Poet’s Corner: “Ordinary Sugar” by Amanda Gunn

by Mikaela Brewer ​for The 44 North, Senior Editor

Amanda Gunn, “Ordinary Sugar” from Things I Didn’t Do with This Body. Copyright © 2023 by Amanda Gunn.

Artwork by Logan Brewer

Note: This poem is not in the public domain! Please use the link above to read it. 

My first encounter with Amanda Gunn’s “Ordinary Sugar” was through Poetry Unbound with Pádraig Ó’Tuama, not long after I read his bread recipe-poem and reflections on soup. Poems and recipes are kindred spirits, both in form and function. And, as Anthony Bourdain writes in Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook, “the ability to feed yourself and a few others with proficiency” is a vital, fundamental skill. Perhaps the same is true of poetry: We’re not all poets, but everyone can ask how they’re nourishing others with words, or learning how to absorb them for the soul. As Ó’Tuama writes:

“[R]ecipes are an old form of poetry, and I think a recipe and a poem each have a measure at the heart of them—a measure about pain, a measure about love, a measure about pleasure, or about survival. They’re giving a certain form of instruction that can turn you either towards the deliciousness of food or the deliciousness of language, that can help you look at your own life and feel like you’re finding something from it in the engagement with the writing.”

Gunn’s “Ordinary Sugar,” like opening an heirloom cookbook, unfolds the complexities of the generational relationship between poem and recipe. Recipes as poems—and vice versa—are a form of ancestral archiving and memory, amplified here in the rhyme of the second stanza: keep, knees, pristine, sweet, green, pleasurably, plenty. These words summarize the ‘story’ Gunn is sharing with us; rhyme aids memory for prayer, song, patience, attention, and presence.

Remembering is also an honouring of people and their circumstances, especially through a recipe and how it’s engaged with or followed: Making sweet potato pie from russets, the gleaming glass eye, pregnant wordlessness, and fast spinning through the kitchen. There isn’t a distinct narrative arc in the poem, per se, true to the patchwork our memories often are, but Gunn includes clear, specific, detailed snapshots—not temporally bound—and brings them alongside her present-day voice’s reflections, inviting us into Grandma Mattie’s life experience and ensuing motivations. Then, the poem tethers this archiving to a bearing of witness through time—how Gunn paid attention as a child and how she’s paying attention now, through inheritance. The stanzas move from Aunts Mary & Earline → Amanda → Grandma Mattie → Amanda → Amanda’s mother → Amanda. Generational influence is layered, akin to those graham cracker cakes, yellow cakes, and the recipe book they’re making was kept safe in.

In this vein, Gunn shows not only the desire her family had to soothe what might have been a difficult life, but a witnessing of why: Hunger, poverty, starvation, and the threat of scarcity are present because they’re remembered in the body, and therefore inherited as well: “Too, the ruthless / manic canning, putting by, / putting by, against memories / too near starvation—the / machine in her belly built / to last.”

Like the inheritance of poverty or scarcity—and the accompanying shame, fear, and silence—some things aren’t documented in a recipe book. Ways of survival and being are altogether missing from our present day-to-day lives: The economic intelligence and commitment to caring for a summer garden—weeding, tilling, watering, and feeding with eggshells and coffee grounds—and harvesting it before the first frost to have enough food for winter. But we all come from oral cultures, and Gunn’s poem seems to say: Don’t forget to witness and remember what wasn’t written down—it’s as much a part of the recipe (of survival) as the ordinary sugar made extraordinarily by love.

And ultimately, though an accessible free-verse poem in five stanzas, “Ordinary Sugar,” is in fact the recipe that includes as much as Gunn can gather. Through the language of food and cooking, it alchemizes its reader and speaker: What’s inherited takes a new shape when digested, then gifted, like the bread and jam in the final stanza. As Ó’Tuama says: “[A] recipe is an opportunity in writing to give some tools for survival as well as maybe a couple of quantities.” When we follow a recipe, it’s not only those fed who survive. The person who crafted it lives on, too.