This April sees the publication of A Feast for Santa Barbara: Poets Celebrate Food & Drink (Gunpowder Press), an anthology containing literary morsels from more than 100 Santa Barbara–area poets, celebrating the diverse farming, dining, cooking, and drinking in our community. The anthology is edited by George Yatchisin, who is Santa Barbara’s 11th Poet Laureate, the author of Feast Days and The First Night We Thought the World Would End, and is retired from a long career at UCSB.
Every Santa Barbara Poet Laureate typically takes on one or two big projects during their two-year tenure. Can you tell me about why you decided that A Feast for Santa Barbara: Poets Celebrate Food & Drink was going to be one of yours?
As I particularly hope readers of the Indy would know, I’ve been writing about food and drink for a long time. What they might not know is that in addition to hundreds of column inches of journalism, I have been writing poems about the topic for decades, too. After all, my chapbook back in 2016 was titled Feast Days (yep, the titles are intentionally close), and included poems about everything from ortolan to uni, celeriac to John Downey. Food and drink are such a perfect intersection of joy, culture, history, science, love, myth, mystery, memory. All the good things to write about…