Joyce Sutphen Response

Joyce Sutphen’s poems are very easy to read. You read it once and you grasp the main concept. In her poem, “Listen”, it’s about how to listen. Her poem “Some Glad Morning”, is about spring coming one morning. This poem is one f my favorites of hers. It’s very pretty and my favorite stanza is “The clouds took up their positions in the deep stadium of the sky, gloving the bright orb of the sun before they pitched it over the horizon.”  The theme and the message of her poems are displayed in the title. Her poems speak of her life on the farm. Poems like “Girl on a Tractor” and “Just for the Record.” The poem “Just for the Record” is about stereotypes about her father being a farmer not being true. She writes, “No bib overalls over bare shoulders… he wore his dark suit as gracefully as Cary Grant.” In “Girl on a Tractor” she writes about being a girl working on a farm, “when it came time to work in the fields, I learned to drive a tractor at just the right speed.” She grew up on a farm in Minnesota so it’s cool that her poems relate to something so close to home. She illustrates that not all poems have to have double meanings. Sometimes poems can be beautiful by just being simple. I really enjoyed her style of writing. I’m a beginning poet but in the future I hope my poems can end up being similar to her style of writing and imagery.