As Necessary As Bread: Some Brief Remarks about Home Economics and Poems

I often recall Mrs. Grumalski, my 7th grade home ec teacher, when I contemplate the necessity of writing and all art. Mrs. G was a holy roller of the rolling pin, a prophet of the gospel of homemade bread. Her devout fervor for home economics was leavened by a conviction of the incontrovertible necessity of the culinary art; an art she equated with the greatest poems, symphonies, and paintings. To the feeblest efforts-in-progress of the most talented future home chefs among us, she would regularly shout comparisons to completed masterpieces like Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante, and Van Gogh's Field of Wheat.

The aesthetic equality between cooking and all the other arts was certainly proved at my home, where my grandmother Helen had come to live with us after my father was killed, at age 39, by a drunk driver. Nana, whose formal education had stopped at the fourth grade, was one of the most intuitively creative and literate people I've ever known. And she could make every baked good known to humankind by hand, from scratch, using ingredients delivered to the mom-and pop fruit & veg from south-central Connecticut's family farms. Nana had tried to teach me to make bread at home for years, but these sessions had always ended with Nana in tears and Alix crumpled dejectedly at the kitchen table, staring down a leaden lump in a charred pan.

I thought home ec might be my chance to redeem the space I was taking up by being alive, and to train myself to do something not only useful, but necessary. So breadmaking day in home ec was going to be my footprint in volcanic ash. All was going according to plan until a rather bitter, sulphurous scent wandered through Room 218. At first I thought it was coming from some boy's oven, who probably thought he was being clever by sticking a Matchbox car in the middle of his bread dough. Then I thought it was coming from a car fire, surely burning out of control across the street. But of course, it was neither, and I stood in horrified shock as dark wisps of smoke emerged from my besieged oven. Before I could take a step toward the immolated loaf, Mrs. G made a dive for the fire extinguisher, threw open the oven and filled it to overflowing with white foam. Then came very loud shouting in my direction, and questions about my moral fiber as a young lady.

I must admit she was kind of right to blow up at me after the bread incident, coming as it did after the hollandaise sauce incident (industrial strength glue having been ordered from the local hardware store to separate whatever I'd made that wasn't hollandaise sauce from the linoleum floor), preceded by the French fry incident (ceiling tiles cost 49 cents each in those days and didn't come in a pattern to match the vegetable oil stains I'd created so the school had to buy a whole section of new ones), preceded by the sewing machine incident (which will go undescribed cause it still gives me the shivers, but suffice it to say this is where my fear of needles originates). After the fire department had made their dramatic entrance and exit from our room, and I had been properly mortified in front of classmates who never did end up speaking to me again, Mrs. G came over and gave me a permanent, laminated pass to the school library, to be used every time I thought for a millisecond about stepping foot into home ec again.

And that's how I came to spend most of my middle school life, and most of this life ever since, reading, and in particular, reading imaginative works. Before his death, my father, a writer, editor, and college English professor, had always read poems out loud to me even when I was only 4 or 5 years old, so it seemed completely natural and necessary to spend the bulk of each day with Cummings, Whitman, or Dickinson. When my concerted reading began, I sometimes couldn't understand all the words, but something was happening to me when I'd read poems. I got this strange feeling that I understood the recipe. That poetry was a world whose utensils and odors and textures I had some intuitive sense about.

As I got older and started doing things only because I didn't know any better that I shouldn't, I started to write poems. Poems felt very much like the thing I could make from scratch and have come out actually edible, so to speak, even if my first efforts really were half-baked. I am very happy to have found poems in the library when I should have been learning how to cook and sew, because if I hadn't, I really don't know if there would be anything I thought I could do with genuine meaning, with deep conviction in my life, and mostly, without the Fire Department having to be being called.

What is necessary to human life and culture is grounded in what we imbue with significance. After the devastation of 9/11, I was asked by students and colleagues alike why things like poetry, paintings, and symphonies still mattered. I said at the time, and still say, it's because they humanize us. That the myriad expressions of human creativity are metaphors for what is significant to us in the elemental circle of the soul. All endeavors of human creativity and connection, from Art to teaching to science to cabinet-making, are a necessary part of the antidote to the worldview that leads to alienation, terror, and destruction.

We must continue to honor the necessity of creativity, especially in the face of all the ways the imagination is challenged to survive the many little devastations of our own doubt, egoism, and lassitude. In an Antaeus interview with editor Daniel Halpern, the great Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert remarked about the work of the poet: “Each of us composes a part of the universe—an effort should be made to become a meaningful part of the whole .... To extract meaning is our primary task."

Whatever else poets and writers do with our lives and careers after acquisition of academic degrees, let us primarily endeavor to leave a legacy of making things matter.

[This was originally written for the Pre-Commencement Event at the MFA Graduation Ceremony at Sarah Lawrence College, 2002, but was not selected to be read. Alexandra Burack is grateful to Stanley Kunitz for his insights on this essay at the time it was being composed.]

©2002 by Alexandra Burack