Nobody writes love poems to chewing, and Dave Bonta's "Chew" is certainly not one. It opens with a groan, "Chew, chew, / I've had it with this chewing," and the speaker sounds like someone at the end of a very long meal. The complaint turns out to be bigger than it first seems. Eating is how every living thing turns the world into itself, and the poem asks whether there might be a gentler way to do it, a way of taking the world in without grinding it down.
The first stanza makes chewing sound violent and a little desperate. "Rat's teeth on a lead pipe" is a sound you can almost feel in your own fillings, and the hard t, p and d sounds clatter against each other. Then comes the squirrel "opening the brain-case / of a black walnut." The phrase is clever because a walnut really does look like a small brain, so the squirrel's snack starts to resemble a tiny act of cracking a skull. Eating, the stanza suggests, is a kind of breaking in.
The second stanza swaps violence for boredom. The ruminant is "glassy-eyed," its jaw going "back & forth / in the monotonous rhythm of pestle / against mortar." The ampersand is a small, casual touch that keeps the voice conversational, and the line breaks make the sentence rock back and forth along with the jaw. The third stanza rejects the opposite extreme. The carnivore is "so single-minded," and its food is not called meat but "messy drippy stinking tangles / of other creatures' pain." The three adjectives pile up like the mess they describe, and the line break after "toxic" leaves that word hanging before the "rot of its bite." So the speaker turns down two ways of life: the dull grinder and the bloody hunter. Each of these three stanzas has five lines, and each offers a different creature's way of eating.
None of this is rhymed, and there is no regular meter. The poem is free verse that follows the cadence of speech, with phrases like "I've had it with" that sound like something said aloud in a kitchen. That plainness makes the last stanza land harder. A blunt sentence, "Chewing is a waste of time," acts as a hinge, and the poem then stretches to six lines, as if it has been let out of something. The speaker wants "to return to the soup." I read this as the amniotic fluid before birth, or perhaps the primordial soup of early life, and the poem leaves both possibilities open. The fetus is "sampling the world / through its belly," a lovely paradox in which the stomach becomes a sense organ and eating becomes a way of knowing rather than a way of destroying.
The whale completes the picture. Its mouth is "like an aeolian harp," an instrument played by passing air rather than by effort. Judging by the krill, the poet is picturing a baleen whale, whose mouth works as a filter, so the image of strings fits well. The final line, "the whole slow song of it fed on krill," answers the earlier stanzas point by point. "Slow" replaces "monotonous." "Song" replaces the grinding noise of teeth. Even the grammar relaxes, because the whale is "fed" rather than feeding. The sounds soften too, with the long o's of "soup," "whole," "slow" and "song" opening out after all those clipped consonants.
The poem is honest enough not to pretend the ideal is innocent, since the whale still lives on other animals. What it wants is a different manner of taking: filtering, not tearing, and absorbing, not gnawing. It is also tempting to read "chew" as a figure for thinking, since we say we "chew things over," and the walnut's "brain-case" hints at this. On that reading, the speaker longs to experience the world without constantly breaking it into pieces to analyse. That is my interpretation, not something the poem states.
What makes "Chew" worth reading is how much it does with so little. In twenty-one lines it makes us notice an act so ordinary that we never think about it, and it gets there through humour and irritation rather than solemnity. It argues by contrast, moving from harsh sounds to a song, and it ends on music rather than a conclusion.