friday feast: joan logghe’s “Ode to Spoons” (+ a recipe) (2024)

When it comes to eating utensils, spoons reign supreme.

I’ve always loved them more than knives or forks, with their aggressive blades and tines, slices and stabs.

Spoons are friendlier, nurturing. Their rounded bowls invite you to dip, sip, and slurp. The word “spoon,” with its fun-to-pronounce double ‘o,’ has a charm all its own. Say it now:

SPOON

See how your lips gently touch like a soft kiss? Adorable. 🙂

For most of us, spoons came first. Our hungry baby mouths opened wide for rice cereal, puréed peaches and strained peas. And when some of the food missed its target, the edge of the spoon magically corraled any oozy bits from chin and cheek. So accommodating!

And what about Spoon’s most important function?

SOUP! Ah, soup . . .

I was delighted to discover Joan Logghe’s “Ode to Spoons” recently. Love how she celebrates the divine in the everyday. I was happy to learn she shares my love for Maira Kalman, for whom ordinary objects also take on extraordinary significance when viewed through the lens of history, heart, memory.

ODE TO SPOONS
by Joan Logghe

Look at your face in a spoon.
See your ridiculous short life
stretch sideways to contain its
story in silver. I once knew
a woman with no spoons that matched.
She was a wild muttering song.
Her tea spoons were from all
the countries of the earth and
she tried to drink her soup
with souvenirs
of each of the fifty states.

One spoon floated spectral.
Japanese porcelain
so white that blue became
an excuse for beauty. Virtuous
spoons raise broth to the lips
of the dying. And navigate
through the flailing
arms of the baby, reflected
above his silver highchair tray.

My daughter received a spoon
with her own name, Hope, etched
into the sterling bowl.
Dated one hundred years
before her life, it revealed
the history of love
and of appetite in one face.

Shape of my mother wedged between
three sisters. The spoon of Ida,
the spoons of Ethel and Pearl.
As their death approaches
by simple fact of the waving night
they continue to shine like fine Hungarian
flatware, tiny lost ancestral dessert spoons.

The spoon is the yes
of the fork’s no. The spoon
is the girl to the fork’s
boy. Even silverware behaves
in this gendered manner.
And so the word spooning
was coined in the mouth
of the lover.

I love you, spoons,
for you feed myself
to me each day. I praise
your edge and your handle
that causes my hand to close
around you. I thank spoons
for rhyming with all
the predictable and
in thanking, I become myself
a sort of spoon
to scoop up praise.

~ from Written with a Spoon: A Poet’s Cookbook, edited by Nancy Fay & Judith Rafaela (Sherman Asher Publishing, 2002). Posted by permission of the author.

Joan: I love writing odes, focusing on praise and I think many of us are inspired by Pablo Neruda’s Elemental Odes or Odes to Common Things. I have written odes to many things, the world offers an endless opportunity for praise. I find that after I write an ode, I feel an increased tenderness and appreciation for the object or emotion.

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Joan Logghe was Poet Laureate of Santa Fe 2010-2012. She works at poetry and arts activism in community, off the academic grid in La Puebla, New Mexico. Joan has received an NEA in Poetry and a Mabel Dodge Lujan internship, and teaches widely, Ghost Ranch and University of New Mexico-Los Alamos and over 30 years as poet-in-the-schools and private classes from her living room to internationally. Her most recent books include The Singing Bowl (UNM Press, 2011), Unpunctuated Awe: Poems of Santa Fe (Tres Chicas Books, 2016), and Love & Death: Greatest Hits, with Tres Chicas co-founders Renée Gregorio and Miriam Sagan (2011). She is the president ofNew Mexico Literary Arts, which aims to inspire & develop the imaginative use of languageand to create opportunities for the integration of the literary arts with other art forms throughout New Mexico. Learn more at Joan’s Official Website and blog, The Poem Different.

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❤️MORE GOODIES FROM JOAN ❤️

PoemHolders was a project that emerged during Joan’s tenure as Santa Fe Poet Laureate. It combined her love of quilts with her secret mission to sneak poetry into everyday life. Email Joan directly to order ($25 each + shipping) — joanlogghe (at) gmail (dot) com. No two alike. Love them!

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Enjoy the official book trailer for Joan’s book, The Singing Bowl:

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Finally, Joan is sharing one of her favorite recipes — I have a feeling Marilyn Singer’s Little Miss Muffet would approve. 🙂

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Thank you so much, Joan!!

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Jone MacCulloch is hosting the Roundup at Check It Out. Be sure to check out the full menu of poetic goodness being shared in the blogosphere this week. Enjoy your weekend!

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This post is also being linked to Beth Fish Read’s Weekend Cooking, where all are invited to share their food-related posts. Put on your best bibs and aprons and come join the fun!

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Copyright © 2016 Jama Rattigan of Jama’s Alphabet Soup. All rights reserved.