by Austin Segrest

It’s one thing to enjoy a predecessor’s writing, but it’s another to recite it aloud. The spoken word is physical embodiment of the written. We take on, and in, the language, the voice, the person. We channel them.

It’s perhaps another thing again to not only perform the words, but also what they’re instructing us to do—following their directions for a recipe, for example. This interaction further “solidifies” and “elevates” the predecessor’s presence, our communion with them.

Cherene Sherrard’s poem, “Wild Yeast,” from her new collection, Grimoire, begins with the idea of poetry, but moves quickly and incontrovertibly—by way of the mouth, of oral performance—to the kitchen, where she’s making a predecessor’s recipe.

At the start of the poem, the speaker’s son has asked what color Shakespeare is. She answers with Paul Lawrence Dunbar, rhyming the white bard with a Black one.

What color is Shakespeare?
To answer I read my son Dunbar.

They recite Dunbar’s great rondeau of Black double-consciousness, “We Wear the Mask”: “We wear the mask that grins and lies, / It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes…”

Next, they recite Dunbar’s dialect poem, “When Malindy sings.” Just as we hear the ghost of “common,” or hymn meter in Sherrard’s lines—

First, we recite “We Wear the Mask,”
then “When Malindy sings.”

—so the poet hears the ghost of Malinda Russel, the first known Black woman cookbook author. In particular, this line from Dunbar’s “Malindy” gives her/them “pause”:

f’om de kitchen to de big woods

It describes Malindy’s quasi-Orphic song carrying out of doors.

G’way an’ quit dat noise, Miss Lucy—
Put dat music book away;
What’s de use to keep on tryin’?
Ef you practise twell you ‘re gray,
You cain’t sta’t no notes a–flyin’
Lak de ones dat rants and rings
F’om de kitchen to be big woods
When Malindy sings.

Like the historical figure of Malinda Russel, Dunbar’s Malindy is a Black woman at work in the kitchen. As it happens, Sherrard has herself been in the kitchen, “cooking with Malinda,” “her haintly breath…citrus and clove.” In other words, the poet has been trying out some of the recipes in Russel’s cookbook.

Her hands, rough as wind within,
smooth as pears without, guide me
as I knead and read her receipts aloud.
Each line works its alchemy,
solidifies her shade, elevates
the timbre of her voice.

A glance back at the title confirms it: Sherrard is making a bread recipe (or “receipt,” as they used to say). Sourdough. Recited, like Dunbar’s poem, Russel’s recipe is likened, heightened to a kind of poetry in itself, each step a “line.” Just as, line-by-line, a good poem works its magic, or “alchemy,” on a reader, so the baker’s directions chemically transform ingredients, which in turn change the eater.

Malinda Russel’s “shade,” or spirit, comes to take on a physicality for, and through, Sherrard. They are Black women making bread and raising sons. Like the sourdough, the predecessor’s presence “solidifies” and “elevates” (rises)—which is to say, the unique “timbre of [Russel’s] voice” becomes more discernible. This communion is affirming for Sherrard—sustaining, like the bread that will come of it: “I knead and read her receipts aloud.”

So Sherrard shows us the ways in which “recite” and “receipt” rhyme.

The inevitable comparison of Malindas that follows does not reflect well on Dunbar.

[Russel] does not speak the broken tongue
of Paul’s folksy muse.
Penwomanship alone affirms
her education.

Russel’s “elevated” voice gains new/nuanced meaning. Though Dunbar’s speaker praises Malindy’s singing over all other sounds, human or animal, it cannot be said that he “elevates” her. On the contrary, he emphasizes that her genius is “simp[le]” and “humble.” Her skill is something you have to have “nachel,” the product of “o’gans” and “sence” that can’t be “edicated” (as we saw in the first stanza, he indirectly eschews book-learning).

But nothing reifies the supposedly intractable ignorance of his community like the artificial dialect he’s speaking in. “When Malindy sings” appears among Dunbar’s popular Lowly Lyrics, written in nonexistent “Plantation Negro dialect.” Wearing “the mask that grins and lies,” it’s a debasing performance of a white ideal for white patrons—that publishing “world,” which in “The Poet” Dunbar laments (and Sherrard craftily alludes to) only “turns to praise / A jingle in a broken tongue.”

Sherrard ends up calling Dunbar’s performance “lyric blasphemy.” His “blasphemy” rhymes—a foregrounded affront—with those earlier end-words of transformation and communion with Russel, “guide me” and “alchemy.” But in the same gesture—the same line—Sherrard “forgive[s]” Dunbar: on account of another of his poems, also about a Black woman in the kitchen.

Sherrard’s poem ends:

…Not until
the poet delivers Dinah’s arms,
buried elbow-deep in dough,
do I forgive his lyric blasphemy.

Dunbar’s “Dinah Kneading Dough” praises the unmatched loveliness of a Black woman kneading dough.

Brown arms buried elbow–deep
Their domestic rhythm keep,
As with steady sweep they go
Through the gently yielding dough.
Maids may vaunt their finer charms—
Naught to me like Dinah’s arms;
Girls may draw, or paint, or sew—
I love Dinah kneading dough.

Malindy’s problematic portrayal is redeemed—delivered—by Dinah’s earnest lyric couplets. With her own forearms in Russel’s dough, Sherrard feels truly seen.

I think it’s no accident that Sherrard condemns “Malindy” in pristine pentameter. She’d almost gone there in the afore-quoted “knead and read” line, but roughed it up instead with the “folksy” “receipt,” instead of “recipe.”

In “Wild Yeast,” Sherrard “delivers” the full person, the full recipe, rich with layers: a Black woman writing and singing; instructed and instructing; communing and critiquing. How much work her odd “delivers” does! As well as redemption (of the stereotype), it gestures toward childbirth—another labor, patriarchally beneath mention, that binds these women.

Though Socrates eschewed writing, for millennia in the west the “base” physicality of the spoken word was demeaned. The vulgate was vulgar; writing and literacy were (and still are) gatekept offices of “higher” beings. The Romanics pushed back, but in the process, fetishized oral culture and created the reifying stereotype of the illiterate “noble savage.”

“Wild Yeast” makes us think of all the binaries, all the hierarchical reinforcements that have kept cookbooks out of the temple of poetry. Never mind that no words, genius or otherwise, are getting written without food, without that someone or someones doing the cooking; never mind the cleaning, the childbearing and rearing.

These days I marvel at homemade loaves. Nor do I wonder anymore about Mom’s freezer back in the day, overflowing with bags of bread. I’ve taken to calling bread magic (Grimoire means a book of spells), and sometimes think that bread is the tenor, rather than the vehicle, of religion, of incarnation.

I’ve also taken to thinking of writing poems as being like cooking as much as anything: the dialectics and harmonics of ingredients, the cultural inflections, the timing, the presentation, the serving, the tasting, the filling. What is that failure to read one’s own poems aloud during composition more like than the failure to taste one’s own cooking?