Poetry Blog: "A Work Day in Hard Times"

Wednesday October 14 — “What you can plan is too small for you to live”

Opening a book of poetry.  Turning pages until a poem catches your attention, stopping to read out loud.   Pretty good way to start a day.  The David Whyte poem that caught my attention today speaks precisely about just such an experience, entering a day.

Middle of the work week, have a blest Wednesday.

john sj

Today’s post  –   What to Remember When Waking

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other
more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?

Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?

— David Whyte (Dec 30, 2013)

– You can listen to the poem, though not read by the poet: http://www.awakin.org/read/view.php?tid=994#sthash.3K2qfP1I.dpuf

p.s.       A lot of time on the road and a lot of company here at home have given way to days with more quiet in them; time to sort out details that accumulate in hustle times.   This morning,  I remember someone asking me to send her/him a digital copy of George Herbert’s “Love Bade me Welcome” (1633).    Here’s the poem, it runs deep and creates a place of stillness if read out loud, as great poems do.   It makes such a difference in my life.   I like to post it now and then.

Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lacked anything.
‘A guest,’ I answer’d,’ worthy to be here’:
Love said, ‘You shall be he.’
‘I, the unkind, ungrateful?  Ah, my dear
I cannot look on Thee.’
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
‘Who made the eyes but I?’
“Truth, Lord, but I have marr’d them; let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.’
‘And know you not,’ says Love, ‘who bore the blame?’
‘My dear, then I will serve.’
‘You must sit down,’ says Love, ‘and taste My meat.’
So I did sit and eat.

George Herbert  1633

Monday, October 10,    “young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy”

Fall Break on our campus,  which means that administrative people come to work but students and faculty can sleep in —  the mid-October Fall Break.  Often, the greater your distance in time or space from the work of teaching and research (student research & faculty research and student-faculty research), particularly if  you’ve just read another dis-spiriting account of immature student behavior, plus a report on the high cost of higher education, the more likely you might be to mumble some at a 4 day weekend when most of the world is working this Monday morning.

As I ruminated about a poem for this particular Monday, I thought of sheer beauty & brilliant colors; Hopkins’  “Hurrahing in the Harvest” came to mind. Hopkins announces autumn to me each year, but it can wait a week or two until the season has matured some more.  But then I remembered why I am thrilled that our McNichols campus, for the second year, now offers this 4 day weekend for students and faculty.   I love it partly because October shows more awe within its beauty than any of the seasons (for me. not a universal I know).  But mostly because, here on our northwest Detroit campus, this 2 day break honors the fatigue of teaching and learning.   The ruminations  led me to Richard Wilbur’s unforgettable poem about a parent paying attention to his daughter’s sheer daring, as she writes her way toward an adulthood where strong winds will blow and sometimes even floods . . .  writes her way into lifelong courage.

So I’m posting it again, an homage to the quotidian courage of students and their demanding, hopeful, attentive teachers.

Not the peak of autumn yet; most of the leaves outside my window are late-summer, worn-down greens.  But there are already traces of frost to promise waves of brilliance on their way.  Yes, please read “The Writer” out loud, with pauses.

Note: Wilbur wrote this in 1921,  2 years into the rolling  shock waves at the horrors of chemical warfare twisting the faces and limbs of maimed soldiers returning from Europe and, way too often, not finding jobs waiting to honor their broken bodies: a half-decade of fear and rage, of  contempt for most immigrants, and for fellow citizens with whom one differed.  A year not unlike the years in which we live now.  I love it that  this poet recognized, in that precise moment of history, the wonder of young human beings risking so much to launch into their futures.

Have a blest day,

john sj

“The Writer”  Richard Wilbur

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.

     richard wilbur  March 1, 1921  –

About Wilbur’s poems, one reviewer for The Washington Post said, “Throughout his career Wilbur has shown, within the compass of his classicism, enviable variety. His poems describe fountains and fire trucks, grasshoppers and toads, European cities and country pleasures. All of them are easy to read, while being suffused with an astonishing verbal music and a compacted thoughtfulness that invite sustained reflection.”  {poets.org}

Wednesday  October 5   Work-day mid-week — time for dancing

An hour or so ago I was still rubbing sleep around my eyes and looking out my window to the city’s morning traffic and early sunshine.  When I heard children chanting somewhere around the campus,  I poked my head out the window and, sure enough, a playful, imprecise column of grade school students were dancing along the sidewalk in front of the university’s McNichols front gate.  I’m guessing they were kids from the Gesu School across the street, part of the Jesuit parish that is a close neighbor to the university.   I kissed my hand to the kids and their teachers; they gave me a playful entrance to this month before the November election that is wearing me out,  wearing lots of us out, with anger and anxiety and moral fatigue.

