Journal Response

Joyce Sutphens nature poems have some of her best work in them. The way she uses her line breaks much like another form of punctuation is always something that catches the eye first but her best skills lie in other areas. She is fantastic at describing and giving objects/specific things voices through a function they don’t have. Such as in Sutphes poem ‘How to listen’ where she writes, ”Listen with your eyes, as if the story you are hearing is happening right now.” Something about the idea of listening with your eyes gave that one stanza a lot of visual power and mental capability in imagining how to ‘truly listen.’ Another place she gives another meaning to something we take as literal. In her poem ‘crossroads’ she writes, “ The second half of my life will be ice breaking up on the river, rain soaking into the fields, a hand held out, a fire. And smoke going upward, always up.” In this stanza she seems to describe the end of the second part of her life which is death. The breaking of the ice on the river represents the final crack that allows death to seep in, but there was a more powerful line here. The line ‘and smoke going upward, always up’ gave a very strong mental image of the smoke almost representing what we imagine a spirit to look like rising into the heavens.