Zack Dicks
Cooking Breakfast With the News On
I juggled an egg, flat as the sun
dripping through oil mist
as a spilt ray from clouds
The kitchen spat at me
as the garden outside
I blistered on both sides
Like a cheap sausage
from an open window
I tossed the dripping
To argue on concrete
settle and clog drain
my arteries hard
as brittle thunder
pulped up by cold wind
About the poem
I was asked to explain this poem, this makes me feel uncomfortable. I don’t like to explain a poem as that implies I need to justify it.
Instead I’ll look at some themes for further investigation and enable the reader to decide what to examine should they choose.
The poem Cooking Breakfast With the News On has a register of language associated, unsurprisingly, with food preparation. This is to activate schemas in the readers mind of the domestic kitchen but I wanted to keep it playful too
I juggled an egg...
This gave a sense of movement and by saying
...flat as the sun
it brought to mind a child’s drawing and gives a sense of the frying pan without explicitly saying it.
The purpose of the poem was to create, very quickly, these kinds of connections (quick mental images), to drip feed in cue words to spark a readers memory.
The second stanza I wanted to immediately change the tone. The first was to set the scene and the second was to determine mood.
The kitchen spat at me
As if the kitchen was now possessed by some malevolent spirit. Inside and outside the kitchen, heat is implied through blistering, but equally it could be cold outside and just hot inside.
Like a cheap sausage
Is used again to go back to being less serious in terms of tone. Cheap sausages contain a lot of water and are known to pop or bang as a reaction to pressure through heat. This enables the reader to catch the mood at listening to the news, what is being cooked (possibly) and the physical reaction to hearing the news in a very select set of words. The radio going out with pan fat.
To argue on concrete
Leaving the voice of the poem stressed to have hear bad news and using negation to emphasise it isn’t a positive after image. Arteries being hard are associated with heart disease and brittle thunder connects to the inside works and possible the outside world of rain outside. A clash of hot and cold.
my arteries hard as brittle thunder
In summary, there is a lot going on in so few words and the poem was written to capture 90 seconds and one person’s response to the news. No radios were harmed in the construction of the poem.
Bio
‘Z. D. Dicks holds an MA in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of Gloucestershire.
He often works with other poets locally and nationally to create events and to work on poetry projects.
In 2016 he founded the Gloucestershire Poetry Society and the Gloucester Poetry Festival.
He has had his work accepted by many publications including Ink, Sweat and Tears, Sarasvati, Obsessed with Pipework, Three Drops from a Cauldron, Words from the Wild, Outlaw Poetry, Fresh Air Poetry, I am not a silent poet, As it Ought to Be, Nymphs, and Stride (plus many more and anthologies).
He currently has two collections ‘Malcontent’ and ‘Intimate Nature’ with Black Eyes publishing (2019) and one ‘Vexed’ with Hedgehog Poetry Press (2020).
Dicks has a keen interest in imagistic poetry and his work has been described ‘muscular language’ by Helen Ivory and has himself been described as ‘a gothic Seamus Heaney’ by Anna Saunders.
In 2019 he was appointed Gloucestershire Poet Laureate and works in various settings to promote poetry.’
www.facebook.com/TheGloucestershirePoetLaureate
Twitter.com: @ZiggyPoet
