When my friend and mentor Leslie Norris died on April 6, 2006, I was unable to attend his funeral or participate in Irreantum’s “Readers Write” feature addressing the topic, ”Leslie Norris Among the Mormons.”  With this post I’m making up for lost time.  It runs long, and I beg your indulgence, dear reader. 

If we pay any attention at all to where we’re going and to what we’re doing, we might meet someone who changes everything for us.  Someone whose presence tunes our language, so that we become better spoken, more lyrical in thought and belief, and much deepened in feeling.  Someone who makes us wonder what might have become of us had he or she not come along.

For me, Leslie Norris is such a person.  I met him at a Rocky Mountain Writer’s Convention, hosted by BYU, back in the early 80s.  If I remember correctly, he was the featured speaker along with William Stafford (William Stafford — another beacon of wonder and fine language).  I acted as Norris’s “girl Friday,” seeing to it he broke from consultations to make it to lunch, helping him keep track of the schedule, “goferring” fer ‘im, etc.

After meeting him, I had the audacity (where would grad students be without it?) to review his volume of poems, Walking the White Fields: Collected Poems, for BYU’s student literary journal, Century II (now Inscape).  In the review, I said,

Walking the White Fields is a flock of gently exquisite perceptions with the sharp teeth of skill nipping at their heels.  The neatness and gentility of these poems makes them very approachable, and the reader, no matter how unskilled in poetry, can sense their importance and their wistful or severe beauty.  With his sometimes narrative, sometimes elegiac, and consistently lyrical style, Norris presents a unity of tone and observations somewhat like the report of the scouts sent out by Moses to look at the land of Canaan: there is something most wonderful — but most serious — here.(1)

Looking back, I’m struck by how my description of Leslie’s verse captures something of the man himself, though at the time I didn’t know him well.  Apparently, his poetry emanates his presence so strongly that even an upstart like me could catch wind of him. 

In 1983, BYU invited Leslie to come teach and he took a six-month position he found very agreeable.  BYU was smart enough to ask him to stay.  At that time, I was finishing my master’s degree.  He kindly offered to act as my thesis chairman.  I spent many hours with him in his office in the Jesse Knight Humanities Building talking poetry, roots, loneliness, and dogs.

I think Leslie saw me very clearly, perhaps more clearly than many of my teachers had before.  At the least, he communicated my faults more clearly.  He wrote to me once of my poetry, “This young poet has the flaws of her youth, she sometimes employs a vocabulary which sounds much better than it says, she sometimes is apt to think her personal experience is important instead of making it important.”(2)  This stung, but then, as now, I knew he told me the truth.  When I did it right, he let me know that, too: “Look at this verb!  She’s right!  This is a beautiful verb!”(3)

A beautiful verb.  For a master jeweler, it might be the exquisitely cut gemstone that gives cause for celebration; for a master writer, it’s a finely-fitted verb sparkling in its setting, the well-wrought sentence.  Leslie taught me about verbs, how to find the right one, how to create the proper setting for it: “Why do you use such an unusual word order?  Turn it ’round right!”(4)  He taught me how to say something meaningful rather than hide the fact I didn’t quite know what I meant behind an inflated vocabulary.

Besides helping me find my voice as a writer, Leslie recognized I was setting down roots in Utah long before I did and brought it to my attention. “People like you and I have no roots among people,” he said.  “They are in the land.”(5)  I don’t think he understood at the time how much I like people, or maybe I didn’t like them as much back then.  And I knew Leslie had people he felt strong ties to, like his wife, Kitty.  But that part about the land — I didn’t understand it when he said it, but he was exactly right and knew better than I did what it meant.  “You’ve put down too many roots in Utah,” he said another time.  “Is putting those roots down a bad thing?” I asked.  “No,” he said. “It’s a very good thing.”(6)  Naturally, he understood how the colors, flavors, odors, and sounds of your homeland hold you in place; how it’s your knowledge of your place’s prevailing winds, the directions from which its storms come, how the light works on it, how your place sounds from day to day, and many other facets of your relationship with “home” that inform your language. 

In an interview I did with Leslie, also for Century II, he said, “The colors we ordinarily use are those that belong to the world we saw in our youth.”  He gave examples from two poets who were also his friends.  “Vaughn uses only green and gold, the colors of the grass and soil of Breconshire, my home as it was his; and Vernon Watkins uses those colors and white, the perpetual color, the color of eternity, radiant and clear.  I use water, so I ‘mix’ or ‘conjure’ with colors so that the finished poem has a kind of washed clarity about it, as if it were at once firm and wet, so that, reading it, you might think of mother-of-pearl, as the poem reflects light.  I use rainbows.”(7)

I think Leslie believed it necessary that a writer feel some tension, some loneliness in life.  In our interview, I asked him what he thought of the idea that a people or a person can’t produce great art until they’ve suffered.  He said, “There’s something in it, in that such a nation, or person, has great material to write about.  But a greater writer doesn’t have to suffer necessarily.  He knows, by sympathy and empathy, what suffering is.”(8)  He quoted the poet W. H. Auden: “‘About suffering they were never wrong, the old masters.”(9)

