Please stop

Please stop

You’re sweet,

But I don’t care.

You cannot convince me

From my own truth I’ve created.

My truth.  

Relief

Relief

Hot tears slide down my face,

My hands tremble to answer the phone.

Deep breaths to slow my pace.

The sweet voice talks, I whimper and moan

I can’t seem to focus

Tears return so I look at the sky

In a moment’s notice

A bird shaped cloud had caught my eye  

I can’t help but smile,

I am released from anxiety.

Context: I had a really bad volleyball game and my coaches were really mad at me so I began to have a panic attack on my way home, my boyfriend called me to try to calm me down but it wasn’t working and as I was driving I saw this cloud shaped perfectly like a bird and I just felt good and I wasn’t worried about anything anymore at that moment.

Poem of the Day

Snowball
by Shel Silverstein
I made myself a snow ball as perfect as could be.
I thought I'd keep it as a pet and let it sleep with me.
I made it some pajamas and a pillow for it's head.
Then, last night it ran away.
But first -- it wet the bed.

My lovely stress outlet

My Lovely Stress Outlet

Cluttered utensils tap measuring cups,

White sweeteners dance in sunlight singing through the windows,

My playful symphony.

Smooth vanilla attracts sweet rose water

Delicious neutrons and delightful protons collide

My candied chemistry.

Silky cream and sugar slowly condense

So light and so fluffy, as if the frosting could float

My cotton-candy clouds.

Precisely prepared I gaze at my art

Mindlessly lost in the curved peaks and dim shadows

My lovely stress outlet

Chris Martin Poetry

In Chris Martin’s poetry one thing that stood out to me as an audience, is that he uses synecdoche, but more specifically he uses body parts like fingers, hands, and skin to represent the relationships between the characters. I first noticed this in his poem “Time,” he creates this imagery between the characters by saying things like, “swollen fingers,” “we gather fingers into a knot.” Another place where this is seen is in his poem “Surviving Desires,” by stating “in skin as sometimes,” and once again in “The Science Fiction of Color” when he states “find my fingers twittering.” Using this type of device lets the reader see the relationships, and lets the reader create the scene in their head instead of just saying it. He is showing, not telling which in his short stanzas increases the power of his poem. I really enjoyed Matin’s poetry because I found them very intriguing and fascinating to read, I thought it was fun to subconsciously see the devices he used to create the images in my mind.  

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?