Hello and welcome to the 2023 Thanksgiving Menu-Poem. This is the twenty-second incarnation of the Thanksgiving Menu-Poem! This series began in 2002 with a Menu-Poem to honor Charles Bernstein, and since then this series engages Thanksgiving as the basis to celebrate poetry, poets, and the poetry community. Being a trained professional chef, I have blended my love of food and poetry into a book-length work as a feast of words and art to bring everyone a tiny bit closer together.

This project is a conceptual meal served for the thousands of friends I would love to have over to our home on Thanksgiving Day. Since it is unavoidably impossible to even consider doing such a thing in real life, I have designed a menu of foodstuffs that reflect upon the guest of honor as a person, a poet and their poetry. These works directly respond to our surrounding environment and use everyday experiences as a starting point. Often these are framed instances that would go unnoticed in their original context. With a conceptual approach, this menu-poem tries to increase the dynamic between audience and author by objectifying emotions and investigating the duality that develops through different interpretations.

Rockets, Geoffrey