The Poetry of Thanksgiving: Charles Simic, Joy Harjo, and Giving Thanks at a Divided Table

A Guest Post by Greg Emilio, Executive Director of Georgia Writers

Juan Sánchez Cotán (1560–1627), Still life with Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber

Last year, my wife and I hosted our very first Thanksgiving, and a rather miraculous event occurred.

The spatchcocked turkey turned out golden, succulent, and after being dry-brined for three days, preternaturally moist. The homemade dressing, made with sage-laced sausage and good bread—its surface crunchy-crisp and the interior soft as bread pudding—was a paragon of the form. The simplest mashed potatoes of russets, butter, and milk were soft as a feather-down pillow. And the gravy, which I made from my own chicken stock—a 24-hour brodo rendered gelatinous and lip-smacking by the addition of chicken feet—I could have eaten straight from the gravy boat with a spoon (which, when no one was looking, I did).

Yet none of these gastronomical feats, which were all special because they were first-time successes for my wife and me (thank you, Serious Eats), are the minor miracle of which I speak. After the meal, lingering at the candlelit table, our group of twelve or so adult friends, all in good health and sound mind, with neither funeral nor wedding to prod us, took turns doing something incredibly rare in modern American life…

We recited poetry.

You read that right, dear reader. We read the poems of Charles Simic to be exact—the food-centric poems of Charles Simic, to be even more exact. I’d been on a Simic kick at that time last year (he passed away in early 2023), and I was planning to write an essay on the role of food, wine, and feasting in his work (finally getting around to it!). Thus, I’d surreptitiously left out three volumes of his poetry—Selected Early Poems, The Voice at 3 a.m.: Selected Late and New Poems, and Simic’s Pulitzer-winning collection of prose poems, The World Doesn’t End—around the dining room, the books silently daring our guests to pick them up and thumb through the dog-eared pages.

The freak occurrence of this spontaneous recital might lead you to believe that it was a gathering of poets. It was not. I was the only card-carrying poet among us, but I will grant you that this was a rather artsy group—actors, musicians, theater folks, etc. Still, it was the first Thanksgiving of my entire life in which poetry was read aloud. With the wine flowing, and our bellies glowing with the rich food, we took turns passing around the books and performing Simic, even re-reading our favorites to see who could read them best. A hearty, quasi-competitive nature took over. More bottles were opened.

“Butcher Shop,” one of Simic’s first published poems, set the stage: “Sometimes walking late at night/ I stop before a closed butcher shop.” It is a poem of intense yet unspoken hunger, the narrator wandering around a big city late at night (Simic was a notorious insomniac, and very broke at the time he wrote the poem), looking into the window of this empty temple of butchery. It’s not a poem about meat, but about the tools, implements, and the mystery that attends our preparation and consumption of it.

The speaker surveys the scene, his eyes passing over a dirty apron, “The blood on it smeared into a map/ Of the great continents of blood,/ The great rivers and oceans of blood,” then the knives “glitter[ing] like altars/ In a dark church,” and finally its “wooden block where bones are broken,/ Scraped clean—a river dried to its bed.” This is the dreamscape, the poet tells us, “Where I am fed,/ Where deep in the night I hear a voice.” It remains one of Simic’s strongest poems, one in which hunger is rendered both visceral and metaphysical, which is the hallmark of true hunger.

Next we read “The Soup,” a politically charged poem that seems to be informed by Simic’s upbringing behind the Iron Curtain (he immigrated from Belgrade to America when he was 16), and showcases his capacious imagination. The recipe for his soup contains some of the following wide-ranging ingredients:

• chopped onions

• dead people’s wedding pictures

• flies

• the mustache of Joseph Stalin

• the head of one about to be shot

• the fires of Hiroshima

• a pair of dice

• barbed wire

• the white panties of Veronica Lake

In typical Simic fashion, the poem concludes by merging the sacred with the profane, ending not with an answer, but an image:

And this is what we’ll have on the side:

The bread of remembrance, a black bread.
Blood sausages of yes and no.
Scallions grown on our mother’s graves.
Black olives from our father’s eyes.

The immigrant in the middle of the Atlantic,
Pissing in the sea with a sense of eternity.
The wine of that clear night,
A dark wine sparkling with stars.

We took a few deep breaths after that one. Then we read some of the more lusty poems, bearing in mind that Simic once made the following proclamation in an essay titled “The Trouble with Poetry”: “The true poet specializes in a kind of bedroom and kitchen metaphysics; I am the mystic of the frying pan, and my love’s pink toes.”

“Crazy About Her Shrimp” seems to be a poem written to give voice to the “true poet” in Simic:

We don’t even take time
To come up for air.
We keep our mouths full and busy
Eating bread and cheese
And smooching in between.

No sooner have we made love
Than we are back in the kitchen.

A poet after my own heart! Perhaps only Simic has the chutzpah and sense of humor to end a poem like this: “‘I’m crazy about her shrimp!’/ I shout to the gods above.”

Despite the fact that it may be a touch adolescent, “Breasts” was no doubt the fan favorite of the evening, savored with particular gusto not by the men, but the women in attendance, who giggled and clapped throughout this over-the-top ode. It begins simply: “I love breasts, hard/ Full breasts, guarded/ By a button.” As the opening suggests, there will be no beating around the bush in this poem, though there is plenty of ingenious metaphor, often connected to food and drink:

I like to come up to them
Like a kid
Who climbs on a chair
To reach a jar of forbidden jam.

