“Date? No; Put Pasta on my Plate”
I twirl the slender noodles around my fork
Deep red marinara
mixed with spicy herbs
My date talks on
I see his lips moving
but it’s the pasta that I focus on
My fork pierces my plump meatballs
into little chunks
Perfect bite-sized brownish chunks
They are
juicy
as I cut
My date asks me what I’m thinking
I mean to say, “nothing”
but “noodles” comes out
He grows upset that I hadn’t listened
He stands and prepares to leave
I panic and spout
“I skipped lunch for you
I exercised for you
I’ve been waiting for you
I’ve dreamt of you”
And just like a dream,
the date fades away
and I can let the words
meant for my pasta
sink into the gravy
I should
run and lie to him
that I listened
all along
But I can’t risk the waiter whisking my pasta away
The urge is strong but my hunger is stronger
I stay and twirl
I eat and think
I think I messed up a date
Just to satiate my palate
I chose pasta over a guy
easily ranking a number
eight
I should have said “Here, have my pasta as a symbol
of my love”
But I reason, that’s
only something
a married couple does
But instead I eat and sip my drink
As I ponder my priorities
The date left me
with a growing cold pasta plate
My hunger subsides
I finished my plate
And then I think,
“It was worth
the date”
And think of my missed lunch,
“And the wait”
The particular poem of Jennifer Barone’s that is my favorite is “You’ve Ruined My Pasta” from her collection of poems in Saporoso. This poem is about a man/woman that grows angry at a person close to them for not cooking his/her dinner al dente, as Italians like to say. The narrator is angry with the loved one and yet, as the poem draws to a close, the narrator slowly realizes that he/she should not have lashed out at his/her loved one and feels regret for not having him/her there because despite the pasta being bad, his/her company would have made it better. Jennifer Barone’s poem is the muse for my own. In my poem, “Date? No; Put Pasta on my Plate,” I try to borrow a bit of the tone from Barone’s poem and add a twist at the end.
Poetry has the power to draw tears, thoughts, and laughs from people. The laughs Barone’s poem drew from me and the kinship to her that I felt are what ultimately drew me to her poem. Her piece does more than just make me laugh; it makes me relate. I share her passion and zest for noodles/pasta. I am so passionate about pasta that I often tell my friends, “The day I choose a guy over pasta is the day I’ll know I love him” because that means my passion for him rivals my passion for pasta, which says a lot. A list of my priorities should illustrate my love for pasta just perfectly: first would be family, and second would be either food/pasta or friends, but those two really war for second place if I’m being honest. I am like a child with ice-cream when I have a plate or bowl of pasta, especially if its lemon alfredo, pesto, cacio pepe, or spaghetti and meatballs—the quadruple threat to my heart. My overwhelming love for pasta is similar to Jennifer Barone’s narrator in that I sometimes make rash decisions based on food. Just as the narrator of her poem makes a fuss over messed up pasta, I too have fallen prey to my blinding love for pasta, forgetting how much more important maintaining relationships is to pasta. That poorly made pasta dish I am frustrated over will pass from my life just as it will pass through my digestive system, but family and friends however are not a fleeting matter. I sometimes think more with my stomach than I do my mind though, so at times I forget that. In my interpretation of Barone’s poem, the narrator lets his/her love for pasta overcome his/her love for the friend or partner. I, sadly and humorously, felt like I was reliving a memory with this poem—that anger and that passion all for pasta, and then that regret on how I behaved. Both Italians and French are widely known for their passion and quick tempers and though I am proud of my ancestry and culture, I unfortunately have both the Italian and French’s quick temper.An Italian and French person’s temper is like a hot flash on a stove—it burns, it sears, and as fast as it appears, it is gone. Combine an Italian and French person’s quick temper with a great love for food and you got a messy situation when a dish doesn’t come out right. Just as the narrator makes the mistake of prizing pasta over people, just as she/he does with his/her friend or partner, I have also made the same mistake. The narrator of Barone’s poem regrets seething at his/her friend or partner by the end of the poem, realizing an epiphany that his/her loved ones matter more than a messed-up pasta dish and they could have made it better by just being there as company. While Barone opted for her narrator to have this grand epiphany, I decided to end my poem on a twist. Rather than my narrator reaching this ultimate enlightenment, she continues to love her pasta and ultimately chooses food over a good-looking guy, ranking an eight on the zero-to-ten scale. Needless to say, my narrator shows some regret as evident with her constant “should have” statements, but she ultimately does not regret finishing her pasta and continues to be happy with the dish, not truly realizing her lesson—that people matter more than food. This twist was not just for comedic value. Another reason was because it was to show that, realistically, people don’t always realize their mistakes. Also, the spaghetti is just so good that she cannot bear to leave it—this really shows the strong pull food can have over people. It is no coincidence that people say food is the way to a man’s heart—it’s also the way to a woman’s heart, and can sometimes captivate it so much that the woman may realize she loves the food better than the man! Ironically, throughout the semester we have learned that pasta serves a social purpose by bringing people together, but in my poem, it tore the woman and the man apart.
Jennifer Barone is an Italian-American that grew up in Brooklyn, New York. Italians might have left Italy for hopes of a better life, as illustrated in Angelina Porcarelli’s Immigrant Story, but one thing they brought with them was pasta. It is hard to get settled and find a job in a foreign country, but pasta provides affordable food in a large quantity, making it the more economical choice as well as giving an Italian some comfort in reminding them of home when in a foreign land. This pasta was then passed down through generations often, hence the creation of Barone’s book which completely revolves around pasta.
Perhaps, partly, why I felt such a kinship with Jennifer Barone is that I, too, am an Italian-American and my family practically lives for pasta. We have a spaghetti and meatball recipe that has traveled through our family for generations since my ancestors moved to the United States, though they did not bring this recipe from Italy, needless to say.
Though DNA is microscopic and invisible to the human eye, some cultural DNA shows itself in Barone’s and my own poems. In stanza six of “You’ve Ruined My Pasta,” for instance, Barone writes, “What would my ancestors say? A tradition of pasta; Cooked with pride; Savored with loved ones; Ignored.” She illustrates how pasta is part of her heritage, being a long carried on tradition and the pride that Italians put into making pasta, just as Chef Locatelli remarked on how Italians put pride in something as routine as cooking in The Art of The Feast: Italy Unpacked. At the end of stanza one in my own poem, “Date? No; Put Pasta on my Plate,” I write “but it’s the pasta I focus on” when talking about the date—my veins are practically noodles because pasta is such a large part of my Italian DNA, making it terribly hard for myself to focus on anything else if pasta’s on the table. The main topic of DNA mainly revolves around genes, but I do think there is such a thing as cultural DNA–culture transferring from generation to generation in a family. Mine and Jennifer Barone’s carry some strong Italian cultural DNA it would seem, despite not being immersed in Italy.
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Works Cited
Barone, Jennifer, and Lam Khong. 2017. Saporoso: Poems of Italian Food & Love. Place of publication not identified: Feather Press.
KakaTonyLa. 2013. BBC – Italy Unpacked: The Art of the Feast. YouTube. YouTube. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BW9-b3J3-DY, accessed July 30, 2019.
Poets.org. Academy of American Poets. https://poets.org/text/great-anthologies-food-poems, accessed July 29, 2019.