Cooking With the Texas Poets Laureate

It should come as no surprise that poets are often exceptionally fine cooks, savoring food the way they savor words and at the same time recognizing that just as a gathering of words does not necessarily mean a good poem, neither does a mixture of ingredients necessarily mean a good recipe. In Cooking with the Texas Poets Laureate, the editors, all members of Dr. Paul Ruffin’s 2014 graduate Editing/Publishing class, solicited recipes and food-related poetry and prose from Texas Poet Laureates of this millennia. The result is a most unusual gathering of personalities equally comfortable with the spatula or the pen.


Eating Texas

It’s taken a long apprenticeship
to make waffles in the shape of Texas.
First there were mountains over Waco.
Then the Panhandle sank.

A few more false starts when
the Red River swamped Oklahoma
and the Rio Grande dripped into Mexico.
Now I can make perfect ones.

All I have to do is take care
to stop pouring the batter a little shy
of El Paso, Dalhart, and Texarkana.
For some reason, Brownsville needs more.

Otherwise, my grandchildren complain they
don’t have the tail of Texas to bite off.

ELIZABETH ETHREDGE, who lives in The Woodlands, Texas, is a CIED graduate student minoring in English at SHSU. Joanna Baker, Matthew Bennett, Reina Shay Broussard, Gary Horton, Julian Kindred, all in the English graduate program at SHSU, were members of Dr. Paul Ruffin’s Editing/Publishing Practicum (Spring 2014), which produced this book.