The children’s improbable marching song still makes me smile.  I had the children in mind when I went looking back to October posts two years ago for some autumn sounds and sights.  Look what I found from two years less 5 days ago?  Can’t imagine a better post to remind the “Work Day in a Hard Time” poetry list’s 2207 members (31 countries) of our various neighborhoods’ capacity for surprise and joy, no matter our burdens.    While you watch/listen to these 4:53 minutes of dancing, pay attention to the captions naming the places where people dance on the video.  I’ve never met “Matt,”  but watching him end the clip dancing alongside his partner and their very young child makes me think good thoughts about him.

I almost always end by encouraging readers to read a poem out loud, with pauses. No need for that today.  If you can listen and watch the video without dancing and laughing or bouncing in your desk chair,  and  . . . .  well behaving like that irregular column of children were doing in front of our campus about 90 minutes ago, maybe you will want to  play it again when you can take another 5 minutes.

Have a blest day,

john sj

Posted Friday, October 10, 2014

To match the two Matisse paintings 1909 & 1910, listen to this 4:53 YouTube  “Where the hell is Matt?”   Treat it like a poem.   Probably an ad you have to click through first.

[jwplayer mediaid=”835″]

Matisse 1909                                                         Matisse 1910
   

Monday October 3

“ . . .  my work
which is standing still and learning to be astonished.”

Today’s post I’m writing at the Maritime Institute just 15 minutes from Baltimore’s airport.   About 80 people have been gathered by the collective national presence of The Sisters of Mercy in the world of higher education.  What is the current state of the health of our culture of work among the 16 colleges and universities — students and faculty and support staff that treat their heritage of  “Mercy” as their soul.  Like conferences everywhere, people meet and talk and listen with each other, over coffee or wine or water.   Our last plenary speaker today, John Collins, C.Ss.R. invited us to listen while he read Mary Oliver’s “The Messenger.”   As many of Mary O’s poems as I’ve posted I had not met this one.

It’s lovely and evocative.  Try reading it out loud.

Back in Detroit Monday evening.

I hope your work week is beginning well.

john sj

Today’s Post    “The Messenger”

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird — equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.
Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect?
Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium. The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all ingredients are here,
which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes, a mouth with which to give shouts of joy to the moth
and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam, telling them all,
over and over, how it is that we live forever.

Friday,  last day in this September –

It’s the last day of the last work week in September, which is, in the United States, the first month of what is called the real election race, the time when many potential voters begin to think seriously about who they will support for the presidency and for other more local elections.   Judging from what I read in media and hear from friends these past weeks, the uncompromising venom in much of September’s public discourse, punctuated by unpredictable violent actions around this country and around the world, wear on people’s inner spirits.  Mine too.  Perhaps there are no better times to read a strong poem and  renew our imaginations.    For me and perhaps for you this is a good time to return to an exquisite  poem and allow the poet’s language to take the reader into intimate tenderness.  When we have eyes to see and ears,  kindness at close range can open ways into courage during a hard time in a hard world.

Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses, to let the cadence and word choices surprise you and restore realism and capacity for the world’s beauty.

I first posted this poem last December when many millions of people were reeling from the bombings in Paris.  I am posting it this morning because, in my own weariness of spirit,  I want to read it again.

Have a blest weekend,
john sj

p.s.  Today & tomorrow here at my university, we invite alums back, to hang out with each other, and check out the remarkable transformations a city and a university well along in a startling process of rebirth. With the many troubles in the country and the world, that encourages me.

Taken from Work Day Post December 4, 2015

Somali-British poet Warsan Shire’s poem evokes intimacy — a crying child lucky enough to have a mom or a dad hold her or him, whispering “where does it hurt?”  Shire enters that moment and opens it out into the wide world and a time marked by brutal absolute convictions that demonize those with whom one differs.  Columnist Omir Safi turned to Shire’s poem while reeling with shock after the Paris massacre in December 2015.

“I watched the outpouring of grief from all over the world, including most of my Muslim friends. I saw hundreds of Facebook profiles being changed to the French flag-themed profile pictures, and thousands of #prayerforParis and #Prayers4Paris tweets.  I also saw, as I knew would come, wounded cries of the heart from friends in Beirut wondering why their own atrocity (43 dead) just one day before — also at the hands of ISIS — had not received any such similar outpouring of grief; friends from Pakistan wondering why there was no option to “check in as safe” during their experiences with violent attacks; friends from Central African Republic wondering why their dead — in the thousands — are the subject of no one’s global solidarity.”

