While most travelers collect souvenirs, poet Leslie Norris instead sought experiences—and, according to Professor Aaron Eastley, they shaped his poetry.
During his 85 years of life, Welsh poet Leslie Norris was known as a writer, a teacher, and, perhaps most importantly, a wanderer—a title he earned by drifting from place to place in search of opportunity and belonging. As one of the most influential Welsh writers in the postwar period, his ventures to the United States—including Washington state, New York, Massachusetts, and Provo, Utah, where he settled down—did not go unnoticed in his work. In a Humanities Center Colloquium given March 20, 2025, Associate Professor Aaron Eastley (African Literature) examined the transnational nature of Norris’s poetry. Eastley hoped his lecture, “‘All Distance Gone’: Leslie Norris’s Transnational Poetics,” would help to paint a picture of Leslie Norris by analyzing the many people, places, and things that helped define him as a poet.
The Personal Nature of Poetry
An important part of understanding Norris comes from examining his ability to cross borders, cultures, and perspectives in his works. “Looking at writers like Leslie Norris, we must take into account not only where they’ve come from, but where they’ve gone,” Eastley noted. “More subtly, it involves ascertaining how they’ve traveled, choices they’ve made, and ways their experiences have shaped them.”
Eastley began studying Norris’s writing by looking at a collection of his poetry published in 1974, called, Mountains, Polecats, and Pheasants. This collection marks the beginning of what Eastley describes as Norris’s transnational arc. This piece, and those published around the same time, is characterized by a connection with Welsh landscapes as Norris describes the terrain and wildlife of his hometown. Eastley noted that Norris’s poetry during this time often contrasts South Wales with other countries in such a way that “the world outside of Wales is simply other: distant and foreign.”
Feet Down in America
Norris’s transnational arc picks up speed after his big move to America, where his poetry began to adopt a more international focus. In contrast to the poetry written in and about his homeland, Norris’s poetry here paints him as being the foreigner: “Now, he was the alien—as he ruefully relates in his short story, ‘Sing It Again, Wordsworth.’” Though America proved very different from his homeland in terms of culture and lifestyle, he found comfort and belonging in the geography he visited throughout his travels. Eastley explained that much like in South Wales, the houses and rivers Norris visited in Washington state all pointed west and reminded him of home, helping him realize that people and places can have a host of differences without any one of them being considered “other.” Norris explores this idea in many of his works written in America, including “Cave Paintings” and Islands off Maine.
Eastley explained that Norris’s move to the United States also marked a decided change in the structure of his works, and they became sequences of poetry as opposed to one lengthier piece: “Norris had come to see life as far more intertwined, more interconnected, and similar across space and time than he’d seen before,” Eastley stated. “It seems that writing poems in sequences allowed him to capture such ideas more easily than writing singular poems.”
This same style can be seen in the pieces he wrote after moving to Utah in the early 1980s, where he began teaching at BYU and set down roots in the Intermountain West. Eastley explained that his relocation to Utah marked the conclusion of this arc as his “transnational revolution was largely complete.” After looking through a handful of Norris’s most notable works, each of which was written in different locations, Eastley concluded, “The clear implication is that each place and person form a meaningful part of the person of the poet; he is not singular or solitary—he's a product of them all.”
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