Somerville Poet Laureate Lloyd Schwartz put into a fortune cookie

On January 12, 2022, in Latest News, by The Somerville Times

Somerville Poet Laureate Lloyd Schwartz, and The Somerville Times Arts Editor Doug Holder are some of the many poets included in Peter Payack’s The Edible Anthology of Poetry. This whimsical project, founded by Payack puts micro-poems from area poets into real fortune cookies and groups them into Chinese takeout boxes. These collector items can be purchased at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Harvard Square.

Payack wrote, “This is the 7th edition of The Edible Anthology of Poetry. The first was in 1980. At that time The Boston Globe wrote, ‘Peter Payack is the kid who crossed Popular Mechanics with the New Criticism and made the (fortune) cookie crumble into poems.’

Payack continued, “I had some people over last week and handed out 6 cookies to six people and was surprised to see how each person not only read the poem out loud but had an interpretation and they then started a discussion. The room unexpectedly turned into a literary salon! I then told them who the poets were and why I picked that particular poem.”

Some of the notable poets included are Martha Collins, Joyce Peseroff, Sam Cornish, DeWitt Henry, Ifeanyi Menkiti, Kathleen Spivack, Tracy K. Smith, Mark Pawlak, and many others.

After devouring some of the poems from your takeout box, watch out, you may hunger for more an hour later…