alexist

By unpopular demand ...

1 chicken, cut in 1/8s (*), rinsed and patted dry
4 medium onions
2 heads of garlic
3/4 cup (ish) (180mL) dry white wine (I don't measure. I just pour from the bottle.)
2 cups (500mL) chicken stock (**)
1 can (~2lbs/1kg, depending on brand--mine's 1kg, but many are smaller) plum tomatoes, drained, seeded and chopped
Oil for frying--a couple tablespoons or so
Salt

(* - A stewing chicken or pullet is best. If all you can get is a supermarket broiler/fryer, be careful not to overcook. Kosher chickens are preferable to mass-market--the soaking and salting firms them up.)

(** - homemade is best, but if you're lazy, I suppose canned will do. Be careful with the salt.)

Peel the onions. Cut in half lengthwise and slice each half thinly.

Heat the oil in a sauté pan or skillet (not nonstick! You can't deglaze a nonstick pan.) and add the onions. Cook, stirring frequently, until softened and just starting to brown. Dump out into a casserole or large saucepan. Add the chicken to the frying pan. Cook till browned on both sides. (Hint: when the chicken is browned on one side, you'll be able to turn it without any resistance.) Put the chicken in the pan with the onions. Pour off excess fat in the frying pan, then pour the wine into the frying pan, over medium heat. Stir to loosen all the browned bits from the bottom. Cook till reduced and slightly syrupy. Pour over the chicken.

Peel and chop 2 of the garlic cloves. Add to the casserole. Separate the remaining cloves, but don't peel. Add them to the casserole, along with the tomatoes, stock, and salt to taste (medium handful of Diamond Kosher for me; use half that for table salt). Stir. Bring to a boil, then cover and turn the heat very low. Cook till the chicken is tender.

Serve with fresh crusty bread and squeeze the garlic out of its skin onto the bread. You can also use rice or noodles to soak up the sauce, which is thin and soupy.

One of my favorite poems is Dylan Thomas' "Fern Hill". The last stanza is one of my favorite pieces of poetry ever:

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me  
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
      In the moon that is always rising,
           Nor that riding to sleep
      I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
	   Time held me green and dying
    Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

(Full poem: http://www.poets.org/poems/poems.cfm?prmID=1160)

I'm a little bit conservative in my poetry tastes. I don't insist that poetry have strict rhyme and meter, but I do like it to feel like poetry. I've read poems that felt like prose with random line breaks. Good "free verse" (to use the three classes of poetry as taught back in high school English) does have rhythm and cadence, even if it isn't iambic pentameter or trochaic hexameter (I wonder: could you write a poem in that? Maybe, since [I just checked] a trochee is the reverse of the iamb: DA-duh instead of duh-DA. Might sound funny, though. I remember reading that in popular music, we're used to what's basically an iambic foot: in a 4-note bar, the beat's on 2 and 4. Switch it to 1 and 3--a trochee--and it sounds odd, though many people can't put their finger on why.)

Free verse can be wonderfully liberating. The problem with classic forms is that you can all too easily focus on form over content. Sometimes the form adds dramatic impact: the repetition of the villanelle works well in "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night". But how many of us remember reading Shakespeare's sonnets in school and studying the rhyme scheme? Rhyme and meter are wonderful poetic devices, but they don't overshadow the poem.

One of the things I like about "Fern Hill" (and poems in a similar style) is that the form supports the content, rather than overwhelming it. You sense the alliteration, the images, the use of color as a poetic device--but you don't get trapped by the form. Think of Frost: "Whose woods these are I think I know / His house is in the village though." It's in iambic tetrameter, and if you read it out loud, it's very easy to fall into a singsong rhythm.

Form is really a digression, though. What I love about the poem is the feeling it gives, that sense of bittersweet longing and regret for childhood. When we are young, we run our heedless ways, and know nothing of how short a time we have.