Title?

"Rice and Keats" is not the most graceful title. I typed it in without really thinking it through, and then say back and asked myself "Why?"

The two things I seem to spend most of time on these days are food and literature. I'm no gourmand, but I do cook a lot, and as a South Indian, rice is at the core of it all. The Tamil word annam means both 'food' and 'rice'. No matter how far into the cooking stratosphere I stray, I always come back to the many rice-based dishes that are the core of my food psyche.

I don't necessarily have the same elemental connection with John Keats that I do with rice; my research interests lie in a different direction. But I have found teaching Keats to be one of the highlights of my career. He's a pleasure to teach: the meters are tight, the rhymes fascinating and controversial, and the language is simply yummy. That's not a particularly academic description, but I can think of no other word for his lush, almost tactile wordplay. Best of all, even my poetry-shy students embraced it. After a semester of freaking them out with Shelley, Wordsworth, and De Quincey, reading Keats felt like a love-fest. Teaching Keats always reminds me why I entered this ridiculous profession in the first place.

But the connections between Keats and rice extend beyond the madness of my personal universe. After I started thinking about it, I remembered that one of Keats's best friends was a James Rice, with whom he was living when he wrote a lot of his best stuff, including Lamia, one of the poems that so gripped my students this past semester.

So, rice and Keats. Keats and Rice.