[New-Poetry] fingerlicking lit

[Anny Ballardini]

I would never make something like this up... :-)
This probably answers your question:

Like I said, the cookbooks sustained him for a good while. He told me once that he would propose a cookbook to a publisher, get an advance, and then live off that money for a year or two. 

Here is the entire answer in Peter O'Leary's interview on Octopus Magazine:
http://www.octopusmagazine.com/issue03/peter_oleary_interview.html

How seriously did RJ take his cooking and his cooking publications? How did he regard his cooking in comparison to his poetry?

I think they were a serious part of his life. Which is to say, they were his livelihood for a period of ten years or more. Cooking has been my main hobby (along with birdwatching) for the last fifteen years. I do all the cooking for my family, all the grocery shopping. I came to Ron's cookbooks, then, not just out of poetic interest. I really wanted to get some recipes from them! Anyways, I use them all the time. I probably use The American Table most often - there are at least four recipes from that one in heavy rotation, for feasts as well as everyday meals - but turn with great frequency to both Company Fare (try the roast chicken in sauce of red-wine vinegar for an epic meal made from a handful of ingredients) and to Simple Fare. Ron wanted to call this one When the Cupboard is Bare, which his publisher thought too grim. As a penny-pinching poet, he knew how to pull a meal together out of nothing at all. He stayed with me and my brother in 1996 when he came to Chicago to give a reading. On his last evening with us, he began nosing around our pantry - which, it turns out, was pretty bare - and soon enough was preparing a meal. He made a Southwest feast for us: a stew of pinto beans and chorizo, topped with cilantro and Chihuahua cheese; fresh fritos (fried tortilla chips); and a salad of iceberg lettuce and pomegranates. Meal of a lifetime.

The times we were together, when we weren't talking about poetry, we were talking about food. Like I said, the cookbooks sustained him for a good while. He told me once that he would propose a cookbook to a publisher, get an advance, and then live off that money for a year or two. He always had a roommate to split housing costs, and he lived frugally. Among his correspondence are letters from M.K.F. Fisher and Marion Cunningham. I think he took quite a lot of pride that great cooks (and cooking writers) recognized his talent in the kitchen (and at the typewriter). There was a while I kept The American Table ("the diet of the tribe" as he calls it) by my bedside. It's a really great read! There's some excellent poetry gossip in there, too, about what poets like to eat. 

I don't know how much (or little) to make connecting the cookbooks to his poetry. I mean, he was a poet who put his life into a poem, ARK, and then retrospectively ordered his life around that construction. The cookbooks allowed him to work on his poem (He wrote most of them during the 1980s, while he worked continuously on ARK). If the work merits the investigation, I imagine someone will start to compare the cookbooks to the poetry, or look to the cookbooks for some hermeneutical clues. For me, the cookbooks seem most interesting from a practical standpoint. Ron never thrived financially. I think toward the end, he really would have liked to have been hired as a creative writing instructor at a college somewhere; it would have solved some unfortunate fiduciary dilemmas. But it's interesting to think that an American poet made his living for a sustained period by writing cookbooks. More interesting than if he wrote advertising, or plumbing manuals, or drew military cartoons say. The academy has been the mainstay for poets - as professors or creative writing teachers - for a while now (though maybe this is changing?). It's useful to think of alternatives to this system. Ron's cookbook writing didn't support him as long as he had hoped it would, but it kept him going while he was writing ARK. For that alone, we should all have copies of each of the cookbooks.

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: JforJames at aol.com 
  To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu 
  Sent: Sunday, April 15, 2007 10:46 PM
  Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] fingerlicking lit


  In a message dated 4/15/2007 1:58:04 PM Eastern Daylight Time, anny.ballardini at tin.it writes:
    Ronald Johnson didn't go anywhere with his ARK but got some money with his recipe books
  Anny, are you making this up...did he write cookbooks? I'm sure I could Google and find out myself, but it seems you're familiar with Johnson's recipes.
  Finnegan



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