Poetry Night with Bart Sutter and Shelley Getten

The natural world has been a major source of inspiration for Bart Sutter’s poetry for more than half a century, during which he has explored the backroads, trails, rivers, lakes, and bogs of the North, returning with vivid reports of otters eating golden walleyes, a big bull moose groaning for love, and the memorable music of a field full of bobolinks.

Cotton Grass also bears witness to the allure of nature in urban settings. Sutter has drawn beauty and insight from the woodsy environs of his home overlooking Lake Superior: a fox appears at a summer big-band concert; a raccoon relaxes in the hole he’s ripped through a roof, a pair of lovers find an emblem for their daring as they watch a falcon fold its wings and hurtle headlong toward the pavement.

Sutter has resisted contemporary trends and gone his own way, listening for what each poem wanted to be, mastering a remarkable range of tones and forms from celebration to lamentation, from long-lined free verse to haiku, from love lyrics to prophecy, from ballad to sonnet, from story to song.

Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Dunn called this poetry “light years away (thank God) from post-modern tactics; one might even say Sutter’s aesthetic is pre-modern. There are many poems with rhyme and meter, an unabashed celebration of nature, and most amazingly, a healthy sampling of what we see little of these days, the affirmative poem.”

Bart Sutter is a three-time recipient of a Minnesota Book Award, for poetry, for fiction, and for creative non-fiction. Among other honors, he has won a Jerome Foundation Travel & Study Grant (Sweden), a Loft-McKnight Award, and the Bassine Citation from the Academy of American Poets. Bart lives on a hillside overlooking Lake Superior with his wife, Dorothea Diver.

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In Of Cows and Crows poet Shelley Getten evokes ten years of life on a hardscrabble farm in Central Minnesota as seen through the eyes of a young girl. It’s a coming-of-age tale in which the narrator navigates the emotional tumult of her teens while also experiencing the isolation, financial difficulties, and other challenges of living on a farm. Along the way, the poems subtly depict how such a childhood can foster a deep connection to the land and other living things—a process that can heal wounds and strengthen our shared humanness. Of Cows and Crows is rooted in aspects of rural life—poignant, evocative, and dreadful— that are experienced by few, but are likely to be of interest to many.

Shelley Getten has been publishing poetry since 1990. Her chapbook Agates (Fishing Line Press) appeared in 2005, and shortly thereafter she expanded her media to printmaking. She was the 2017 winner of the Lake Superior Writers Annual Poetry Contest.