'An astonishing life' — Poet Leslie Norris

Norris was moved to write poetry even as a boy. "I thought everyone did that," he recalls. As a teen, he sometimes rode a bike 28 miles to a neighboring town just to sit at the foot of a handful of poets as they met in a small room above a bookstore. Among those poets: Dylan Thomas and Vernon Watkins. The older men drank beer and read their poems and discussed them while the kid, largely ignored, listened. They would go on all night, but eventually, Norris would retire to a tent he had set up on the edge of town and ride home the next morning.

Sitting at a picnic table on his back porch, Norris relaxes with Tansi asleep in his arms. He loves dogs. In his study, there are several dog trophies sharing shelf space with the hundreds of books that are lined up floor to ceiling. For years he showed fox and Welsh terriers and was a patron of dog and horse racing. He has written magazine articles about terriers. The local shelter called him when Tansi showed up.

Kitty, his wife, keeps coming out to check on him. "Are you all right, love?" she says in her tiny voice. This is how they talk to each other. She brings cookies and coffee and juice on a tray and sets them on the table. "Thank you, love," he says.

He is such an innately kind, pleasant man that a poet once teasingly chewed him out for not being the stereotypical brooding poet. How could he consider himself a poet, after all, if he was so even-tempered?

"The thing about him is that he is just a wonderful human being," says Brewer. "That doesn't always go together."

Kitty says he is frequently singing and whistling around the house. But she notes that he is always thinking, always keeping his senses open for his art. She knows this well. It has been just the two of them. They have no children. They have been married for 56 years.

Hudson tells us of them,

the two migrating geese,

she hurt in the wing

indomitably walking

the length of a continent,

and he wheeling above

calling his distress. — Excerpt from "Hudson's Geese"

"It's a useless craft really," he is saying. He is talking about poetry of course. "You don't make any money. But it's a great craft. You create worlds. The Scottish word for poet is 'maker.' So is the Greek word."

But there is that matter of money. Even poets have to eat. He became a teacher to earn a living and discovered he had a passion for it and was sidetracked by it. He published his first book of poetry at 20; he published a second book two years later. And then he didn't publish another book for 15 years.

"I was a very naive kid," he explains, stroking his dog absentmindedly. "I thought you published your poems, then you die when you're 30. And when I hadn't died, I thought, well, you're not a poet, are you?"