Today’s Post:  “what they did yesterday afternoon”
by warsan shire

they set my aunts house on fire
i cried the way women on tv do
folding at the middle
like a five pound note.
i called the boy who use to love me
tried to ‘okay’ my voice
i said hello
he said warsan, what’s wrong, what’s happened?

i’ve been praying,
and these are what my prayers look like;
dear god
i come from two countries
one is thirsty
the other is on fire
both need water.

later that night

i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?

it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere.

Warsan Shire

posted November 16 2015  on Amber J Kaiser (http://amberjkeyser.com/2015/11/warsan-shire/)

(Somali: Warsan Shire, Arabic: ورسان شرى‎‎, born 1 August 1988)
is a London–based- Somali writer, poet, editor and teacher.^{[1]  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsan_Shire)}

Wednesday September 28  —
That we endure absence, if need be,
Without losing our love for each other.
Without closing our doors to the unknown.

Readers of these posts may have observed lately that these posts are more family-specific than ordinarily.  My dad and mom set things up that way by choosing each other with birthdays 4 days apart and then deciding to marry 3 days later, setting in  motion a family week of rolling celebrations at the cusp of autumn.  Choosing September 28 was taking advantage of coincidence.  Choosing September 1935 was more.  Like their age peers, they entered their thirties battle-hardened by the unforgiving hammering of the world’s Great Depression.  Quite a time to make one of life’s hope-filled choices:  “in sickness and in health, in good times are bad, we will trust our futures to each other.”  Brave for sure and leaving scars that, in the right light, glow.

Marriage is not the only sort of bravery and beauty, and like all the others its moments of wonder are crowded with the plain and ordinary.   Perhaps that’s why people pause some times to exult and dance.  It happens that the University celebrates Homecoming this weekend.  One of the 15 or so events will happen in the McNichols Campus Ballroom at 4:00 Saturday when some of the many couples who met here will renew their vows.  For today’s post I am returning to a life-long source of grace for me,  Denise Levertov’s “Prayer for Revolutionary Love.”  When I read it — out loud, with pauses — these words sometimes bring me close to Hilde and Louie in 1935 and many times to couples who anoint my life with their beauty and bravery.

If you are on the McNichols Road campus for Homecoming, come, married or not. —>   Beauty everywhere, all of it flawed, all of it waiting to be seen and heard and touched.

john sj

Today’s Post – “Prayer for Revolutionary Love”

That a woman not ask a man to leave meaningful work to follow her
That a man not ask a woman to leave meaningful work to follow him.

That no one try to put Eros in bondage
But that no one put a cudgel in the hands of Eros.

That our loyalty to one another and our loyalty to our work
not be set in false conflict.

That our love for each other give us love for each other’s work
That our love for each other’s work give us love for one another.

That our love for each other’s work give us love for one another.
That our love for each other give us love for each other’s work.

That our love for each other, if need be,
give way to absence.  And the unknown.

That we endure absence, if need be,
without losing our love for each other.
Without closing our doors to the unknown.

Denise Levertov
b. October 1923  d. December 1997

Monday – September 26  — A Treasure . . . “Buy the field”

People tell each other stories about what they see, and hear, and touch.  People listen to stories.   This ancient rhythm weaves humans together over and over.   We tell each other how we understand the wide world and little worlds.   At universities we talk about “research.”  And in my faith tradition, we tell each other what we perceive in words from scripture.   Telling and listening help make the world go round.   The passage of time sifts words, sorting out the not very good from the good and the very good.  But in a lifetime of listening you may notice a few sayings so compelling that they hold their shape as clear and unforgettable for decades.

Many people at the university have spent time and tears keeping vigil as Gerry Stockhausen, back in early January, labored with his dying in an Omaha hospital room kept company by some of the close women and men of his life.  After he died, some of Gerry’s soul friends gathered in Omaha, in Milwaukee, and here on campus in Detroit, to anoint him with our love after he had left us.  We told stories about him, sang songs he used to play and sing and lead for worship.  Once I heard Gerry preach a game-changer homily.   I write how I remember what he said then as a way of keeping vigil in these months since he died in that Omaha room.

