BlazeVox Is Thankful for Steve McCaffery & We're Thankful for BlazeVOX

It wouldn't be Thanksgiving without the ever-intrepid gourmand at the head of BlazeVOX, Geoffrey Gatz, presenting his Thanksgiving Menu Poem. As in year's past, Gatza invites a guest of honor and offers up a sumptuous spread of poetry published in the form of a conceptual meal. This year's guest is Buffalo's own Steve McCaffery. We'll set a conceptual place for you at the table with Gatza's introduction:

Hello and welcome to the 2017 Thanksgiving menu poem. This is the sixteenth incarnation of the Thanksgiving Menu-Poem! Our guest of honor is the wonderful Steve McCaffery. 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.

This project is a conceptual meal served for the thousands of friends 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.

This year our guest of honor is Steve McCaffery. This poem series represents a combination of sound and visual poetries as a tribute to the magnificent works he has created. This is his seventieth year and to celebrate this milestone mark in his life this year’s Thanksgiving menu is an extravagant affair. Since Steve was born in England, a traditional American Thanksgiving dinner would be a nice choice to celebrate but maybe not the best choice. Steve is very much a gourmand and since this feast is conceptual and our budget is imaginary I decided to make this an expensive, luxurious event. Included in this dinner are champagnes, caviar, fois gras, white truffles from Alba, jamón Ibérico, rare vintage wines, Armagnac and to top it all off we finish with a 50 year old whisky that retails for twenty five thousand dollars a bottle. I am sure you will agree that Steve deserves no less.   

I hope you enjoy this meal, the menu and the poem. Have a Happy Thanksgiving!

Rockets, Geoffrey

Rockets, indeed! Head to BlazeVOX for poetry with all the trimmings.