Blaise Cendrars' "Menus"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 26 November 2024

⏱️ 9 minutes

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Summary

Sometimes a list is much more than a list. Happy reading.

Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961) was the pseudonym of Frédéric Sauser, the Swiss son of a French Anabaptist father and a Scottish mother. As a young man he traveled widely, from St. Petersburg to New York and beyond, and these wanderings proved the inspiration of much of his later poetry and prose. Settled in Paris in 1912, Cendrars published two long poems, “Easter in New York” and “The Transsiberian,” which made him a major figure in the poetic avant-garde. At the outset of World War I, he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion, losing an arm in the battle of the Marnes. A prolific poet, Cendrars was also an exceptional novelist, the author of Moravagine, Gold, Rhum, and The Confessions of Dan Yack, among many other books.

-bio via New York Review of Books

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Tuesday, November 26th, 2004. Today's poem is by the Swiss-born Frenchman, Frederick Louis Saucier, better known as Blaise Chandraars. And it's called menus. And while I have a complicated relationship with
0:25.2	modernist poetry, I do have a particular affection for this poem. We have featured it on the show
0:31.1	before. But anytime I think about food poetry, this poem comes to mind. This version is translated from the French by
0:40.3	Ron Padgett. I'll read it once, discuss it briefly, and then read it one more time.
0:46.6	Menus
0:47.0	1
0:49.4	Truffled Green Turtle Liver, Lobster Mexican, Florida Fheasant, iguana with Caribbean sauce, gumbo and palmetto.
1:00.0	2. Red River salmon, Canadian bear ham, roast beef from the meadows of Minnesota, smoked eel, San Francisco tomatoes, pale ale, and California wine.
1:14.5	3. Winnipeg salmon, Scottish leg of lamb, royal Canadian apples, old French wines.
1:23.9	4. Concal oysters, lobster salad, celery hearts, French snails, vanilla and sugar, Kentucky
1:32.1	fried chicken, desserts, coffee, Canadian club whiskey. 5. Pickled shark fins, stillborn dog and honey,
1:43.4	rice wine with violets, cream of silkworm cocoon, salted earthworms
1:49.2	and kawa liqueur, seaweed jam. Six. Canned beef from Chicago and German delicatessen, crayfish,
2:00.0	pineapples, guavas, loquots, coconuts, mangoes, custard apple, baked breadfruit.
2:06.8	7. Turtle soup, fried oysters, truffled bear paws, lobster Java.
2:15.0	8. River crab and pimento stew.
2:19.1	Suckling pig ringed with fried bananas.
2:22.2	Hedgehog Ravansara.
2:24.3	Fruit.
2:27.3	I mentioned in an episode last week that I love poems that are essentially just lists.
2:34.1	And this is one of my all-time favorites because this is... I love poems that are essentially just lists.
2:43.6	And this is one of my all-time favorites because this list or series of short lists is so evocative.
	...

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