Martha Rhodes

Kurt Brown was, primarily, essentially, a narrative poet—"things" happen in his poems, over time and place. This, then this, then this. "Hunger" plays with time and location from the start. At poem's beginning, it was late, for what? for dinner? The title is "Hunger" after all. Or, was it late in the day? Late at night? We don't know. All of the above? Drama right away! The poem takes on an apocalyptic tone in the 2nd sentence: "Near the end of the world." Near in time, and possibly, near as in location. Proximity of time and place brings about, over the course of two short sentences, a sense of dis-ease, tension and dread. A shift occurs in the next line, which comes almost as relief since we realize that the point of view is a child's—we are not really near the end of the world—it's just that the parents are telling the children that they have to eat everything, because there are people in the world who have nothing. Ah, for those people, it really IS near the end of the world, but for the children being told to eat, it's just near the end of the world because they are being forced to eat food they don't like (vegetables? the dreaded spinach?). Generations of parents over the course of the next lines tell generations of children the same thing—the retelling of the same story with different characters over time. The universal is revealed through the concrete. Brown circles the globe in this poem—moving in time and space from the huge abstract end of the world, made concrete by the word near to the family dinner table(s), to Magellan's explorations. We move fast through history and through fast food lines—we are presented with the story of the world through hunger and plenty—rickets and scurvy to plastic food—in one poem the have-all generations and the have nothings all inhabiting the same world and time zones, history repeating itself. Brown moves us around, locating and relocating us masterfully here—the poem could have been a stump poem, the speaker shouting to us from Madison Square Park in NY, preachy and finger pointing. The speaker includes himself and his family in this poem and, too, the largeness of the poem—the sweep—keeps it from being narrow and accusatory. It's a mythic poem, as many of Brown's poems are, touching on large topics subtly, yet overtly, imaginatively, concretely, ever skillfully.