corn

Lisa Jarnot
Everything I Know About Corn
ecopoetics 1, page 55

I’ve read this poem many times. I’m starting to feel like I’ve eaten corn from reading the poem a lot. I enjoy eating corn about half the time. Very fresh corn on the cob is delightful. Any other form of corn has an offtaste, like sweetness gone bad.

I get stuck on the title. Particularly the words “Everything” and “Know.” The title is not a believable statement in an everyday way. We suspect that there are some other things the poet knows about corn, that are not included here. In addition, it would be very easy to know a few more things about corn. Googling corn provides a wealth of something like knowledge, that anyone with an Internet connection can absorb. For example, the ancestor of the corn plant may have been a grass called “teosinte.”

There is a lot to know about corn. Yet the poem is very brief. It is rhythmic, with a repetitive phrasing. The word corn appears 24 times in the poem, including once the title. Maybe impressionistic would be a good word. An impression of corn by someone that knows corn, including its colors, its parts, the sensations of it, its associations, and its music. And because the poem uses the word “love” twice and the word “sing” three times, unavoidably it could be called a love song to corn.

Lisa spent time crossing the cornfields as a child and seems to have a pleasant memory of it. I played a bit in a corn field as a child. But I had more intimate experiences with a soybean field. I grew up in a suburban development carved out of a soybean field in Illinois. A diminished soybean field remained down at the end of the deadend street. I remember the farmer yelling at us from way down below because we were trespassing in the field. I would not be inspired to write a poem called “Everything I Know about Soybeans.” And corn fields are not what they used to be either. A child would not be able to enter an industrial cornfield today. The stalks are too close together. Even when I was young, the cornfield seemed ominous. You could get into it, but you didn’t want to go too far into it. You might be hopelessly lost and be unable to see above the stalks to find your way out.

So there is a love relationship with corn in the poem. I don’t completely connect with it because I don’t have a great relationship with corn, finding it not so tasty and ominous in its growth habit.

More to say on corn in a future post, even though I’ve already way exceeded the word count of the poem.