Conger Chowder!!

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Dear Everybody:

Today we continue our discovery of Pablo Neruda with a poem from the same series as yesterday’s tomato poem:

Ode To Conger Chowder
by Pablo Neruda

In the storm-tossed
Chilean
sea
lives the rosy conger,
giant eel
of snowy flesh.
And in Chilean
stewpots,
along the coast,
was born the chowder,
thick and succulent,
a boon to man.

[The rest of the poem has been removed because it’s almost certainly still in copyright. But I doubt you’ll have any trouble finding it on the Web.]



The above poem is, you will note, perilously close to being a recipe. Yes, of course. What recipes and poems have in common is that they are both the reduction of a complicated thing to the least number of words. Anything more and it would be wordy and flabby. Anything less and it wouldn’t work.

All best,
Michael

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