This April sees the publication of A Feast for Santa Barbara: Poets Celebrate Food & Drink (Gunpowder Press), an anthology containing literary morsels from more than 100 Santa Barbara–area poets, celebrating the diverse farming, dining, cooking, and drinking in our community. The anthology is edited by George Yatchisin, who is Santa Barbara’s 11th Poet Laureate, the author of Feast Days and The First Night We Thought the World Would End, and is retired from a long career at UCSB.
Every Santa Barbara Poet Laureate typically takes on one or two big projects during their two-year tenure. Can you tell me about why you decided that A Feast for Santa Barbara: Poets Celebrate Food & Drink was going to be one of yours?
As I particularly hope readers of the Indy would know, I’ve been writing about food and drink for a long time. What they might not know is that in addition to hundreds of column inches of journalism, I have been writing poems about the topic for decades, too. After all, my chapbook back in 2016 was titled Feast Days (yep, the titles are intentionally close), and included poems about everything from ortolan to uni, celeriac to John Downey. Food and drink are such a perfect intersection of joy, culture, history, science, love, myth, mystery, memory. All the good things to write about.
I admire the fact that you wanted to reach out to the broader community to get their poetic input.
I really wanted to celebrate Santa Barbara’s food world with a more encompassing book than I could ever write on my own. Fortunately, Gunpowder Press was open to doing it as part of their Shoreline Voices series that has put out collections centered on places like the Botanic Garden and Lotusland. Now, A Feast for Santa Barbara gets to wrap its poetic arms around a much wider cross-section of the county, from strawberry fields to Grandma’s kitchen, from Brophy Bros. to the Hitching Post. And a lot of wine gets drunk along the way.
There are a lot of contributors in the book! It looks like you tried to include both well-known local poets as well as relative newcomers.
Definitely. As Poet Laureate, my job is to grow the brand. So, sure, all nine living SBPLs are in the book, but so are 6th graders and 95-year-olds and many people having their first poem published in a book. I can’t wait for all the readings and celebrations to bring this wonderfully artistic and diverse group of 117 writers together.
Having read through so many submissions on the topic, what commonalities did you find about how poets responded? Were you surprised by anything in particular?
I certainly cannot blame anyone, as I am obsessed, too, but people really love avocados. The Farmers’ Market is such a draw, it gets its own section of the book (alongside Libations, Location, Labor, Ritual, and Ingredients). As one would hope with a topic that tends to bring people together to break bread and to create community, there’s a lot of tenderness, often leavened with humor. But the poems are very much of this perilous time our country is in, too, so I’m glad many writers were willing to attest to that. Turns out poets aren’t big fans of ICE.
What would you say to potential readers of the book who aren’t necessarily great fans of poetry?
To be glib, I’d say this: Do you like to eat or drink? Then you’ll have no problem getting into this book! To be dangerously grand, I’ll turn to lines from the foreword for the book, written by Krista Harris, founding publisher of Edible Santa Barbara: “You read, you pause to think, and you savor. You step into someone else’s world, their memory, their senses. Their poem might give you permission to dream of the past or sigh with longing or admit your hunger for connection.”
So, food and drink direct us back out to the larger world in which we live?
Aren’t those all things we desperately need right now? Time to pause and think, to feel empathy. We ache for permission to dream, for connection. A Feast for Santa Barbara is a recipe for all these things.
Books are currently available for preorder at gunpowderpress.com/product/a-feast-for-santa-barbara.
