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Dear HIart perusers, Elisavietta Ritchie is a poet warm and prolific who lives currently in Maryland. Through Tia Ballantine's listserv of daily poetry I became aquainted with her work. Through a correspondence I got a whole bunch of stuff from her including a biblio/bio which I found factual but uninformative of Elisavietta the poet whose messages and poems I so enjoyed and resonated with. So with some cajoling she's given us a small autobiographical introduction and you shall find it below along with her selection of poems for eating. Enjoy the meal. Alan Young |
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RECIPE: ONE ARTICHOKE --Elisavietta Ritchie |
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| Heidegger at the Breakfast Table The way he goes at the bread! A knife that might have slaughtered pigs hacks slabs of pallid cheese. A peasant’s shirt to show off his roots, thick boots he should have left on the stoop. Mud enough outside. He insisted we visit his mountain rather than himself descend to our accessible plain. Now he won’t let us eat in peace. He demands we think about thinking – we think about breakfast. He questions our human existence as if we didn’t know we’re alive, just out of breath being at his altitude. We’re well aware of the limits to life so why waste time on insoluble problems? That’s what alienates us from dumb conundrums. Better he lead us back through the woods, point out a safe trail down that avalanched slope, instruct how to circumvent wolves. Yet…First, let’s pick just a few of those huge raspberries ripe on his briars… Something is better than nothing at all. --Elisavietta Ritchie |
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The Roots and Fruits of My Oeuvre Every locale, every adventure, encounter, fish or fruit or vegetable, informs my work. The entire natural world, and individuals, and the evils of the world including wars, all inspire. Much of my writing of course derives from my heritage. First, the Russian world of my father and of his mother my babushka, that world of émigré “white” Russians in a permanent exile, and the concerns for those who could not leave the USSR except, a few fortunate souls though with great difficulty. I soon expanded this concern farther to embrace dissidents not only from Slavic nations, but also from many lands—the Philippines, Korea, Bulgaria, Poland, Indonesia, China, etc. etc. And dissidents tend to be poets, writers, artists and musicians, which forms a natural bridge. All their histories, national and personal, excite me. Then there is the America of my mother, her New England heritage and schooling nonetheless rooted in Kansas City, Missouri, which she left as soon as she could. She returned to bear me there but whisked me away age ten days old. It was she who sent me to the Ambler School for Horticulture one summer; there I learned how to kill and pluck a chicken (which of course made a poem). My mother had studied at the Sorbonne, where I was to go 25 years later—and boarded on the same street where coincidentally my Russian babushka had boarded 50 years before me. And in World War Two, my father helped to “liberate” Paris, and in 19950-51, my parents lived there. They all already spoke perfect French, the king’s English, learned Spanish and by age 60, my father had a dozen languages, my mother mainly English and French but had picked up some Russian and Spanish. My Babushka who lived with us (but did not cook), my American Grandma who visited (but had never cooked either), and my Russian-born father and American mother, all encouraged my reading widely and my writing. Naturally they have been and continue to be subjects. My parents’ house was always full of guests from all over the world: relatives, friends and even strangers. (This pattern has repeated itself in my own households.) So this formed a natural cauldron for my interest in the world, and international affairs, and human beings of all shades and beliefs. So while a Pan-European cuisine remains the basis of many meals, these are many other influences. My parents loved the Far East, were married in the Philippines, returned via China and India and Europe to the USA. I too have lived in Japan age 19, in Malaysia with a first husband, in Australia with a second. In between, USIA has sent me all over as a “Visiting American Poet.” So of course I cannot live without ginger and garlic, curry and teriyaki sauce, cilantro and basil. Vietnamese and Thai cooking are my favorites, or were until I lived in Malaysia with its variegated cuisine. Intermittently since 1950 we have lived in Washington DC, and in Southern Maryland, on the briny Patuxent River, which empties into the Chesapeake Bay just 4 miles down river. Look at a map. This rural riverine area, long the domain of watermen and tobacco farmers and to some extent an airbase, in the last decade as new people have moved