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Sheila Sondik’s LIGHTING UP THE DUFF

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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.

J. I. Kleinberg, DESIRE’S AUTHORITY

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DESIRE’S AUTHORITY, J. I. Kleinberg, from Triple No. 23. Ravenna Press, Edmonds, Washington, 2023, pp. 61-80, paper, $12.95. http://ravennapress.com.

Last Saturday, I slipped away from the Chuckanut Writers Conference to attend a reading, at Dakota Art in downtown Bellingham, featuring Anita K. Boyle, Sheila Sondik, and J. I. Kleinberg. Yes, the conference was wonderful, with a plethora of good stuff on offer, but the trifecta of these voices, plus their art, was too great a temptation. I’m so glad I was able to be there.

Kleinberg read from several books, including her Dickinson inspired chapbook of collage poems, Desire’s Authority, published last year by Ravenna Press. I’ve been on a book-buying binge (a binge that seriously has to stop) but this book I already had in my possession. So, once I was home, I went through my TBR pile of poetry books and found it.

Take all the serendipity of how I stumbled into this happy accident, and times it by three, and you have Triple No. 23 (also featuring chapbooks by Michelle Eames and Heikki Huotari).

Kleinberg’s collage poems, alone, are all about serendipity, juxtaposition, and happy accidents.  She creates them by cutting apart words found in magazines—if it sounds a bit like ransom demands, you’re not wrong. Not demanding in the sense of difficulty, but definitely willing to hold your attention hostage. In the author’s note Kleinberg reveals how she came up with her collage series (which is extensive, and not only this set of poems):

Through the accident of magazine page design, unrelated words fell into proximity to cast unintended meaning across the boundaries of sentence, paragraph, and column break. Leaving behind the words’ original sense and syntax, I collected these contiguous fragments of text, each roughly the equivalent of a poetic line. Arrayed on my worktable, they began to talk with one another and assume a new shape of visual poems. —J. I. Kleinberg (p. 89)

Gaps, fragments, the hop from one word or phrase to the next like hopping stone to stone across a creek, the occasional precarious drop—these found poems are a visual and poetic delight. I can’t decide on a water metaphor or fire to best describe them. Either way, I love these poems in part for how they invite a reader’s imagination into their creation. If there’s sometimes a little groping to find a shutter or door to throw open, a match to light, the illumination comes.

You can learn more about Kleinberg’s collage poems—and see examples—at her blog, Chocolate Is a Verb. She is also the curator of The Poetry Department, which delivers one poetry event, quotation, or other enticing poetry-related discovery every day.

 

borrowed from Judy’s blog, a photo from the exhibit, “Ink, Paper, Scissors: nature speaks in three voices”

Sheila Sondik

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FISHING A FAMILIAR POND: FOUND POEMS FROM THE YEARLING, Sheila Sondik. Egress Studio Press, 5581 Noon Road, Bellingham, WA 98225, 34 pages, $12, paper, https://www.egressstudio.com/.

What a treat to spend the afternoon with this book. It made me want to read The Yearling again, and it’s a work of art itself–the book, designed by Anita K. Boyle of Egress Studio Press–as well as the poems, which are stunning and spare. This project reminded me of Joanna Thomas‘s work, and made me see new possibilities for playing (in the best sense of the word–like musicians play) with words in my own poetry.

In the Afterword, Sondik describes her process:

My method of composition was very much like that of Tristan Tzara, who wrote his recipe for Dadaist poems in 1920. I literally deconstructed The Yearling. I cut up photocopies of book pages into short phrases , put these strips of words in envelopes, and drew them out of the envelopes at random. I moved the strips around the tabletop until each poem revealed itself.

Some of the poems, like “Penny Baxter,” are closely related to the content of The Yearling, but most of evolved according to their own internal logic. All the words in the poems are contained in the novel.

Again, if I were teaching language arts, I think I’d want to get my students to try this with a book they are reading. It’s truly a different way of seeing the choices made by the original author.

Meanwhile, here’s one poem from this lovely book:

A breeze in canopied limbs

When he awakened in the branch bed,
instead of falling over the edge, he sank.

He thought he might still be dreaming.

A shaft of sunlight, warm and thin
like a raccoon, had been that way.

Wild-cherry grew halfway up the bank.
He swung himself over the fence.

His eyelids fluttered with the starry dripping
of the flutter-mill, the thirsty birds of motion.

The bubbling spring would rise forever.