The Cooking Pot

At eighteen years old – a young eighteen, according to her Dad – Christine was terrified of university. She hated the idea of finding her place in a new social order when she’d only just got to grips with sixth form college. Her parents' reassurances didn't help, not until her mother bought the pot.

On the day, Christine's parents helped her carry her things into the halls - a CD player, suitcase full of clothes, and the books from the reading list - along with the huge pot. After her parents left, she did what her mother had told her. She took the pot, her knives and some ingredients into the kitchen and started cooking.

All through school, Christine’s Mum had cooked – occasionally her Dad – and she had been freed up to study. In the long summer holidays, she finally learned for herself. Her Mum taught her some meals, mostly without meat, as there would be vegetarians in the halls of residence, and she might make friends with them too.

Every new student came into the kitchen to claim a cupboard, and they all admired the chilli. Once they'd unpacked the rest of their things they came back. Someone bought beers, someone else a three-litre bottle of cider.

That pot was on for more than 24 hours, with new ingredients regularly added. Occasionally people shared opinions about things the dish needed - some dark chocolate, a shot of coffee, cinnamon - and took over for a time. Christine went to bed at three on the Saturday night and woke to find the kitchen and the pot still full, with the overnight crew slowly being replaced by people fighting off hangovers. Everyone knew who she was.

Christine had gone to Uni to study English, since that was the subject she was best at. That first weekend, she knew what she wanted to do with her life. She dropped out in the spring, in favour of her kitchen jobs. Cooking had become everything to her.

Background

This piece very much breaks the rule of "show don't tell", a fundamental law in creative writing classes (although a little less fundamental than 'never use adverbs'). The danger with that, as my friend Rosy says, is that it's easy for microfictions to be descriptions of stories, rather than the stories themselves. Hopefully I’ve avoided that pitfall here.

Christine's arrival at university went much more smoothly than mine. I'm writing a lot of notes about food and my relationship to it, particularly in the light of reading Chris van Tulleken's Ultra-Processed People. For me, this connects with Immediatism, Hakim Bey's book about mediation and how important it is to resist capital inserting itself into our lives. Bey wrote, "The basic structure of immediatism is a banquet or picnic." In an age where the spectacle of the Internet makes it easy to cut ourselves off, the act of sharing food with people is more important than ever.

Announcements

• Some tickets are still available for Rosy Carrick’s Poetry Gang-Bang in Brighton - I’m doing a very short set on the Thursday (May 22nd), along with nine other performers.

• We’re in the last week of the kickstarter for Peakrill Press’s A Moorland Notebook, with only a few hundred pounds to go. If you’re interested in hiking, check this out.

• I loved the most recent episode of echologorrhea, Content Warning Because This is About Sex Tropes Good and Bad. It’s basically what I want from podcasts - intelligent conversation from engaging people. This one made me think about Blue Velvet and zombie apocalypses in new ways. And I fucking love the intro: “This podcast is rough around the edges for a simple reason that we are amateurs. We make this in the spirit of samizdat because art is not a commodity; philosophy is not pointless; religion is not a waste of time. Enjoy the crunch”. I’ll write more about echologorrhea in time but, for now, check them out.

Recommendations

Thomas Sharp is an inspirational figure. He organised the world's largest faery ring and puts on the Abyssmas variety shows. In 2019, he decided to become a poet and set about it with passion. His work is produced in short print runs of beautiful editions which he then gives away for free, (including postage to anywhere in the world). His most recent book is Black Ribbon, which he describes as a 'symbolist collection'

In a recent substack post, Thomas wrote about the logic for selling his book for free, talking about how being a poet often involves

submitting your work through a series of administrative online forms to poetry magazines (generally subscribed to only by other poets) before approaching a small, tweely-named publisher hoping that they will print your poems in a cheap paperback and throw you a launch party where you share your mysterious divine faculty in front of that infinite symbol of weary commerce – a terribly-designed pull-up banner

This is a contrast to what Sharp sees as the divine. nature of poetry. Rejecting all this, Sharp has chosen to work as his own patron:

Meaning, whenever I lose hefty amounts of cash I don’t really have on gorgeous cloth coverings, thick stock, black foiling and extortionate international postage … I find that reciprocal magickal things start to happen in my life.

This is similar to my approach to writing. Most of my projects lose a little money, and I'm happy with that. For me, writing is about communication and building networks. Maybe self-patronage is being a dilettante - but then I know that I get more freedom with my work through not having to pander to gatekeepers. I don't want to make it less weird to get it published in literary zines that nobody reads.

if one’s best writing is straight from a divine source (and that only happens when your ego steps aside) then one must let it flow into the world as easily as possible. And seeing as buying poetry books is very very very low on the list of things people will ever buy, FREE is the logical price point.

I've spent a few hundred works talking about Sharp's distribution rather than his work¹. I loved the poems in Black Ribbon, and some in particular haunt me. The rich language, with precious metals and touches of Victoriana, makes me think of childhood. I love the neologisms (like roofslope or doomshanty) and the echoes between the poems. There is a striking image of an archivist with cancer, "comforting maps swapped for clinic parking permits." A section of Someone triggered a whole cascade of thoughts that I want to put in a story.

A few of the poems have been published at the end of Thomas's substack emails: Sphinx, The Green Language (another favourite) and The Peacock Feather Masque. The initial print run of Black Ribbon was all given away, but a new (paid) one has been set up but a new one is now available for £10 from Thomas’s shop or free if you message directly. You can also read about Thomas's latest projects in his recent post, A Far Field Full of Folk.

The Internet offered us new ways to build creative communities and distribution. It's good to see people taking advantage of this.

1. Although I think the two things are more closely coupled than a lot of people realise. My long-paused PhD is about how the Internet’s speed disrupts literature. For one example, the beats would not have happened without the social and postal networks that structured their work.