Have a blest day,

john st sj

Today’s Post – a treasure in a field

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field which someone has found; he hides it again, goes off happy, sells everything he owns and buys the field.”
(Matthew 13:44)

Gerry Stock’s homily, as I remember what he said that day:  “The saying tells of a treasure and a field.  Parables are not long and they reveal their meaning when you pay attention to the words.   This parable does not say, “He dug up the treasure, cleaned off the dirt, and carried the treasure away.”  If you want the treasure, Gerry told us, you have to take the whole field, everything in it, what you treasure and what you wish was not part of the deal.  It’s that way when you fall in love and decide to commit to each other: “For better, for worse”; good days and bad days; tenderness and fights; patience and impatience; grief and joy.  It’s that way, too, when you decide to take on a new job or move to a new city, or commit yourself to a process of reconciliation that invests you more deeply in some real and earthy person or place.”  This is how I remember what Stock said that one day some years ago.  I’ve not been the same since.

p.s.    One of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poems comes to mind thinking of Stock these 8 months since he died and blessed many of this post’s readers with his presence in our memories.

Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses.  That’s especially true with Hopkin’s dense and demanding poems.   His poems open their meaning more after 3 or 4 readings.

  “The Windhover:  To Christ our Lord”

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in
his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy!  then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl
and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,–the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valor and act, oh, air, pride, plume here
Buckle!  And the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it:  shéer plốd makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, a my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

Gerard Manley Hopkins  28 July 1844 – 8 June, 1889

Friday, September 23
“the mystery
that there is anything, anything at all,”

Weather.com predicts a Friday and Saturday of mixed clouds and sun plus a sunny Sunday.    This Friday,  the last work day of this week, opens into its weekend.  Lots of people  — not just at the University, not just in this pulsing-groaning city, in this pulsing-groaning country, in this pulsing-groaning world —  feel fatigue.   Denise Levertov’s poem  speaks of refreshing mystery waiting to be noticed.

The Work Day blog hosts poets of many faiths and some who refrain from religious faith.  Denise Levertov celebrates a creator God whose attention is not easily distracted.  In this mode, she reminds me of Tagore.  Best read the poem out loud, with pauses.

Have a blest weekend.

john sj

Today’s Post  “Primary Wonder”

Days pass when I forget the mystery.
Problems insoluble and problems offering
their own ignored solutions
jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber
along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing
their colored clothes; caps and bells.
And then
once more the quiet mystery
is present to me, the throng’s clamor
recedes:  the mystery
that there is anything, anything at all,
let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,
rather than void: and that, 0 Lord,
Creator, Hallowed one, You still,
hour by hour sustain it.

Denise Levertov
b. October 1923  d. December 1997

Wednesday, September 21

“this is where I want
to love all the things
it has taken me so long
to learn to love.”

This day, 109 years ago,  my grandmother brought my dad into the world with pain and courage: farm people who lived in the far east of Kansas, close to the Missouri River.  Dad lived long enough that we grew to be friends, to tell each other stories across our generational lines:  e.g.,  On rare occasions someone would bring candy from the store and each kid got their portion. But, one of his sisters told me years later, “Louis would eat his quickly and then go beg some more from the rest of us.”  When the family moved to central North Dakota,  he learned to swim in the Hart River by holding onto the horse’s tail;  so he told us.  He learned the responsibilities of an oldest boy so that when, in 1921 the family swapped farms with strangers in Wisconsin, sight unseen from a farm journal (!), his mom and dad packed the Model T to overflowing and drove east with the younger kids.  He, the oldest boy, took their small herd of dairy cows on the train, across the prairie, down through central Wisconsin into Chicago where he and the cows changed trains and headed north through Milwaukee and Green Bay to Marinette.  He was 14.  He told me a story thread once, when he’d gotten up before 5:00 so he could drive 2 hours to where I was staying for vacation .  .  . he picked me up at 7:00 when the Jesuits allowed him to pick up his Jesuit man-child for an overnight at home.   On the ride home he observed that he had worked his way through Marquette U law school in the depths of the Great Depression so that he would not have to spend his life getting up in the pre-dawn to tend cows.  And here he was, getting up on farmer hours to pick up his son.

Stories, lots of them to remember decades later in 2016 when stirred by David Whyte’s poem, in conjunction with a birthday 109 years today.  Is it deeper love to listen to a father’s stories or to live one’s own?  Yes.  All around me, on this university campus, in this city, in this hard-times world,  stories live.  At the university we teach precision skills;  we also teach listening and the conviction that everyone’s stories are worth the telling.

Have a blest day this mid-week.

john sj

p.s.  On their first (blind, set up by mutual friends) date, deep in The Depression in the fall of 1933, my mom told us kids that her date’s best shirt had a frayed collar.  “But he kept it clean,” a promising early sign she thought.  Stories.

dad b. 1907 – d. 1980;  mom b. 1903 – d. 2005

“THE HOUSE OF BELONGING”

by David Whyte

I awoke
this morning
in the gold light
turning this way
and that

thinking for
a moment
it was one
day
like any other.