At the same time, he told me, “Go somewhere where you will be even more lonely.”(10)  I believe that with such words he meant to voice a truth about solitude, about how sometimes one hears and sees the meaning of some events best when one is solitary.  But also, he tried, perhaps, to warn me about a brand of isolation that many writers feel, the burden of their seeing.  “You have to keep going,” he said.  “It’s only going to get more painful.”(11)

Whatever tensions and loneliness Leslie felt, his passion for animals, especially for dogs, greatly lightened it.  At the time I was under his tutelage, I had a dog — Ruby, a Siberian husky — by definition a difficult breed.  He dog-sat her in his BYU office once or twice while I attended class. When she had puppies, he advised me on their weaning.  I sold all the pups but one quickly.  As this last pup lingered in my household, Ruby became even more difficult.  “She’s jealous,” Leslie said.  “She’s upset about there being a rival in the house.”(12)  Once he said it, I saw it: How Ruby placed her body between mine and the pup’s, how she wouldn’t let the pup play with me.

When Leslie talked about dogs, he shone with joy.  At a time when he didn’t have one with him in the U.S., we had a conversation about them, the gist of which I recorded in my journal.  “I had a splendid talk with Leslie Norris the day before yesterday.  He is lonely for dogs, and we talked about dogs for some time.  He tells me marvelous stories, full of tenderness and understanding … The best part of our talk was about dogs … during which he charmed me.  He tells me his triumphs and errors with them.  A sort of pleasure came into him while he talked of them. He taught me well, here.”(13)

After he retired from BYU, Leslie remained in great demand at schools and other assemblies and continued to travel to speak about writing and learning.  He was between engagements when on April 6, 2006, he died suddenly of a massive stroke.  He was 85 years old.  85 years old, and still writing and reading aloud what he wrote to audiences!  The BYU and Utah arts community — indeed, the world’s literary community — felt his loss deeply; probably they are feeling it still.  Fortunately, during his lifetime he created a great storehouse of poetry, short stories, essays, recorded readings, and so on where we may still encounter him.

Back to my review, where I talked about one of my earliest encounters with him in his verse:

The poem, “At the publisher,” which tells of an encounter with the dying C. Day Lewis, and other poems as well, deal with acute hindsight that becomes foresight, and the meaning of what is seen or heard or felt … In addition to the subjects of death and people, Norris grants us insight into the character of stones, the form exhibited by a sheepdog independently rounding up her flock, and other delicacies of life.  There are poems on his country, on mining; there are poems that read like ballads or like captioned photographs of lands; there are poems that are portraits and poems that sing themselves.(14)

Upon hearing of his death, I found on the Internet a recording of him reading one of his poems (15) and listened to it, allowing his voice to stir me in the old way I remembered.  Then I went for a walk in a nearby canyon.  Down there, cliff swallows had just returned to a traditional nesting site built on a sweeping cliff face.  They swirled in against the stone where their mud nests hung, singing their song of return.  Besides dogs, Leslie loved birds.  “Oh, Leslie would have liked this,” I said.  I felt the pang of something I had not felt for a long time — loneliness.

But in spite of any sorrow we might feel at losing someone like Leslie, such people never truly pass out of our lives.  Our souls bear their imprint; our history with them holds open their places: “Leslie Norris was here.”  We think of them in terms of favorite images.  One I have comes from a letter.  Not only does it preserve Leslie in a way I like to remember him but also it provokes something of the wonder I feel when I consider how this man came to Utah to live and teach rather than a place more glamorous where many of us would never have met him.  He wrote, “This morning, in the woods, my dog Jasper refused to accompany a friend and her dogs, telling me quite plainly that our pack was a more distinguished and preferable gang in every way.  Heads and tails high, we left and walked home.”(16)

Notes

   1.  Patricia Gunter, ”Review: Walking the White Fields: Collected Poems, by Leslie Norris,” Century II 5.3 (Winter 1981), 186.

   2. Unpublished letter, 1 March 1986. 

   3. From a classroom discussion recorded in my personal journal, 30 May 1985.

   4. Personal conversation about my poem, “The Peach.”  Leslie didn’t like how I phrased the poem’s last two lines.  The poem’s current word order at its end reflects the changes I made in response to his criticism.

   5. From a conversation recorded in my journal, 14 Janurary 1986.

   6. Ibid.

   7. Patricia Gunter, “An Interview with Leslie Norris,” Century II 5.3 (Winter 1981), 185.

   8. Ibid.

   9. Ibid.

 10. From a conversation recorded in my journal, 21 April 1983.

 11. Ibid.

 12. Conversation recorded in my journal, 9 January 1986.

 13. Journal entry, 13 January 1983.

 14. Patricia Gunter, “Review: Walking the White Fields: Collected Poems, by Leslie Norris,”  Century II 5.3 (Winter 1981), I86.

 15. http://www.byubroadcasting.org/norris/poem_visitation.asp, although, recently, I haven’t been able to get the audio to work.

 16. Unpublished letter, 1 March 1986.

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