[Deborah Warren]

Ubi Sunt Ballade for the High-Fat Diets of Our Youth

Oh frosting dribbling down the sides of bowls,
Oh mostaccioli baked with triple cheese,
Oh dough that puffs to pudgy dinner rolls—
I learned and mastered them. I meant to please
your tastes, love, in those early Seventies,
in these overt and those more hidden ways.
I did. And I still have the recipes.
Ah, for the dinner hours of former days!

Creations like your mother's were my goals.
(Bountiful lady; may she rest in peace.)
Memorialized in blots on cookbook folds:
those raised and deep-fried doughnuts, drooling grease.
The baths of olive oil, the crisp panisses,
the lemon pudding cake with orange glaze,
the fruit-topped cheesecake dripping with cerise—
still here, the recipes of former days.

Alas! Triglycerides and LDLs!
Their numbers rack us. Doctors put the squeeze
on these trans fats and those cholesterols,
and timor mortis bred of heart disease
conturbat nos. Ah, must we trade Chinese
for whole wheat pasta with its cardboard taste?
Leave and abandon, quit, desist and cease
from saturated fats of former days?

Dear heart, corragio! Pass the tofu, please.
We still have pinot noirs and cabernets.
Heart-healthy, let us drink life to the lees!
Santé. To pleasures, and to latter days.

[Deborah Warren]

Admirable rhymes for this demanding form: -eeze is an inspired choice. A ballade wants us to notice and embrace its rhymes, but I like that here they come so naturally.

Nice twist in the envoi—a consolation for all that goes before. (On a petty note, the spelling is coraggio.)

One measure of the poem’s success is—amid the nostalgia for the culinary neiges d’antan—the disgust it manages to elicit at a few of the old foods: I shudder a little at ‘deep-fried’, ‘drooling grease’; I have the knee-jerk modern horror of ‘trans fats’. This ballade does—lightly—lampoon today’s righteous (even sanctimonious?) precepts, but I do feel some revulsion at the indulgences of yesteryear.

However, I’m right with the writer in this paean to rich delights. (Not that I’ve given them up entirely.) And such an eclectic catalogue!

A nice juxtaposition of timor mortis and LDL/trigycerides.

And I’ll give a nod to the santé/saints pun where the poem celebrates ‘latter days’.

[Petra Norr]

This is actually another parody, namely of Villon's well-known ballad with the famous line, "Where are the snows of yesteryear?"One of the most parodied poems around -- even Michael had one in last year's Light Bake-off. Is that why he picked this poem, or was it all the food, which is right up his alley? I enjoy food in poems, and I like the food descriptions in this one. I also think it's well crafted technically. And I think it's an utter bore. There is nothing new or imaginative in this -- it's all been said about food & fat before, in countless poems, countless prose articles, and day to day talk.

[Roger Slater]

What Petra said goes double for me. Boring. Very well written, high level of craft, but nothing even faintly resembling an original thought, perspective, joke, spin or take. Just "too bad we now know that so many really delicious foods are bad for you," and another use of the word "tofu" as if the mere mention of it were good for a laugh. All of this is mixed in with a vague suggestion that things were better in olden times before the food police took over and ruined everything.

The fact that it's in a Villon package with bits and pieces of other canon allusions thrown in for good measure doesn't change the pedestrian nature of the poem or validate or reinforce anything that the poem is saying, which is pretty much what everyone on earth has said at one time or another.

But yes, it's a demanding form and it's been well executed in formal terms, almost enviably so. But formal mastery isn't enough, of course, and the poem is more like whole wheat pasta than mostaccioli.

[Catherine Chandler]

Rachel Ray on steroids. Clever, yes, but a big "So?"

[Jim Burrows]

I don't see how this a parody, at least not in the way the others are. What's slightly disappointing about those is that they're not only copying form but filching sentence structure and pacing. The way that Rilke poem moves, it sets you up, esp. in the final pause, for the power of its last statement. Pacing, sentence structure, form, count for a lot. So a parody, if that's the word, is counting on your knowledge of the other poem and using its movement, too, as much as possible. This doesn't do that. I'm not even certain you can do that with a poem this long.

I like the richness of the description and the execution of the form. Maybe not the best, but one of them, for me.

[R. Nemo Hill]

I wouldn't say "clever", not by any means.
Oh please--tofu as the ultimate culinary punchline? Wow, what a never-been-done-before old age to new age swipe...

Yawn.

Sorry. Overall, what a batch of crappy poems.

Nemo

[Susan McLean]

I thought it was fun and nostalgic (a lot of lingering on the forbidden joys of the past and a clever twist in pointing out that at least wine is not forbidden now). The ballade form is demanding, so I cut it some slack on content just for the sheer joy of seeing the form pulled off so well. Yes, many of the points about eating then and now have been made before. But there is sensual pleasure in the enumeration of foods, and I liked the wordplay on "Santé."

Susan

[Gail White]

I have to admit, I love a ballade, and I think more of them should be writen, so I enjoyed this one.
I sometimes think our group comes down a bit hard. The hapless poet goes direct from:

"Oh look, my poem made the bake-off!"

to

"...but everyone thinks it's crap."

Talk about a letdown!

May also add that I read this through without thinking of Villon at all. He never ate high on the hog.

[Julie Steiner]

This transcends the Villon original in interesting ways. While Villon's ballade is entirely pessimistic and self-pitying--"Legendary beauties such as A,B,C, etc., just aren't around anymore, so hoping to see their like is pointless, dude"-- the narrator of this ballade does far more than just sit around and sigh about the vanished good old days.

At first blush, the litanies of long-lost foods may seem like nothing more than culinary porn, but the poem also has a narrative thread that develops over the course of the ballade, clinched by the surprising optimism of the envoi. And along the way, there are enjoyable little throwaway comments, like the cornicopia-like metrical substitution on "Bountiful lady" in S2L2, the thesaurus attack in S3L7, and the final pun on "Santé...latter days" (although this might be funnier if Latter Day Saints weren't teetotalers).

I can really see the narrator as an anxious young bride in the Seventies, attempting to satisfy her new husband in both "overt" and "more hidden" ways; this subtle association of sex with food foreshadows the reference to timor mortis--usually associated with sexual guilt--in connection with dietary cholesterol and heart disease. But, not to worry, love! We can still enjoy wine, which is supposedly heart-healthy! (And, not coincidentally, aphrodisiac.)

I saw the dribbling, drooling, and dripping food items as metaphors for abundance, just like King David's "my cup overflows"; all the more reason to appreciate the narrator's decision to wine instead of whine at the end.

My favorite poem so far. Was bummed to see Susan comment above, because I was sure this was hers.