Poetry Night with Joyce Sutphen & Connie Wanek

In her new collection, former Minnesota poet laureate Joyce Sutphen shares a collection of musings full of insight and whimsy on the conundrums of poetic art. She begins by asking herself why poetry exists, what it does for us, and why we’re afraid of it, and concludes, many poems later, with one in which she thanks those who have driven through the dark to attend a reading. In between, there are many unexpected shifts in mood and focus. Some of the poems are deeply personal, as she reminisces about good times with friends and fellow poets—a few of them no longer with us. Other poems take the form of an instruction manual, suggestive rather than dogmatic, offering advice on “the basic plot” and “the art of revision,” for example. Sutphen touches on the pleasures of writing poems and the value of memorizing the poems of others. It’s a world of words in service to observation and emotion, conveyed with the light touch of a late-night fireside conversation at an artist’s colony. But it’s also a world of microwaves and crossword puzzles, birthdays and praying, funerals and memory loss, wildness and mystery.

Joyce Sutphen was raised on a farm in Stearns County, Minnesota. She is a professor emeritus of English at Gustavus Adolphus College and served as Minnesota’s poet laureate from 2011 to 2021. She is the author of numerous books of poetry, among them That Other Life, This Long Winter, and Carrying Water to the Field: New and Selected Poems.

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In her new collection, poet Connie Wanek reflects on the recent death of her mother, continues the series of Mrs. God poems that enlivened her previous collection, Consider the Lilies, and ensnares us in the kind of whimsical meandering the deeper significance of which often strikes us only after the fact. In “Tennis Lessons,” for example, she relates the various instructions being given by the “pro,” many of which—“Relax,” “Don’t Think,” “Remove imperfections”—could easily carry a deeper meaning. The poem arrives at a hilarious conclusion: “Ideally, after the lesson I could be someone else altogether.” In another poem an old friend appears in the poet’s dreams to tell her she’s started smoking again—something she hadn’t dared to do when she was alive. Wanek shares her mother’s advice about medicine—you could tell how well it was working by how much it hurt. There are gentle words, too, about her father, a soldier in his youth, who chose to be buried in a distant cemetery with his comrades rather than close to home, near his family. Well, it was free. Along with the rich detail and understated humor, there’s a subtlety and ease in these lines that’s rare. Wanek is confident that we’ll catch her drift.

Connie Wanek has lived in New Mexico and Minnesota. For a quarter century she lived in Duluth near Lake Superior, where she worked at the Duluth Public Library and restored old houses. She has two children and two grandchildren. Her most recent books are Rival Gardens: New and Selected Poems from the University of Nebraska Press, Consider the Lilies: the Mrs. God poems, and a book of poetry for young readers, Marshmallow Clouds, co-written with Ted Kooser and published by Candlewick Books, which won the CLiPPA Award in the UK.

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