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State Fair Vanitas
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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents
Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other
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Yes, yes, to fried everything on a stick, to the duckling slide and the poster with the ten-point plan defending the ducklings’ dignity, to the hired-out Pirate Ship and the Tilt-a-Whirl’s impeccable lettering and questionable gears; yes to a roasted ear of Frankencorn, to a pork butt sandwich dripping with grease; yes to the overfed, pampered pumpkins waiting to shock us all at weigh-in, yes to 4-H tobacco, dark stripped or burley, to quilts too beautiful to throw on the bed, to the sheep in their couture gowns, the goats lost in perverse thoughts, and the pigs, the pigs, who could say no to their downy bellies heaving in the barn-dank, straw-scattered air? And especially yes to the culinary wing on the final weekend, when the lemon tassies and meringue-topped pies and hummingbird bundt cakes with cream cheese glaze have spontaneously sprouted their own personal crops, soft green mold patches furring across slumped-in sides. Give me decay on display, blue-ribbon proud. Yes, yes, we know it’s all in vain, but yes to being here anyway, whether we take Best in Show or die trying.
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I love the Kentucky State Fair, which I think comes through pretty clearly in this piece. There’s an overwhelming sensory assault that comes from combining a carnival, a flea market, and an agricultural competition in one space that I can’t help but respond to. I love the excessive food, of course, but also how the farm families showing livestock set up camp next to their prize animals, and how amateur gardeners, bakers, cooks, and crafters are competing just as fiercely for a ribbon and, like, a five-dollar prize. And my absolute favorite time to go to the Fair is later in the run, when the food exhibits have started to develop mold but are still on display. It’s gross in a very compelling way. I started this list knowing I wanted to end up in the culinary wing with the mold, hoping to write my way to understanding why I derive such delight from the ruined foods left out in the cases for us to admire. In the vanitas subgenre of still life paintings, human skulls and other transient objects are included to remind the viewer of the certainty of death (one of my favorite fixations) and to scold us about worldly pursuits—their idea is that in the end, all our petty little pursuits will have been in vain. This list is my answer to that: Of course we’re gonna die anyway. Of course the blue-ribbon cake is a temporary pleasure. Of course the hours of baking practice put into developing a contender for the prize can all add up to nothing in the end. But it feels good to make something intentional out of the chaos of ingredients, environment, and form, and it feels great when you surprise yourself with the result. It’s worth celebrating the choice to create instead of despairing. Nothing we do with intention and pleasure can possibly be in vain, even if we never win the big prize or leave a legacy that sustains across centuries. In a recent poetry workshop, one of my students identified a poem not labeled explicitly as an ars poetica, and I heard myself saying, maybe every poem is secretly an ars poetica, essentially making its own case for why we write in the first place. Maybe this list is one, too.
Erin Keane is the author of three collections of poetry and the memoir RUNAWAY: Notes on the Myths That Made Me, named one of NPR's best books of 2022. She teaches poetry and creative nonfiction in the Naslund-Mann MFA program at Spalding University and is Chief Content Officer at Salon.com. New poems are forthcoming in North American Review, Indianapolis Review, Solid State, and Forget Cool. Her recent writing can be found at HAD, Necessary Fiction, Essay Daily, MarchXness.com, and in the anthologies HIT REPEAT UNTIL I HATE MUSIC: The March Xness Anthology (Split/Lip Press) and ONCE A CITY SAID (Sarabande Books).
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