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.