poet Joyce Sutphen

Poem of the Week, by Joyce Sutphen

Posted on by alisonmcghee

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

Poem of the Week, by Joyce Sutphen

Posted on by alisonmcghee

I’d love to see you in one (or both!) of our two remaining fall four-hour Zoom workshops this coming week: The Intuitive Leap on November 14, and Poetry, from Flicker to Flame, on November 17. Click here and scroll down for all the details.

I read it in one sitting, my daughter said about a book. Here, you can have it. I too read it in one sitting and texted her this photo. What did you think? she asked, and I sensed her trepidation – what if I hadn’t liked it?

Broke my heart, I wrote. So beautiful and so painful.

I sensed her relief through the ether. The things and places and people we love can be hard to share, because what if others don’t feel the same way? This is why I can’t be in a book club, and why I usually don’t tell people my favorite movie because it’s often scorned. It hurts to think how I must have hurt people in my life by unknowingly scoffing at the things they hold dear.

Forgive Me John Keats, by Joyce Sutphen

The day we read your “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
I wasn’t able to make them see it.

I couldn’t get them to hear your voice, to
imagine you standing in a bare room,

slowly circling the urn, noticing
the lovers and the piper and the town,

and how it occurred to you that not one
detail would change; no one would ever grow

old there, the leaves would never fall. I tried
to get them to think about Art and Life–

how one is long and the other is short,
how death may be the mother of beauty.

But forgive me John Keats, I failed to let
them see your hand (still warm) held out to us.

Click here for more information about the wondrous poet Joyce Sutphen.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Joyce Sutphen

Posted on by alisonmcghee

I was a girl, walking along the Charles River in Boston on a sunny day, no one else within earshot, when suddenly a young couple got out of a car next to me, the girl in a tight sundress and heels, big smile, radiating friendliness. Her male partner silent, a half-smile on his face.

The girl was full of questions for me. She invited me to join them for coffee, tea, lunch. It’ll be fun, she said. That big smile. But something in me was wary. Something in me knew to smile, excuse myself, and back away.

I’ve never forgotten this five-minute encounter. It’s haunted me for decades, but why? Because they were going to do something terrible to you, I woke up thinking a few weeks ago. They were going to do something indescribably awful, and somehow you knew it.

Last week some friends and I were talking about all the narrow escapes in our lives, all the twists and turns of fate that somehow we’d eluded. Do you think life is just a never-ending series of lucky misses? one of them asked.

My Luck, by Joyce Sutphen

When I was five, my father,
who loved me, ran me over
with a medium-sized farm tractor.

I was lucky though; I tripped
and slipped into a small depression,
which caused the wheels to tread

lightly on my leg, which had already
been broken (when I was three)
by a big dog, who liked to play rough,

and when I was nine, I fell
from the second-floor balcony
onto the cement by the back steps,

and as I went down I saw my life go by
and thought: “This is exactly how
Wiley Coyote feels, every time!”

Luckily, I mostly landed on my feet,
and only had to go on crutches
for a few months in the fifth grade—

and shortly after that, my father,
against his better judgment,
bought the horse I’d wanted for so long.

All the rest of my luck has to do
with highways and ice—things that
could have happened, but didn’t.

Click here for more information about the wondrous Joyce Sutphen.

alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter: my podcast