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Kevin Craft, TRAVERSE

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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!

Kevin Craft’s Vagrants & Accidentals

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This luminous book makes my heart happy. It takes up big themes–like identity, loss, space and time–and fastens them to the page with the smallest of details, precise and exact, that flare up in the imagination, opening into fissures that grow wider and wider with each rereading.

I’ve known Kevin Craft for about 20 years, we once shared an office at Everett Community College, and we both wrote our poems and shared them while wrangling our way from part-time English instructors to full-time, from newbie probationers, to tenured faculty, to …well, you get the picture. He’s still there, and despite a full plate of family, teaching, travel, and somehow managing to be executive editor of Poetry Northwest, has continued to write. And so, this book, Vagrants & Accidentals, which is the seventeenth book in the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series. You can read more about him, and a sampling of his poems, at Poetry Foundation.

Here’s a poem that I keep going back to:

Old Paradox

Consider that a single grain of sand
cannot be arranged so as to form
a heap.

Consider that it’s difficult
if not impossible to discover the exact
moment a tadpole becomes a frog,

the precise instant al dente
loses its bright tooth. At noon I am
half in love with you, half distracted

by the dishes in the sink.
Now the soul: tell me where is it
that split-second before

and after the old woman who is mother
and grandmother and cousin
to those assembled in a hospice room

kisses her own immigrant grandmother
on the cheek as she leaves that Napoli
she left long ago

forever in the past? In dying, does she
take the flyswatter with her,
does every cell turn off at once?

One death permeable as grief,
another obdurate: they lean against
each other, accumulating

mass. On a scale of extravagant
to frugal, we fall everywhere
between.

–Kevin Craft, Vagrants & Accidentals (University of Washington Press, 2017)

Kevin Craft, “My Clone”

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“[By the estate of poetry], I do not mean the estate over which the poetic imagination rules, whose bounds we do not know. Each poet has nothing more than a right of entry to it, and a patch of ground which he is at liberty to cultivate….by cultivating his holding each poet adds to the world of poetic imagination, and that therefore it can never be regarded as completely embodied — reason for discouragement and hope, and an earnest of the continuance of poetry.” Edwin Muir, The Estate of Poetry (1)

It had been awhile since I googled my friend, poet and editor extraordinaire Kevin Craft. It was a rewarding experience. Since our paths have diverged, his work on Poetry Northwest has continued to expand a well-deserved reputation. Here is a poem from his first book, Solar Prominence. May there be many more.

 

MY CLONE

frowns when he finds out he’s not alone.
Was grown from cells
scraped from the inside of my cheek.
I’m nobody’s second string,

he insists to the talk show host
egging us on. (Loud applause
from the studio audience.) I’m a self-
made man, not the other

way around. Steely-eyed and neatly
groomed, he’s as brash
as a dressing room mirror.
Backstage he takes me aside.

Nothing personal, he admits, running a hand
through his long black hair.
They put us on to air our differences,
is all. Thought I’d play ball.

He does, in fact, play soccer
in the Italian leagues.
He was shipped at cell’s first division
to a western fertility lab,

so that we grew up on opposite coasts, a case
of nurture versus second
nature. He is savvy
beyond his years and makes me seem

thwarted and unsure. And now he sniffs
at the guestroom cabernet, smoking a fat cigar.
Is this what it means to turn the other cheek?
Perhaps, he says, stretching

out on the double bed as if
he counts the same sheep I do before sleep
or reads the Dadaists for moral instruction.
As for second guessing, he adds,

you’re not the only one.

–Kevin Craft