'One Hundred Megawatts of Butter': A Thanksgiving Menu Poem Courtesy of BlazeVOX

For this year's Thanksgiving Menu Poem, poet, publisher, and professional chef Geoffrey Gatza generously celebrates Elizabeth Alexander. As Gatza notes at BlazeVOX, the TMP has been going strong for 15 years. For a little background, Gatza explains: "This series began in 2002 with a Menu-Poem to honor Charles Bernstein, and since then this series engages Thanksgiving as the basis to celebrate poetry, poets and the poetry community. Being a trained professional chef I have blended my love of food and poetry into a book-length work as a feast of words to bring everyone a tiny bit closer together." More on the meal:

This project is a conceptual meal served for the thousands of friend I would love to have over to our home on Thanksgiving Day. Since it is unavoidably impossible to even consider doing such a thing in real life, I have designed a menu of foodstuffs that reflect upon the guest of honor as a person, a poet and their poetry. These works directly respond to our surrounding environment and uses everyday experiences as a starting point. Often these are framed instances that would go unnoticed in their original context. With a conceptual approach, this menu-poem tries to increase the dynamic between audience and author by objectifying emotions and investigating the duality that develops through different interpretations.

Gatza continues on to introduce this year's guest of honor, Elizabeth Alexander:

It is my great pleasure to host Elizabeth Alexander as this year’s Guest of Honor. As one of America’s premier poets it was a very easy choice to make. Her accomplishments are too numerous to mention here, but briefly I would like to draw your attention to a few of her many accolades. Currently Professor Alexander is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she was a finalist for the politer prize for her 2005 book, American Sublime and her poem “Praise Song for the Day” was commissioned for the inauguration of President Barack Obama in 2009. Her work has been recognized with numerous awards; most recently she was presented the prestigious Schomburg Medal, awarded by the New York Public Library and Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture on the Center’s 90th anniversary. Dr. Alexander is also an influential voice in the Cave Canem poetry workshop, a community she helped to foster for 20 years. She has been a mentor, advocate and friend to many poets, many of whom have gone on to the national stage such as Kevin Young, Natasha Trethewey, Tracy K. Smith, Evie Shockley, and Terrance Hayes.

Head over to BlazeVOX to read on and celebrate. Happy Thanksgiving—Rockets!!