Sheila Sondik’s LIGHTING UP THE DUFF

LIGHTING UP THE DUFF, Sheila Sondik. The Poetry Box, Portland, OR, 2024, 48 pages, paper, $14.00, https://thepoetrybox.com.

I love this chapbook by Bellingham poet and printmaker Sheila Sondik. I read it before publication and wrote one of the cover blurbs. I read it again during the Sealey Challenge in August. And again, today. New delights and discoveries each time.

“Duff” is the fungi and decomposing leaves and other detritus that sifts to the forest floor, that stuff you scuff through when you walk on wooded trails. The other term you need to understand in order to make your way through these poems is “Golden Shovel,” a poetic form invented by Terrence Hayes in which the last word of each line is taken from a single line of poetry by another poet. Lighting Up the Duff perfectly and playfully marries these two ideas, while paying tribute to Sondik’s influences: Linda Pastan, Kenneth Rexroth, George Oppen, Philip Levine, Maxine Kumin, Frank O’Hara, Bob Kaufman, William Carlos Williams, Alicia Ostriker, Marge Piercy.

Well, playfully, but there are more serious threads running through here as well: Covid, aging, and Sondik’s care for the natural world and its endangered beauty. Using a line borrowed from Bob Kaufman’s “Response,” she creates this poem:

Blow, Wind, Blow!
            —after Bob Kaufman

Firs and red cedars are dancing
in the fierce November winds.
Under the comforter, will
we find the courage to sing
bold anthems of praise for
the buffeting? I embrace you.
We two become one ancient
breathing trunk. Call on the gods
to share our awe. Requests will
receive no response. Don’t pray
to idle distraction. Advocate for
the beast the howling wakes in you.

Sheila Sondik

—Sheila Sondik

I was especially fond of the Pastan and Kumin influenced poems. And who can’t help but be delighted by a poem beginning “I will write my biography in recipes”? (“The Joy of Cooking”). A line from Pastan, “Electrons move around their nucleus like moths circling a light or earth the sun,” inspires Sondik’s “Mutual Attractions,” which includes this passage: “We hip-hop like / dolls … or like moths / flittering frantically bumping into screens…”

I encourage you to take a look at Sondik’s book at The Poetry Box (it’s a beautifully made book, with cover art by Sondik), or get your own copy and see how gorgeous it is for yourself. You can find more images at her website, https://sheilasondik.com/.

Plus, if you’re looking for a poetry prompt, the Golden Shovel is a great one.

Thanks to Suzy Hazelwood at Pexels

Karen Rigby’s FABULOSA

“Poetry’s work is the clarification and magnification of being. Each time we enter its word-woven and musical invocation, we give ourselves over to a different mode of knowing: to poetry’s knowing, and to the increase of existence it brings, unlike any other.”  — Jane Hirshfield, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry

I decided this morning to count my blog-reviews for 2024. Thirty-three thus far (fewer than I thought!). As this is week 41 of the year — or is it 42? — I’m 9 reviews behind. This is doable. For today, here’s a link to my most recent review at Escape Into Life (EIL). I have an additional review there that never got linked to the blog:  At the Edge of a Thousand Yearsby Matt Hohner.

Some poets and some books stand out for me, but all of them have had their effect — to borrow from Jane Hirshfield again, each has had a part in mapping the terrain of my year of reading poetry.

So, with about 10 weeks left to the year, expect to see a flurry of reviews, or — barring actual reviews — shout-outs for poetry books. Maybe those read in August?? See, doable.

Click on the link below to see my review of Karen Rigby’s Fabulosa. And thank you for reading poetry!

Kevin Craft, TRAVERSE

TRAVERSE, Kevin Craft. Lynx House Press, Spokane, WA, 2024, 130 pages, $25, lynxhousepress.com.

I’ve known Kevin Craft a long time. We were colleagues at Everett Community College, beginning in 1998, and our bond of poetry drew us into friendship. He was always the star, with awards and grants and travel—including to France each summer to teach. He had a knack for making opportunities for himself that I (frankly) drooled over. But we had other, more home-bound threads connecting us as well, including many of the threads found in these poems: parenting, adoption, navigating the intricacies and interstices of family. Who do we belong to? Who belongs to us? Sometimes this theme plays like a lament, as when he echoes Emily Dickinson with, “My life had stood me up one too many times” (“Only If You’re Feeling Better”). In others, it’s a messy celebration: “Into gravity a history of spontaneous alleles” (“Game Theory: A Primer”).

