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?