A list poem

How to ride a motorcycle

First, let a small nephew or neighbor,

preferably a boy around five or six,

sit in the seat.  Watch his face and know

your eyes will be that wide
when the ground moves beneath you.  

On the road, learn to scoot through others’ blindspots

To stay back from sand blown or gravel bounced

from semis on the freeway

To avoid Buicks and Oldsmobiles and school buses

Driven by old men with side sunglasses who stop without reason

Pay particular attention to the head turn

or subtle start of abrupt, unsignaled lane changes.

Don’t imagine front tires exploding

and the garage sale road rash and much much worse

or deer bounding from ditches.        

And certainly don’t remember your physician assistant neighbor’s

emergency room cautionary tales,

or the word ‘donor mobile’

or the arguments with your wife about helmets

or  the rear wheel spinning in spring sand, the rear end swerving just before you found yourself floating above the horizontal bike sliding across the double yellow line on that curve.

Focus on the engine’s steady thrum instead of the irregular ticking sound

on the sudden appearance of horizons from hilltops

on the coolness in dips or river bottoms

on the physics of friction holding tires to tar

(and on sand or water or oil that reduce friction).

Marvel at the easy lean that bends the bike into an arc,

at sunsets reflected in small square mirrors

at the two finger downward salute of grizzled leathered riders

at clutches of  Harleys outside bars named for numbered highways

in the looks from the land bound while you come nearabout to flying.

First visiting poet

Although she visibly cringed each time I repeated the phrase "Minnesota's poet laureate," Joyce Sutphen's conversations with both classes yesterday demonstrated how her words earned that recognition.  In her Minnesota way, she first acknowledged a former student now colleague, Matt Rasmusson whose first book of poetry was nominated for a National Book Award yesterday.  I'll start by noting a few of her thoughts to help us remember them:

Poetry is 'language condensed'
"Write what matters"
Good poems "leave room to respond"
"Think of the poet as a potter who learns forms and and skills."
'Ekphrastic' meaning 'talking image' is a poem about a picture.

She also talked about her poetic voice in the way we have been and identified her voice as: terse, narrative, elegiac memoir that focuses on topics of love, loss, relationships and philosophy.  I particularly appreciated the way she showed how the rhythms of sonnets appear in her poems as looser versions of rhyme and meter.  For example, she executes Alexander Pope's line "The sound must seem an echo to the sense" in these opening lines-

The Problem Was

The problem was a different sense of form.

He was all couplets, heroic and closed;

I always wanted to carry on, one line

into the next, never reaching an end,

or, if I did, imagining it might be

the possible beginning to a different train

of thought, which might lead to the exact

opposite of what I was saying now. 

Joyce Sutphen

I'm excited to announce our first visiting poet will be Joyce Sutphen on Thursday September 19th.

Read her bio and poems here and here and here, and an interview w/ more poems here.

Then, write a 250+ word journal response that connects particular images or topics or approaches in her work with quotes that show this.  This should be something that prepares you to ask a specific, well prepared question in class.   This is due on Tuesday, Sept. 17th.  We'll discuss her work with writing groups and the whole class in preparation for her visit.  See my response to this poem below.

Death Inc.

Without his scythe and crooked knife  
he’s simply an ordinary guy.

You see him at the bus stop,
and he’s reading a folded newspaper,

or he’s in the car next to you 
on the freeway—first he passes

you, and then you pass him.
It goes on like that for a long time,

but though you glance over at him,
he never looks back at you,

which (it turns out) is a good thing.
All the while you’ve been 

waiting for the carriage to stop
(kindly) at your door—the carriage

that would take you past the schoolyard
and the fields, accompanied by 

the gentle clip-clop of horse’s hooves,
but suddenly you realize he might be

driving an eighteen wheeler, high on
meth, tires screeching. Yes— it could

happen like that, but it’s just 
as likely he might be the shadow

of a tree you planted years ago
falling across the green lawn.

In this poem Sutphen addresses the topic of death as in several other poems but handles it somewhat more playfully.  She also alludes to Emily Dickinson's famous poem "Because I could not stop for Death" (Gwynn 159).  As in the poem "Death Becomes Me," the poem makes death familiar and close, something more mundane than menacing.  In that poem the speaker traces the effects of age on her own body attributing them to the presence of death.  The poem above also notes death's proximity, but adds a comic element to Death's juxtaposing the classic image with robe and scythe with some random guy reading a paper at a bus stop.  Clearly, those guys with the black socks and bald spots reading the sports section aren't very threatening. Her next image of death as the person you notice but never quite acknowledge in a car pacing you on the freeway moves toward something equally familar but a bit more awkward. Having familiarized death with the two images, the poem continues using the 2nd person pronoun 'you' that places the reader near these representatives of death, but shifts to images of carriage, schoolyard, fields and horses that connect this poem with Dickinson's similar visitation.  For an English teacher (and perhaps some of you) "Death Becomes Me" is quite familiar, and her playful allusion fits and extends the light but accepting voice of that poem. My favorite image here, however is the next one that juxtaposes the high literary reference with a much lower contemporary one of semi drivers on meth- a guy I might have seen on my commute today, really.  She ends acknowledging such a death isn't likely, and returns to a more traditional shadow image at the end, but also makes it the shadow of a tree in your front yard. Compared to the more reflective quality of most of her poems, I found myself enjoying this playfulness.  Now, if I could just understand the title.  I don't quite see how a corporate version death fits here.  Any ideas?