Monday, 10:00 a.m.
Poet Joyce Sutphen read from her work. She has published three books of poetry: Straight Out of View, Coming Back to the Body, and Naming the Stars. She teaches literature and creative writing at Gustavus Adolphus C0llege in St. Peter, Minnesota.
Sutphen noted that she sees a lot of the rural landscape, driving about a hundred miles each way to and from work.
"Here's a poem that zooms the lens into a place on the farm," she said, reading "Feeding the New Calf," speaking of "the blue-grey afterbirth....," of the calf "singing a desperate duet with his mother."
"He nudges me hard," she said.
She spoke of her father's farm, 160 acres near St. Joe/St. Cloud, Minnesota - "too close to town, developers all around."
"My mother at age 76 has become very political," Sutphen noted. "I wish it could stay the same forever...."
"My father's farm is an apple-blossomer," she said, reading from her poem about the farm. My father's farm is "rolling thunder, a lightning bolt on the horizon,... an icicle, a hillside of white powder.... He cultivates his rows of starlight...."
Flipping between poems and adding a few she hadn't planned to read: "See, if I go of the beaten path, I can get in trouble...."
"How strange it is that we drive on these narrow strips of asphalt," she observed.
"I think we are standing on bones and feathers," she said.
"Light went around in a golden bowl," she said.
"I think something happened here," she said, "and angels held their breath in the sky above...."
Sutphen noted that in the rush and bustle of teaching, "you get to a place where you forget who you are." The situation is not aided by having to read student papers which phrases such as: "one word is inextinguishable from the rest" and "there's a curtain of truth in all he says." In such days, sleep is "a lean skin pinched between midnight and dawn."
"I like to play with words," Sutphen said. "I suppose that's what writers do."
Among the "Things to Watch While You're Driving:" "Trees slipping across the fields, changing places with barns and silos."
"I was kind of in a sonnet thing for a while," she said. "I think I'm emerging from it now."
"Whatever hard rain is gonna fall," she read, "she knows. She's heard it all."
"I woke up with my teeth clenched and a line in my head," she told us. "'You should come with warnings.... There should be a sign which says High Voltage....'"
The light is receding proprotionate to the distance between then and now, she told us.
"I come from a family of nine children," Sutphen said. "I'm the oldest.... My job was to lead the way.... They said 'Don't do what your sister did.'... I was the road not to take. That much I could say for sure...."
She spoke of children - "I took them to the ocean and the mountains, and brought them safely home...."
She read: "Say it is the impulse of the soul to live forever. Say it again."
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