FEATURE
December 2006

Joyce Sutphen


THE CORTLAND REVIEW

E
SSAY
Tony Barnstone
  "A Manifesto on the Contemporary Sonnet: A Personal Aesthetics"
Tony Barnstone considers the sonnet from its formal beginnings to its evolution into the twenty-first century, including some generative techniques for sonnets of your own


S
ONNETS
Tony Barnstone

Willis Barnstone
Lorna Knowles Blake
Kim Bridgford
Billy Collins
Leisha Douglas
Barry Ergang
Ross A. Gay
Soheila Ghaussy This marks an author's first online publication
Miranda Girard This marks an author's first online publication
Myrna Goodman This marks an author's first online publication
Susan Gubernat
Heidi Hart
Jay Leeming This marks an author's first online publication
Anne Marie Macari

Patricia O'Hara
John Poch
Michael Salcman
Patricia Smith
A.E. Stallings

Gerald Stern
Joyce Sutphen
Jeet Thayil
Meredith Trede This marks an author's first online publication

 

Joyce Sutphen's first book of poetry, Straight Out of View (Beacon Press, 1995), won the Barnard New Women's Poets Prize. Her second, Coming Back to the Body (Holy Cow! Press, 2000), was a finalist for a Minnesota Book Award, and her third, Naming the Stars (2004), also from Holy Cow! Press, won the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry. In 2005, Red Dragonfly Press published a fine press edition of Fourteen Sonnets. She holds a Ph.D. in Renaissance Drama and teaches literature and creative writing at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota.

From The 6th Floor    


I'm sitting in the air, where there once was
nothing; now I'm looking down on people
walking on a plaza which was never
there. I could be sitting on a steeple

(just as likely) but I'm not; I'm walking
through the wind—where it goes, I do not know.
Once I saw clear through these walls; shocking
now to think of it, how the world is so

capricious that it changes air to brick
and cloud to window sill. Everything
gives way to progress—such a rhetoric
of loss, such a way to stop us singing.

If they build it, we will climb into the air
and forget that blue was everywhere.

 

 

Joyce Sutphen: Poetry
Copyright ©2006 The Cortland Review December 2006 FeatureThe Cortland Review