But
the veil had gone
from my
darkened heart
and
I thought

it must have been the quiet
candlelight
that filled my room,

it must have been
the first
easy rhythm
with which I breathed
myself to sleep,

it must have been
the prayer I said
speaking to the otherness
of the night.

And
I thought
this is the good day
you could
meet your love,

this is the gray day
someone close
to you could die.

This is the day
you realize
how easily the thread
is broken
between this world
and the next

and I found myself
sitting up
in the quiet pathway
of light,

the tawny
close grained cedar
burning round
me like fire
and all the angels of this housely
heaven ascending
through the first
roof of light
the sun has made.

This is the bright home
in which I live,
this is where
I ask
my friends
to come,
this is where I want
to love all the things
it has taken me so long
to learn to love.

This is the temple
of my adult aloneness
and I belong
to that aloneness
as I belong to my life.

There is no house
like the house of belonging.

“On Being,” with Krista Tippett  April, 7 2016

Monday, September 19-  ” To attach oneself to place is to surrender to it, and suffer with it.”

Why post Kathleen Norris in almost the same words as last year’s September 16 post?   In September, lots of people in university worlds suck air, walk too fast, and try to manage and big and little start-ups.   Then too, the first Clinton – Trump debate shows itself just over the horizon.  Lots of people scramble and walk too fast, not just on campuses.   Maybe that’s why Kathleen Norris leads this week.   She writes words that open deep into ordinary living.   In 1974, after learning her way into New York City’s world of poetry with mentoring from the legendary Betty Kray at the Academy of American Poets (http://www.nytimes.com/1987/11/24/obituaries/elizabeth-kray-patron-and-friend-of-poets-and-their-art-dies-at-71.html) Kathleen and her husband shocked their peers by moving to Lemmon in northwestern South Dakota where Kathleen had inherited the family home of her grandmother.  They stayed a long time.

In 1993, her Dakota: A Spiritual Geography took the literary world by storm.  Took me by storm too.  If a book of micro essays, some only half a page, ever approaches the taut, lean focus of strong poetry, for me this is the book.  In those South Dakota years she became friends with vast horizons, and with the Benedictine monks at St. John’s Monastery in Minnesota.  She’s written several memoirs about the intersection of her secularity with the roots of Benedictine prayer and wisdom.

Think of these short quotes from Dakota as poems.   Best to read them out loud, with pauses.

Have a blest day.

john sj

Today’s Post:  Four texts from Dakota

“Once, when I was describing to a friend from Syracuse, New York, a place on the plains that I love, a ridge above a glacial moraine with a view of almost fifty miles, she asked, “But what is there to see?” The answer, of course, is nothing. Land, sky, and the ever-changing light.”

“Maybe the desert wisdom of the Dakotas can teach us to love anyway, to love what is dying, in the face of death, and not pretend that things are other than they are. The irony and wonder of all of this is that it is the desert’s grimness, its stillness and isolation, that brings us back to love.”

“To be an American is to move on, as if we could outrun change. To attach oneself to place is to surrender to it, and suffer with it.”

“For me, walking in a hard Dakota wind can be like staring at the ocean: humbled before its immensity, I also have a sense of being at home on this planet, my blood so like the sea in chemical composition, my every cell partaking of air. I live about as far from the sea as is possible in North America, yet I walk in a turbulent ocean. Maybe that child was right when he told me that the world is upside-down here, and this is where angels drown.”

meadowlark on a fence,   Fog Basin, SD  2008

Kathleen Norris (born in Washington, D.C. on July 27, 1947) is a best-selling poet and essayist. Her parents, John Norris and Lois Totten, took her as a child to Hawaii, where she graduated from Punahou Preparatory School in 1965. After graduating from Bennington College in Vermont in 1969, Norris became arts administrator of the Academy of American Poets, and published her first book of poetry two years later.^[1] In 1974 she inherited her grandparents’ farm in Lemmon, South Dakota, moved there with her husband David Dwyer, joined Spencer Memorial Presbyterian church, and discovered the spirituality of the Great Plains.^[2] She entered a new, non-fictional phase in her literary career after becoming a Benedictine oblate at Assumption Abbey   ND in 1986, and spending extended periods at Saint John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota.^[3] Since the death of her husband in 2003, Norris has transferred her place of residence to Hawaii, though continuing to do lecture tours on the mainland.

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