
Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb …

Amazing (but largely unobtrusive) phonological play on the intense sensory experience of eating oysters, culminating in the metaphor of verbs as pure activity.

The segment was a kind of Thanksgiving present for listeners, with material (presented by Nicole Cohen) from Kevin Young’s food-and-poetry book of last month — which I haven’t seen but look forward to checking out.

This entry was posted on November 22, 2012 at 6:04 pm and is filed under Figurative language, Metaphor, Poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.