in, is now developing too much. This is not the spectacular ocean such as you have, but the wetlands and rivers and bays leading to the ocean. I have always loved oceans and they do wash over much of my work, be they the South China Sea, the Mediterranean or the Baltic, or the mightier Pacific or Atlantic. Foundations and rooms of all three houses where we have lived part-time along the Patuxent were 100-years old with somewhat newer additions. For over a decade we rented the old wharf house of a historic plantation on the southwestern shore. When the owner reclaimed it, we rented a grand and dilapidated farmhouse until Clyde became the NY Times correspondent covering all Canada for five and a half years, and soon after that, Australia for a year. Now we own a modest house a few yards from the cove and the Patuxent River. We have transplanted the Jerusalem artichoke tubers from one garden to another. For years we lived off the sea—fish, eels, shellfish—five out of seven days a week. Now alas I’m allergic to them. So although we are by choice mostly vegetarian, now the protein a couple of times a week is poultry or lamb. The best produce comes either from our garden or produce stands, preferably organic. My earliest work: My Babushka, transcribed poems I spoke or scribbled at age three. My first poem I wrote was on the ferry to Nantucket Island age six: Seagull, seagull, two by four, Eating garbage off the floor. That poem may foreshadow the tugs between lofty and earthy throughout my life, what the French philosopher Henri Bergson termed “La lutte entre la vie spirituelle et la vie quotidienne.” Which is much of my whole life. An example: I was heading off to a dazzling week of poetry readings throughout Ohio-Illinois-Indiana when my first book Tightening The Circle Over Eel Country won the 1974-75 Great Lakes Colleges Association's "New Writer's Award" for First Book of Poetry” (in the days when there were only three prizes in the whole continent which a poet could win—now there are 100+) so this was big indeed. But before the waiting taxi could take me to the airport, I had to put out the garbage. Upon return, I had to pick up more garbage the dog had spilled. One of my first published stories, a tiny one in a tiny mag, concerned the garbage can spilled in the street. Since no one in my immediate nuclear family was much interested in my writing, I presented that copy to the garbage collectors—who turned out to be book lovers. “Garlic for Vampires,” a prose piece the Washington Post bought some years ago, led circuitously to my being commissioned to compile my ALPHABET OF EATING POEMS. Aris Books in San Francisco wanted to add it to their line of cookbooks. At the last minute Simon Schuster bought Aris, and nixed the idea of cookbooks. I gave up. Perhaps too early, and someday if someone asks, I should resurrect, rewrite and flog it. All areas and foods appear in my stories, poems, “creative nonfiction,” throughout some 150 pieces the Christian Science Monitor published in the 1970’s-1990s. I am not a Christian Scientist and much of my work is too dark and dangerous for them, but finds a home in the small press world and anthologies. But sometimes it turns up in other publications. My friend Lynn Visson created the Russian Heritage Cookbook, inviting friends to send recipes. I seldom use or follow exactly a recipe, so I had to invent one for lentil soup—which soon had a whole story about how everyone contributed to it. She published a poem about “My Father’s Vishnevka,” about our home brews. Most recently I wrote for some mainline publication “Marmalade at Midnight:” how as a little girl I surprised my mother with my homemade concoction—but used up all the oranges and entire sugar ration. No idea was pectin was and would not have found any in her larder anyway. And another on the skate fish my 13-year old brought home from the South China Sea… Of course I have a tale about our recent cherry tree, and its origins in a lover’s seed, a pit tossed over the balcony years ago, though I’m not sure which one….And poems from Switzerland at 18 stealing cherries with a young med student from Missouri…A young Swedish poet-philosopher taught me to carry chocolate bars on mountain hikes…Loves with whom I’ve gathered berries since…Loves with whom I drank coffee with ice cream or whipped cream…in bed and out. As for mangos, artichokes—Enough. --Elisavietta Ritchie |
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Original poetry with strong imagery; poems of cultural flux and interactions; personal translation of favorite works from the world's verse---these can be submitted at alyguy@hotmail.com. As can commentary on poem eating. Alan Young is a Big Island caterer and literary enthusiast. He describes himself as "an art loving, food gobbling caterer with catholic literary delusions that I'm willing to inflict on an unsuspecting public." |
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