Bending Spoons by Charlie Foos

Ugly Duckling Presse

2004

Reviewed by Zachary Schomburg

Spoons are perfect utilitarian devices. They have been shaped to seamlessly enter a hungry mouth and for that mouth to close around it. Their handles are connected at just the proper angle so that very little effort is needed from the user. But when spoons are bent and the angle of the handle has been disrupted, it becomes a challenge to manage a meal. Spoons become anti-utilitarian; in fact, they no longer fulfill their core definition and cease to be functional spoons altogether. All of Charlie Foos’ poems here are like bent spoons, a beautiful contortion of their former selves, even though they leave us with nothing with which to eat our cereal. It is possible that CF believes he is nobly destroying our resource for spoon-fed poetry, and in doing so, his poetry can be a tad obnoxious. If the reader can get beyond that though, he or she will find that what CF is doing here is undeniably fresh. These poems may leave us hungry and perhaps a little malnourished, but I’m tired of eating.

CF has bent and twisted his poems so that they are no longer recognizable. I won’t dare say that they aren’t poems, but they don’t function like most poems. His are disjointed, but cleanly at the line breaks—a highly organized mess. The working parts of each poem do not seem to belong together, as if all the poems at one point had come in a box with directions and CF tirelessly put them together, directions aside, in the dark night. In the morning light, the poems were found poorly mended, misshapen, and awkward, but beautiful.

There are three chapters that neatly divide, not the content necessarily but the structure of the poems. Chapter 2, “Poking the Eye”, contains the most rigid of the three structures: 175 three-lined poems. These are peculiar little snippets that read a little like an exercise—much too tiring to read all at once, though reading one invites you to read the next:

25:

You think I’m too old for you

people will listen

the real heroes are the highway workers.

32:

He kicked your butt

I don’t think we brought enough stuff

yeah.

See what I mean?

54:

Even ice cream tastes better

why are you staring at me

spokesperson for the actress.

I can’t stop.

128:

Good taste

doctor says

Jack the skating chimp.

In “Irrational Fear of Murders”, CF’s first and most successful chapter, the reader is allowed to get a better grip on this complex woven architecture. There is more to hold on to as each of the 26 numbered poems consist of an average of 6 lines. More puzzle pieces can be seen and a more concise total image can be more easily envisioned. Here, for example, the chapter’s twelfth poem,

He’s kind to animals

a man or a woman

the bowl championship

study of 5,000 women

usually you only hear about the big winners

what a nice surprise

he was trying to stop a tank.

These intricate pieces work together to build what seems to be a very messy total picture. The total picture itself is even a collage though each piece suggests some sort of struggle for dominance and notoriety. But the total picture isn’t necessary—it’s the small parts that CF wants us to look at. The heart of the poems are with these small parts, these details; we are forced to consider them because there is no whole context upon which to focus.

After reading CF’s poems straight through, the reader might have the feeling that he or she is intercepting thousands of radio waves. All these signals seem to interconnect, layer themselves over each other, to create a message that may be far more interesting than the practicality of the original messages. If CF’s poems were decoded, pieced together, we’d be left with something typical, useful. We’d walk away with something. We’d know what to make of it. Everything would be clear. It would be no good.