Over the past couple days I’ve been enjoying some delicious chocolate cake (thank you Dina)! This week’s poem is a childhood favourite of mine: it revels in the sheer joy of eating, in ‘how the icing on top / is all shiny and it cracks as you / bite into it’, in the narrator’s total absorption in his chocolate cake.
‘Chocolate Cake’ is a performance piece by Michael Rosen – it’s conversational, anecdotal, the sort of thing you can imagine being told at a dinner table with new additions every time. And Michael Rosen’s hilarious reading of it has spawned a whole host of YouTube memes (I leave you to peruse these at your own leisure, though ‘Michael Rosen reading chocolate cake but every time he says chocolate cake it gets faster’ is a particular favourite of mine).
Play this to your children/nieces/nephews/little sisters/brothers! It’s an excellent reminder of how fun and casual poetry can be: it’s not all deep intellectualism and anguish!
Here’s the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BxQLITdOOc.
I’m going to be taking a little break from this blog for a few weeks. This week’s poem is number 26 (!) and I need a little space, but I can’t wait to be back with poem 27 very soon!
Lots of love, as ever, from,
Tanvi
