Culinary Pantoum, by David Floyd with art and sound by Timothy May

In the poem, Culinary Pantoum, by David Floyd, the speaker, a reminiscing chef, describes a hazy scene of jaded cooks and forgotten promises. The simple Flash artwork created to emphasize the old style of poetry brings attention to the timelessness of the message without stealing any thought from the actual poetry.  The interaction between the visual art and the poetry is effective. Although the story could benefit from more detailed visual interpretation, the simplicity lends something unique to the story as well. The speaker begins by describing the lifestyle of excess he does not want and then continues to detail how he conformed to this jaded lifestyle surrounding him anyway. Finally, the speaker self-analyzes this contrast, revealing to himself and the audience that something more is necessary to live than the gluttonous lifestyle of a swinish chef. This contrast should be evident through the relation between the artwork and the poetry.


In the first stanza, Floyd depicts a dreamy sequence that he relates to a trance. The speaker, a chef, is described like an old, weathered man in the poem. The poetry conveys a message of mourning and regret about a life wasted on meaningless indulgences. By using selected repetition of lines in the poem, Floyd emphasizes the monotony of the speaker's life.  This style of poetry is called pantoum, which uses repetition of certain lines in a poem, but usually altering their form or meaning. For example, the line, “As natural as salt in saltimbocca,” is repeated twice between two stanzas. In one circumstance it advertises simplicity and expectedness where in the second situation it had a sarcastic tone because it was followed by a statement about the promise of wine in grapes. This repetition is paralleled by the repeated themes of regret and depression in the artwork that accompanies the poem that have only slight changes to show the similarity of different circumstances in the chef’s life.


In the following stanzas, Floyd continues to use imagery to create a depressing scene which the artist captures well with the use of muted and cool colors. “Fat, manic chefs,” surround the speaker, and images like this demonstrate the inevitability of the speaker’s destiny in life. The artist enhances the negative imagery of fate and inescapability with the format for advancing through the poem. The reader uses a single button to advance to another, pre-determined part of the poem, having only superficial control of what is happening. This effectively places the reader in the same situation and circumstances as the speaker in the poem, allowing the reader to draw a personal connection to the feeling of helplessness in the poem.


Floyd uses the qualities of pantoum to his advantage in this poem, allowing the poem to fit together cohesively and aid in transitions from one stanza to the next. The most important part about using the pantoum form is the contrast in significance between the same or similar lines in different places in the poem. Following the appropriate structure guidelines, the first line of the first stanza, “I lived awake but half-asleep,” is repeated for the final line of the final stanza. However, by the end of the poem, the line takes on a different meaning. When used in the first stanza, context suggests to the reader that the reader “lay” half-awake and did not “live” half-awake. By the final stanza, the speaker has confirmed that he has been living half-awake, creating a deeper, more sinister message to the story.


The artist's work that accompanies the poetry echoes the simplicity of the entire work with the use of an unobtrusive, slightly morphing picture in the top left corner of the screen. This simplicity includes the quaint notion of leading an innocent and wholesome life, which the speaker shows regret for not doing. Instead, the bittersweet lifestyle of extreme pleasure and extreme pain is the destiny for the speaker. The predetermined arrangement of the words and lines from the form of poetry show this predetermination of the speaker's life. Although the speaker wished to change his life from the normal path of his peers, he looks back with regret on how his life followed the same pattern anyway.


Overall, the interaction between the visual art and the poetry is effective. Although the story could benefit from more detailed visual interpretation, the simplicity lends something unique to the story as well. Floyd uses old, effective poetic techniques like selected repetition of lines in the pantoum form to emphasize monotony, where the visual art uses similar cues to show the basic pattern of the life set out for the chefs and everyone else alike.

Works Cited

Born Magazine. 5 April 2009. Culinary Pantoum – by David Floyd. 7 April 2009.                                                                   <http://www.bornmagazine.org/projects/culinary_pantoum/>