Mark Kurlansky Reads His Alimentum Menupoem: “Ode to a Mushroom in four four time in a ruined city.”
Now that we’ve recovered a bit from the cocktails we consumed at Good Spirits over at Brooklyn’s Bell House (you can get a round-up of the par-tay from The Village Voice, Metromix and The Examiner, in case you missed it), we’d like to turn again to matters more academic: poetry.
It’s national poetry month, and for the third year in a row the little (literally) literary quarterly called Alimentum: The Literature of Food, which is based here in New York City, is offering up 13 lovely menupoems. Written by scribes like Emily Stokes, Catherine Harnett and Paul S. Piper, they cover subjects like grapefruit, mangos, the perfect cake, eating ants and mushrooms, the latter a poem called “Ode to a Mushroom in four four time in a ruined city” penned by author Mark Kurlansky, shown reading his work above.
This year Alimentum has taped all 13 writers speaking their stuff, and is encouraging readers to follow the authors’ lead and tape themselves reading their favorite poem, which you can download as a PDF online here, then send in the video file for YouTube channel posterity.
Actually what might even be just as cooler is if you sent in your videos to Edible Manhattan of yourself simply reading from city menus: To us, many are practically poetry themselves. Like this piece inspired by The Shake Shack’s menu we like to read aloud on nice spring days like this one. Music to the ears, isn’t it?
We’ll take a Double Shackburger!
With American cheese, lettuce, tomato… and ShackSauce!
Here’s $7.25.