I love the way the poems in Traverse aren’t linear (not usually), but always complex and witty and woven. The first poem, “In Extremis,” launches with: “One man skis alone across Antarctica. / Another pulls morning glory // off a rotting backyard fence.” One world, multiplied. In another poem, a daughter rescues a ruby-crowned kinglet; in another poem, two daughters rescue a father. (I have to add, birds are woven throughout the book, too—snow geese, an Anna’s hummingbird, red-tail hawks, hermit thrush…). I had a sense, reading this book, of circles within circles where human varieties of existence and all of nature nest together in contiguous if uncomfortable relationship. Like they do. These lines, for instance, opening “A Few Pre-Existing Conditions”:

We drank too much.
Stayed up late watching late night turn to laughter
as the elephants disappeared.

Oh, yes. Or this:

Elevator Pitch

First the doors won’t close, then they won’t pry
open, between them the tall tale self-replacing.
We talk it through—a night train rattling high-rise windows—
beginning of the middle, middle of the end,
though sometimes whole chapters fall from the sky
like pieces of a space station. Once I wanted
to be an astronaut. The sky is a laboratory
into which we pour our excess lives.
Some appear in dreams like the family reunion,
the gull-circled landfill, that day I turned the blue car
into oncoming traffic. Our grandmothers went to town
in a horse-drawn buggy. A single cell becomes a city
is one way to muscle through this backstory
hanging over breakfast like a shroud.

—Kevin Craft

Kevin is the featured reader at Everett Poetry Night on Monday, October 7, 5-8 p.m. As I recall, the reading begins at 6:00, but you want to come early—to grab some dinner and find a seat, and to sign up for the open mike. I plan to attend. Go to https://duanekirbyjensen.wixsite.com/everett-poetry-night/features-poets-2024 to learn more

To learn more about Kevin, visit Lynx House Press, or this page: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/kevin-craft. Or buy the book!

Lisa B (Lisa Bernstein), GOD IN HER RUFFLED DRESS

GOD IN HER RUFFLED DRESS, Lisa B (Lisa Bernstein). What Books Press, 363 South Topanga Canyon Boulevard, Topanga, CA 90290, 2023, 110 pages, $17.00, paper, https://www.whatbookspress.com.

Just a little shout-out this afternoon for singer / poet Lisa B, whose book, God in Her Ruffled Dress, I reviewed for Calyx: A Journal of Art and Literature for Women. (You can find the review on-line, here.)

It’s a romp of a book, much worth reading and recommending. Lisa B, also a singer and songwriter, plays with sound, and weaves together color and image in ways that continually surprise and please me.

Here’s one poem wedding past with future, history with fantasy, Emily both at her writing desk, sewing together the fascicles of her poems, and working as a computer programmer. Surprise, surprise!

EMILY DICKINSON AT WORK

she pulls
the thread
through the linen
on the embroidery frame
and at her writing table
through the white packet
of paper poems
the next morning tapping
the keyboard
piecing together
the html
<br> <br/>
marking and closing
the breaks
a figure in a white dress
silent under
fluorescent lights
at her place at the long table
beside the other programmers
listening to the enclosing
emptiness a white
pillow invisibly
holding the lines of code
on her screen
where she glimpses
her own
reflected smile
“I can make the zigzag stitches
Straight—when I am strong—
Till then—dreaming I am sewing”
the shape of God walking
through it like bird’s feet
tracks in the snow
“I’ll begin to Sew
When the Birds begin to whistle—”
a song hummed
under her breath
a bare small wind
she painstakingly places
the letters and brackets
she for whom
“Success in Circuit lies”
here and now are not
where everything
that ticked has stopped
no part of her shaven
instead tick by tick
her mind the mind
forming the frame

—Lisa B (Lisa Bernstein) 

You can find Lisa B at her website, www.lisabmusic.com.  She is working on a second audio version of the book, in “spoken word” format. Follow this link to find vendor links to both the paperback and the audiobooks: