Poem of the Week, by Joyce Sutphen
Registration for our January 8-13 2024 Write Together session is in full swing. I’d love to see you in this one hour, twice-daily workshop in which we all quietly write together from a guided prompt. It’s a beautiful way to usher in the new year.
For many years I taught creative writing at a non-traditional university for working adults, many the first in their family to go to college, many returning to college after a decades-long break. In the beginning we gave no grades. Instead, we hand-wrote long narrative evaluations of our students’ work. These narratives took forever to compose–like, forever–but when done right they were profoundly reflective documents.
I used to sit late at night with a pen in my hand, picturing this student and that, re-reading their stories and poems and memoirs. If you’re going to be an artist you have to push yourself in ways you’re scared to. You have to experiment, challenge and challenge and challenge yourself. You have to be fearless, and how can you be fearless if you’re afraid you won’t get an A? To this day I refuse to grade my students’ creative writing.
Things You Didn’t Put On Your Resumé, by Joyce Sutphen
How often you got up in the middle of the night
when one of your children had a bad dream,
and sometimes you woke because you thought
you heard a cry but they were all sleeping,
so you stood in the moonlight just listening
to their breathing, and you didn’t mention
that you were an expert at putting toothpaste
on tiny toothbrushes and bending down to wiggle
the toothbrush ten times on each tooth while
you sang the words to songs from Annie, and
who would suspect that you know the fingerings
to the songs in the first four books of the Suzuki
Violin Method and that you can do the voices
of Pooh and Piglet especially well, though
your absolute favorite thing to read out loud is
Bedtime for Frances and that you picked
up your way of reading it from Glynnis Johns,
and it is, now that you think of it, rather impressive
that you read all of Narnia and all of the Ring Trilogy
(and others too many to mention here) to them
before they went to bed and on the way out to
Yellowstone, which is another thing you don’t put
on the resumé: how you took them to the ocean
and the mountains and brought them safely home.
Click here for more information about poet Joyce Sutphen. Things You Didn’t Put On Your Resumé is from her book Carrying Water to the Field, University of Nebraska Press, 2019.
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter
Last month I was in the foothills of the Adirondacks, poking around my parents’ giant vegetable garden (the thing could supply a small farmer’s market) talking tomatoes and beans with my father. Every summer and fall growing up we had an assembly line in the kitchen, washing and chopping and blanching and bagging zucchini and corn and beans and all kinds of squash for the freezer. Like most of the men I grew up around, my father always wears a hat (cap for everyday, hat-hat for solemn occasions), goes to the diner every morning, knows how to drive a tractor and change its oil, and has spent his life working hard and helping his neighbors and voting in elections. Joyce Sutphen’s elegant, fierce poems bring me back to my childhood. Some of them, like this one below, bring me to tears.
Alison McGhee 