Poem of the Week | February 01, 2016

This week we’re delighted to offer a poem from our new winter issue, 38.4. Sandra M. Gilbert has published eight collections of poetry, most recently Aftermath (2011) and among prose books Wrongful Death, Death’s Door, Rereading Women, and, in 2014, The Culinary Imagination: From Myth to Modernity. Eating Words: A Norton Anthology of Food Writing, coedited with Roger Porter, appeared in 2015. Gilbert is currently at work on a new collection of poems, Saturn’s Meal, and with Susan Gubar, she is coauthor of The Madwoman in the Attic and coeditor of The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, along with numerous other volumes: the two received the 2012 Award for Lifetime Achievement from the National Book Critics Circle.

 
Author’s note:

This poem is part of a series of ekphrastic/culinary poems–poems meditating on paintings of people eating or cooking–that were at least in part inspired by my recent book The Culinary Imagination: From Myth To Modernity (WW Norton, 2014). Needless to say, representations of Jesus and his disciples at the critical last supper, especially Da Vinci’s, are especially enthralling, & especially difficult to write about. I found some quotations from Da Vinci himself illuminating and even incorporated a few in the poem itself.