Kinnell's "Blackberry Eating" and Neruda's "Sweetness, Always." How do these poems construct a connection between eating and lang./wri./poet....

In Pablo Neruda's "Sweetness, Always," and Galway
Kinnell's "Blackberry Eating," the poems use images of food and eating, compared to
poetry. Kinnell describes ravaging blackberry stalks and taking their treasures—which
seem to surrender as they fall "unbidden to my tongue." Kinnell's metaphor compares the
lush blackberries to words, which are like blackberries on his
tongue. As he savors the fruit, he also savors words such as "strengths" and
"squinched." Like rolling a piece of fruit around in the mouth before swallowing,
Kinnell does so with words in his mind before he writes them down. As does the
fruit—exploding with juice and flavor—Kinnell's words also explode, though perhaps with
meaning instead; and he uses them with pleasure as he does late-September
blackberries.

Neruda's poem argues for poetic simplicity.
He begins "Sweetness, Always" with several questions:

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Why such harsh machinery?
Why, to write
down the stuff and people of everyday,
must poems be dressed up in
gold,
or in old and fearful
stone?

Why do poets work so
hard to portray and present the things that are already rich and sweet in their
"everyday-ness?" Why is there a need to clothe words in splendor, or to convey them like
ancient civilizations or rulers—preserved in stone? Neruda describes what he
wants: light verses—like feathers, and mild verses that hold the intimacy of
love and dreams shared in a bed. He wants verses with "everyday-ness" that can be
touched or experienced by "common" hands rather than those of high intellect or
long-enduring patience as the mind tries to eek out meaning from the poetry of the
"pretentious." The word "highfalutin" comes to mind:

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“Highfalutin,” of course, means “pompous,
arrogant, haughty, pretentious” or “excessively ornate or bombastic (especially in
speech).”

It is here that
Neruda turns to his metaphor of food: that verses be like pastries that melt in the
mouth, free for all—like air and water, and the "bites of kisses of love." Neruda
emphasizes the need for poetry to be not only accessible but
desirable. He asks for "eatable sonnets, poems of honey and
flour."

As a sweet-lover, I find these images do what
Neruda asks of all poems: he makes this piece of verse delicious. We are enthralled by
the overwhelming sense of "sweetness," as is implied in the title. The poet worries that
poets try to lift their words too high with lofty poetry, or hide
meaning with the words so that the truth of the poem is buried like "tunnels
underground." Again we are given the image that this kind of poetry is too much work for
creator and reader. Neruda is one of the greatest love poets in any
language. Is it surprising then, that he wants poetry to be sweet like love, and just as
fulfilling?

Neruda recalls seeing a "sugary pyramid,"
perhaps an actual confection, or figuratively, a "flashy" poem. He notes that (in either
case), someone "dirtied his hands" in making it. He implies
that that person's time would have been better spent creating
something simple, yet lovely—like honeycombs. He encourages all poets to infuse their
writing with sugar, and "Don't be afraid of sweetness." Life goes
on, with or without poets, but sweetness must remain in the
poems left behind—the sweetness, like
love, appeals throughout time, space and language, and one should enjoy the beauties of
the world in poetry—like they were sweets—conveyed by the written
word.

Additional
Source:

http://www.word-detective.com/2009/06/02/highfalutin/