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.

Deborah Woodard

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Photo by Filipe Delgado from Pexels

HUNTER MNEMONICS, Deborah Woodard. Hemel Press, 2008, illustrated by Heide Hinrichs, $6 paper, http://www.4h-club.org/hemel.html.

It seemed like cheating to include  this slim chapbook of only 5 prose poems in my month-long read-a-thon, so I read it twice. The images are dream-like, or they are like images drawn from a fairy tale you heard as a child and have never since been able to find. It casts a spell. Certain motifs repeat and repeat, poem to poem, like stones you might step on to cross a creek. It immerses you in something, but when you emerge, you’re not quite sure what it was.

I heard Woodard read these, and afterwards I couldn’t get them out of my head, so I contacted her and she gave me a copy. Does it depict a walk in the woods as a child, to a town that no longer exists? Or is it a walk in imagination? Here’s an excerpt from the first poem:

It was quiet here, a silence blunt and practical that tied its laces. And Al’s
was no name but a joke the trapper painted across the cover of the well.
I found tin cans and a pair of antlers that almost brought back the tang of your shot,
the monotony of its tuft of smoke. When we got in the clear, we’d reached the cabin.
I imagined red plaid beckoning us forward, milkweed’s limbs akimbo.
But I didn’t understand why Jerusalem was just a few miles up the road,
or why the town was weaker than its well. So I drew down a flap of the grey sky.

Woodard teaches at Richard Hugo House in Seattle, and I have a not-so-secret desire to take a class from her.

Karen Whalley

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MY OWN NAME SEEMS STRANGE TO ME, Karen Whalley. Off the Grid Press, 2019, 65 pages, $16 paper, www.grid-books.org.

I have known Karen Whalley for at least 30 years and consider her one of my dearest friends. All the more amazing, then, that her poems continue to surprise me, and make me swoon. But don’t take my word for it. To quote the late Tony Hoagland (himself, a national treasure) from the book’s cover:

These beautifully clear, meditative poems have it all; dexterously situated in daily experience, they meet with the difficulties of lived life, with a deep, often heartbreakingly honest and humane insightfulness. Fluent, full of breakthroughs and surprises, these extraordinary poems never seem to falter; Whalley is an extraordinary poet, and this is a book in a thousand.

I had a terrible time trying to pick out just one poem to share. This is the first poem in the book:

Naming It

Before dawn, from the gully where the creek abides
A bird whose name I do not know practices
Its five-note song, and I am a girl again
Sitting at the piano repeating a simple scale.

The bird sings, the sun rises, as if there were a connection,
And my feet do not reach the pedals as my hands
Spread, like wings, across the keys. The wound

Is easier to name: the father did not love,
And after that it was the husband, but the bird and the piano
Remind me of that man who read the same book
For thirty years, memorizing each sentence

As a way to perfect his understanding
Of the book whose name I never learned.
I would see him each morning on the corner
Waiting for the bus, the book spread

Across his hands, like wings at rest, peering into the pages
With his glasses slipping farther down his nose
So he had to tilt his head back as he stood there–

Dissolved into his book, like the bird dissolving
Into morning, the way the piano dissolves into the box of memory.

Crysta Casey (1952-2008)

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GREEN CAMMIE, Crysta Casey. Floating Bridge Press, 909 NE 43rd St, #205, Seattle, WA 98105, 2010. 47 pages, $12 paper, www.floatingbridgepress.org.

Many years ago now, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Washington, I enrolled in an evening class to study the writing of poetry with Professor Nelson Bentley. It was not the usual sort of class. Beginning, intermediate, and advanced poets were all thrown in together, along with a few graduate students. And there were some former students who wandered in and out. Crysta Casey was among this latter group. An unforgettable human being. Poetry, she said, was saving her. Reading her book today took me back.

The Sane and the Insane 

My thoughts are more exciting
when I’m not on meds.
On medication, I think
of vacuuming the carpet
to get rid of any bugs
Bonnie may have left
when she curled into a fetal position
on the rug last Sunday.
At three a.m., she lit
three cigarettes at the same time,
put them in the ashtray
and watched them burn,
said, “Kaw, globble,”
so I called 911. The medics were nice
when they took her to the hospital.
She put on her boots
without socks, did not lace them–
I had to give a poetry reading
the next night. “Don’t rock,”
I reminded myself, “that’s a dead giveaway.”
I think it was Robert Graves who wrote
in The White Goddess, “The difference
between the insane and poets,
is that poets write it down.”