Dorothy Sutton

Dorothy M. Sutton ’s bio says she was born in Todd County, Kentucky during the Great Depression, but that would make her older than I am, and I find that hard to believe. Like my own siblings, she began her education in a one-room schoolhouse and she has been publishing poetry in national journals since her days at Georgetown College in the late 1950s.

Dorothy says,

perhaps the most interesting thing I’ve done besides teaching at EKU is teaching Irish lit. in Ireland in ‘96, and having one of my Darwin poems read by Richard Dawkins [Oxford U.] at the Royal Society in London. It’s the same society Issac Newton and Darwin himself belonged to.

You can read some of Dorothy’s Darwin poems yourself in her chapbook Startling Art: Darwin and Matisse (Finishing Line, 1999). In his foreword to this beautiful book, Guy Davenport said:

Mankind has been in a tragic fall all of this century. Our great hope is that the poets will guide us to when it will be “artfully fused together again.” Dorothy Sutton’s firm and careful eloquence makes it seem imperative that we keep winnowing the past for its enduring truths; that we keep entering rooms hung with paintings, poetry, and the other arts and sciences which speak revelations we’d thought “only lovers and nature could say.”

Here is “You Can Be Quite Deprived” from Startling Art:

You Can Be Quite Deprived

Before there was art,
it was something
that only lovers and nature could say.

You can be quite deprived
without realizing it.
One day, a painting, a strain
of music, a poem comes alive
in your eye, your ear, your hand,
whispers an immeasurably sad thing
so beautifully as to make you glad,
talks to you
in a quiet and steady hum,
blooms into a pungent jungle
of colors and sounds,
its resonant rhythms gently,
relentlessly stalking you
into the starkest, gloomiest
corners of your mind.

Admit it.
You were poor beyond measure
until you came into this room.

Possibly related posts:

Colonialism and the missonary position

“woozy, reckless through the barricades”

Donne on Sunday

Barbara Fleming Phillips

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