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This Sunday at noon Barton Sutter and his brother Ross will perform poetry and music at Plymouth Church in Minneapolis.

The program, titled "This is the Day: Rejoicing Anyway" focuses on the spiritual response to suffering, and is part of the church's 

"As the Buddha said, everyone suffers. How we respond to suffering is a crucial spiritual question. Billions of people suffer more than Ross and I do, but art always works with particulars, and in our particular case, when we were just kids we watched helplessly as our mother suffered a gruesome illness and died. Such an experience shatters simple-minded religious faith. So then what? We designed our program around that experience and its spiritual consequences."

One of the poems Sutter will read on Sunday is "My Mother at Swan Lake" from his new collection 

. Sutter says it took him close to fifty years to write.

"The memory of that picnic haunted me for decades, and I didn't know why. In writing the poem, which is mostly just description, I discovered some of the reasons for the haunting. For one thing, I realized this was the last day I remembered my original family as happy and whole. For another, my dead mother seemed to have a message for me in what she'd said that day, but I hadn't been hearing it clearly."

Sutter says he hopes to move the audience to tears, and to laughter.

"We hope they'll go away humming one of Ross's songs or maybe mumbling a couple of my lines. And since all of us suffer, I suppose the best one-word take-away would be--encouragement."

                    "

                            —Psalms 118:24

We'd shed, like leaves, our nagging fears.

Her hair'd come back; her light, low laugh;

- My Mother at Swan Lake, by Barton Sutter, from his collection 

. Reprinted here with permission of the author.

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Marianne Combs

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This Sunday at noon Barton Sutter and his brother Ross will perform poetry and music at Plymouth Church in Minneapolis.


MN poetry: Barton Sutter’s ‘My Mother at Swan Lake’

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