calculus

9/19/13

With furrowed eyebrows

Pencils scribble on paper,

Fingers tap numbers

Wrong answers emerge

All the students get restless

Boys play on their phones

Girls pick at their nails,

Boredom rises in math class,

All eyes on the clock.

Joyce Stuphen has a very clear voice in all of her poems. She uses short sentences and punctuation so there are many breaks and pauses in her poems. What I really liked is that her two poems “How to Listen” and “Just for the Record” are set next to each other and at first I thought it was weird because I did not think they related to each other at all. So I just looked at how they were about different things yet how they were written was so similar. But the more I looked at them the more I realized the connections between the two. One was about how to listen and get the most of the conversation, and the other was about explaining the mistaken stereotype about her father as a farmer. The listening poem mentally prepares you and gets you thinking about how to listen and what listening really means, and then she transitions into a poem where she wants people to listen to her real story, not just assume a story from a stereotype.

After reading Stuphen’s work, you can tell she has perfected the idea of showing over telling. This is very present in her poem “Some Glad Morning,” when she describes the sky, clouds, and sun like a baseball game: “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.” Instead of just telling what happens she really shows how it looks which effortlessly creates a specific image into the readers mind. She also uses this show vs. tell in her poem “Secret Agent Man,” she paints a picture that evokes emotion to the reader making it a fun interesting poem to read. I really enjoy Stuphen’s writing voice and I am very interested to learn more about it. My question for her is, how long did it take you to find your writing voice? Are you still revising it?

May not know that she runs to relax and get away from the world

Airplanes scare her though she likes going places

Rain and thunderstorms are her favorite; she loves the smell and feeling of it

Yogi!!!

Makes her day when she has a turkey Panini from bread and chocolate

Extremely quiet voice but loves to talk, and talks a lot

Rosy cheeks, fair skin and blue piercing eyes, bubbly with a kick of stubbornness 

Really close to her sister and share the same friends, but her sister sometimes thinks that she’s

her mom

In reality she’s short but believes she’s tall because her sisters so small

Laughs a lot and is a very loyal friend

Weekends

Dark nights

Comfortable,

But forever nervous,

Foggy minds and racing hearts, rules

Broken.

My parking permit with revisions

My Parking Permit

On the back of my car is a license plate, and

A window paired with a wiper.

On the tinted window there is a small sticker

This sticker represents that I am one.

I am one of the 500 people that can park in that lot,

Other people who don’t belong cannot park there.

This lot belongs to St. Paul Academy,

A private college preparatory high school.

This high school that ensures I will be able to go to college,

Other schools do not ensure this

I am guaranteed a future beyond high school

And I am privileged for this

My Parking Permit: Revised

My mom always tells me to “look behind you, not in front,”

It is easy to get caught looking ahead,

I scare myself into thinking I am in the back.

So my mom tells me to look behind myself

Which reminds me I am ahead.

I am ahead.

I am guaranteed an education beyond high school

My college preparatory high school enables me this life.

This privileged life that most people will not see.

I am able to park in a parking lot,

Designed and assigned for students,

Because I have the permit to do so.  

As yellow turns to grey

My room was yellow

It was bright yellow with palm trees that my mom and I had painted

I invited my friends to see my new and improved room while I sat back and proudly watched their reactions

This memory was nine years ago

Over the past year I slowly began to loath my yellow walls

Comparing them to the beige, grey and white walls of my peers

“I’m almost 18 and I still have palm trees on my walls”

I had years of hoarded knickknacks coated my mantle, radiator and dresser

For so long I was unable to let go of these little treasures,

But I learned to let go, and now my walls are grey.