The speaker also likes for breasts to “slip into [his] hands/”—wait for it—“Like two freshly poured beer mugs.” Breasts, according to him, “give each finger/ Its true shape, its joy.” They are the soap “On which our hands are cleansed.” When breasts “draw nearer/ In the barn/ The milk shivers in the pail.”

By this point, we were cracking up, not knowing whether we ought to take this guy seriously, whether it’s okay to laugh as he waxes rhapsodic. He doubles down in mock-earnest: “I spit on fools who fail to include/ Breasts in their metaphysics.” And then he insists

That the old janitor on his deathbed
Who demands to see the breasts of his wife
For one last time
Is the greatest poet who ever lived.

We pounded the table at that one, reached for another pour of wine. The poem ends, again, with profundity emerging from absurdity, with the merging of food and love, and the temporary defeat of time:

Now, with the clock
Afraid to tick, drawing the waist
Of the one I love to mine,

I will tip each breast
Like a dark heavy grape
Into the beehive
Of my drowsy mouth.

I shared the anecdote that when Simic was appointed as the Poet Laureate of the United States, one conservative senator thought he was unfit for such a role because there were too many dirty jokes and nipples in his poems. One woman at our table shrugged and said that there is nothing wrong with a man celebrating a woman’s body, especially for raising his praise to the level of art. (Privately, I thought of the chaos that would ensue if a poem like this were brought into a university poetry workshop.)

My favorite poem that night was “[The time of minor poets is coming],” from The World Doesn’t End. The poem is a manifesto for those of us who have been quietly entangled in a decades-long affair with the cruel paramour that is poetry. It is a short prose poem that I quote here in full:

The time of minor poets is coming. Goodbye Whitman, Dickinson, Frost. Welcome you whose fame will never reach beyond your closest family, and perhaps one or two good friends gathered after dinner over a jug of fierce red wine...while the children are falling asleep and complaining about the noise you’re making as you rummage through the closets for your old poems, afraid your wife might’ve thrown them out with last spring’s cleaning.

It’s snowing, says someone who has peeked into the dark night, and then he, too, turns toward you as you prepare yourself to read, in a manner somewhat theatrical and with a face turning red, the long rambling love poem whose final stanza (unknown to you) is hopelessly missing.

—after Aleksandar Ristovic

Of course, this poem describes the very thing we were ourselves engaged in that night after the feast: sitting around the table, flush with good food and wine, reading poems out loud, imperfectly, with missteps and blushing faces, Simic’s poems of gustatory and amatory pleasures filling us up when we had tired of food. All of us were minor poets in the flickering candlelight, or actors pretending to be minor poets, or musicians enraptured by the strange and needful music that is poetry.

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As I look to this year’s Thanksgiving, I have to reckon with the fact that it will be different. For one thing, we will not be a gathering of only adults. This year we’ll have a couple kiddos joining the festivities. (“Breasts,” alas, will not be read, but I can foresee T.S. Eliot’s “The Naming of Cats” making a wonderful addition.) On a grander scale, the mood this year will be different because our country is now different, and at Thanksgiving tables all across America the tension will be thicker than butter pulled too late from the fridge, serrated knives warm and ready in millions of hands.

It’s hard to enjoy food under such circumstances. Who cares if the turkey is dry when you’re waiting for your uncle or grandmother or father to say the wrong thing, the very thing you’ve been hoping they won’t bring up? My advice for this year is to let the food do the talking, to refrain from politics for just one day, and recognize the common bonds of hunger we share—for food yes, but also for family, for warmth, for praise. And to help facilitate this recognition—before, during, or after the meal—maybe try sharing with each other the art form perfectly suited to the occasion of such revelations: poetry.

I’ll leave you with the poem I want to serve as our meal’s benediction, our opening prayer, our grace: “Perhaps the World Ends Here,” by Joy Harjo, another Poet Laureate of the United States, and the first Native American to hold that honor. A profound meditation on kitchen tables and the elemental things we do at them, the poem opens, “The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.” The poem feels incredibly prescient for a time when some of us feel like victors, and some of us are still licking our wounds: “Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.” But Harjo shows us a common way forward: “At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.”

I could go on quoting the whole thing, but why not just go watch Harjo read it? Then when the day comes, share it with others at the table. Take turns reading it out loud. Raise a toast. Raise several. Give thanks to the people who cooked for you, to the animals who gave their lives for you. Praise the turkey even if it’s dry. Tip a spoonful of gravy to your lips. Be on the lookout for miracles, gastronomic, or otherwise. Revel in the short time we’re here for and have together—friends and lovers, minor poets and family, eaters one and all.

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Gregory Emilio is the author of the poetry collection Kitchen Apocrypha (Able Muse, 2024). His poems and essays have appeared in Best New Poets, Gastronomica, Gravy, North American Review, The Rumpus, Tupelo Quarterly, and Southern Humanities Review. The Executive Director of the Georgia Writers Association, he lives in Atlanta and teaches at Kennesaw State University.

You can find more of his work at gregemilio.com, and follow his food adventures on IG @emilioepicure.