Poetry

Poetry, like visual art, has always been a pathway for me to find meaning and resonance in moments of experience.  Bellingham, Washington, where I’ve lived since 2008, has given me much inspiration from its natural beauty and support from a vibrant community of poets.  In 2010, I began the practice of writing haiku, tanka, and other Japanese short form poetry.  My poetry is published widely in journals and anthologies.

Chapbooks

Lighting Up the Duff
A collection of Golden Shovels, published by The Poetry Box 2024

In a Golden Shovel, a line from another poet is hidden, one word at a time, down the right margin of the poem. I’ve always loved word puzzles, so writing each line towards its end-word is an enjoyable challenge for me, full of surprises along the way. The poets quoted in this chapbook are ones I began to read in my twenties and have revisited often ever since.


The 26 short poems in Sheila Sondik’s Lighting Up the Duff are exquisitely crafted homages to her poetic influences, including Linda Pastan, Maxine Kumin, Kenneth Rexroth, and Terrance Hayes, whose invented form, the Golden Shovel, rules. Although they do not ignore the despair endemic to our times—naysayers, ecological disaster, all doom and zoom—the poems sway like an artist between landscape’s dark shapes and the hours of light, steadily urging us toward hope. Attending to these poems, like tending green plants, is food for our souls.

—Bethany Reid, author of The Pear Tree: elegy for a farm

These poems, more magic windows than weighty shovels, offer encouragement, solace, humor, and intimate company . . . I’ve spent grateful hours in this collection’s shimmering grove, and I’ll walk there again.

—Jed Myers, author of Learning to Hold

AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE AT:

Sample Poem

Dream Work
      after Kenneth Rexroth

Hard to remember there was a time
when the time there was was
enough. On Sundays I
did the crossword and walked
across slippery cobblestones in
an ivied city. That February
was icy and April brought rain.

I return there in my
dreams. They roil in my head
when the moon and Jupiter are full.
Do you need more proof of
the sleeping organ’s industry its
drive to manufacture its own
music based on the rhythms
of the Wobbly hymns we used to like?
My brain, traveling snugged in a
skull, a walnut wrinkling in its shell.

Fishing a Familiar Pond: Found Poems from The Yearling

Fishing a Familiar Pond Chapbook

Fishing a Familiar Pond is a chapbook of 30 poems “found” by Sheila Sondik by cutting up and rearranging the text of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ classic novel, The Yearling. The poems are an extended meditation on the themes of the novel, including the loss of childhood innocence, our essential bond with the natural world, self-reliance, and the complexity of familial love.


Sheila wrote the poems while participating in The Found Poetry Review’s Pulitzer Remix project in April 2013. She was one of 85 poets who posted poems gleaned from the text of Pulitzer Prize-winning novels on the project website.

Fishing a Familiar Pond was published by Egress Studio Press in June 2013. Poet and book designer Anita K. Boyle designed it and hand-sewed the binding.

Sample Poem

After the flood

silence instead of tumult

light the color of pomegranate blossoms
sifted through the gray, wet atmosphere

The two dogs pushed out of the cabin
Jody and the fawn were next

the air was cool and sweet and gracious

the fawn tasted the air with its velvet nostrils
pricked up its ears and, with twinkling heels,
bounded over the gate

far away
a hawk cried shrilly
and was gone

Links to selected publications of my poetry on the internet:

My poems won awards in the Sue C. Boynton Poetry Contest in 2023 and 2022. Here are videos of me reading them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Oiag1M1WvM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGxKMR1OZkE

Silver Birch Press series on Mothers and Spices and Seasonings:
https://silverbirchpress.wordpress.com/2024/04/13/dialogue-with-some-of-my-mothers-sayings-by-sheila-sondik-all-about-my-mother-series/
https://silverbirchpress.wordpress.com/2023/12/09/hopes-kitchen-by-sheila-sondik-spices-seasonings-series/

Jacob Salzer featured me in his Haiku Poet Interviews blog in April 2022:
https://haikupoetinterviews.wordpress.com/2022/04/01/sheila-sondik/

My reading of a poem published in CALYX
https://www.calyxpress.org/free-app-by-sheila-sondik/

A reminiscence of our family vacations:
https://willawawjournal.com/sheila-sondik/

Three Golden Shovels in Pontoon Poetry:
https://pontoonpoetry.com/2022/01/28/looking-glass-the-joy-of-cooking-the-understory/

Some haiku published over the years on “tinywords”:
https://tinywords.com/2013/11/29/15449/
https://tinywords.com/2014/02/14/15701/
https://tinywords.com/2015/03/26/18449/

Perhaps my favorite tanka:
https://neverendingstoryhaikutanka.blogspot.com/2018/06/one-mans-maple-moon-night-tanka-by.html?m=0

Another tanka with judges’ comments appears in Honorable Mentions on this page: https://www.tankasocietyofamerica.org/tsa-contest/past-winners-and-judges-comments/2018-winners

Echidna Tracks, an online Australian journal published these haiku:
https://echidnatracks.com/tag/sheila-sondik/