A Vegan Poet

[Guest guest]

I love this article so i'm posting ti on all my veggie groups.

Apologies if you've already seen it!

 

Laura

 

A vegan's ode to soy

'At the moment he's rewriting Burns's " Address to a Haggis " , which

is quite tricky, as it's full of references to blood and innards

gushing forth'

Miles Kington

16 May 2002

 

 

Continuing our occasional series of People With Very Unusual Jobs

Indeed

 

No 66: A Vegan poet.

 

Here are some lines by the poet Josh Bentley:

 

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er hill and dale

When all at once I spied a crowd

Of dried bananas up for sale.

Beside the soy, behind the yeast

Oh, what a vegetarian feast!

Josh Bentley is a Vegan. He is also a poet. But he is possibly the

first man who has ever tried to combine the two activities by

rewriting established poetry so as to remove all traces of meat and

fish products. At this very moment he is working on a Golden

Treasury of Vegan Verse which will attempt to keep all the goodness

and richness of great poetry while eliminating all the blood and

meat fat which has so far, he thinks, disfigured so much of it.

 

" As you probably know, " he says, " we Vegans believe that true health

comes from a strict vegetarian diet, a natural regime of food

derived from pulses and vegetables. Well, if we can purify our diet,

why not purify our poetry as well? And remove all non-Vegan traces

from it? "

 

One of the things that have made it easier for him to do this is the

fact that the word " meat " rhymes with the more acceptable " wheat " ,

so that Burns's little grace which used to start " Some hae meat and

cannae eat... " now goes:

 

Some hae wheat and cannae eat,

And some wad eat that want it,

But we hae wheat and we can eat

And sae the Lord be thankit.

At the moment Bentley is also rewriting Burns's " Address to a

Haggis " , which is proving a little more tricky, as it's full of

references to blood and innards gushing forth, the kind of thing to

make a Vegan feel very ill. So Bentley is pinning the new version on

the idea of a haggis as a pudding... " Great chieftain of the pudding

race! So full of nutmeg and of mace... " etc etc.

 

But isn't there something rather namby-pamby about all this?

Something a bit bloodless? Something anaemic?

 

" On the contrary, " he avers. " It is the mainstream of poetry which

is so brutal. Oddly enough, the worst of the trouble starts in

childhood, because traditional nursery rhymes are so anti-Vegan. One

or two are all right. Oranges and lemons, fine! Little Jack Horner

pulling out a plum – fine! But for the rest, it's all Simple Simon

and the pieman, or the wolf trying to eat the three little piggies,

or the four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie, or this little

piggy which had roast beef, for heaven's sake! Can you imagine

children being taught that pigs eat beef! No wonder we had BSE... "

 

He pushes over a page of revised nursery ryhmes. One starts: " Taffy

was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief, Taffy came to my house and stole

a slice of quiche. " Another reads:

 

Tom, Tom, the piper's son

Stole a pig and away did run.

The pig did bite the stupid boy,

And serve him right. He should stick to soy.

Another starts:

 

Mary had a little lamb Which made her feel quite ill So now she eats

nut cutlets With rosemary and dill.

" I realise it's a thankless task, " says Josh Bentley rather

defensively. " All you flesh-eaters think I am a killjoy and a wet

blanket. But that's the fate of all prophets. Look, take this with

you and think about it... "

 

On the way home I look at what he has given me. It starts:

 

The boy stood on the burning deck

Whence all but he had fled,

Holding tight his tofu bar

And his loaf of granary bread... "

Alas, I can bear to read no further.