The Virgin of Bennington

The audiobook her devoted listeners have been waiting for. At last, New York Times betselling author Kathleen Norris’s first continuous narrative...a story of sex, drugs, and poetry.

After spending her high school years in Hawaii, Kathleen Norris was woefully unprepared for Bennington College in the 1960s, with its culture of drugs, sex, and bohemianism. But it was also at Bennington that she discovered her great love of poetry, which carried her to New York City at a time when a new generation of poets was emerging and shaking up the establishment.

Working at the Academy of American Poets for her beloved mentor, Elizabeth Kray, and hanging out at clubs with Andy Warhol’s crowd at night, Norris found herself immersed in an exciting and emotionally turbulent new world. Her memoir of that time—of her friendships and encounters with poets, including Jim Carroll, Denise Levertov, Gerard Malanga, Erica Jong, James Merrill, Stanley Kunitz, and James Wright—is an inspiring tribute to poetry and a stunning evocation of time and place. Her tenuous balancing act on the bridge between naïve experimentation and indirection and the more focused responsibilities of adulthood, makes for a dramatic and illuminating account of coming-of-age at a tumultuous moment in our history.

“Through three bestselling books published over the past six years, Kathleen Norris has captured [readers’] hearts and fed their souls.” —Common Boundary

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The Virgin of Bennington

The audiobook her devoted listeners have been waiting for. At last, New York Times betselling author Kathleen Norris’s first continuous narrative...a story of sex, drugs, and poetry.

After spending her high school years in Hawaii, Kathleen Norris was woefully unprepared for Bennington College in the 1960s, with its culture of drugs, sex, and bohemianism. But it was also at Bennington that she discovered her great love of poetry, which carried her to New York City at a time when a new generation of poets was emerging and shaking up the establishment.

Working at the Academy of American Poets for her beloved mentor, Elizabeth Kray, and hanging out at clubs with Andy Warhol’s crowd at night, Norris found herself immersed in an exciting and emotionally turbulent new world. Her memoir of that time—of her friendships and encounters with poets, including Jim Carroll, Denise Levertov, Gerard Malanga, Erica Jong, James Merrill, Stanley Kunitz, and James Wright—is an inspiring tribute to poetry and a stunning evocation of time and place. Her tenuous balancing act on the bridge between naïve experimentation and indirection and the more focused responsibilities of adulthood, makes for a dramatic and illuminating account of coming-of-age at a tumultuous moment in our history.

“Through three bestselling books published over the past six years, Kathleen Norris has captured [readers’] hearts and fed their souls.” —Common Boundary

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The Virgin of Bennington

The Virgin of Bennington

The Virgin of Bennington

The Virgin of Bennington

Audio CD(Abridged)

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Overview

The audiobook her devoted listeners have been waiting for. At last, New York Times betselling author Kathleen Norris’s first continuous narrative...a story of sex, drugs, and poetry.

After spending her high school years in Hawaii, Kathleen Norris was woefully unprepared for Bennington College in the 1960s, with its culture of drugs, sex, and bohemianism. But it was also at Bennington that she discovered her great love of poetry, which carried her to New York City at a time when a new generation of poets was emerging and shaking up the establishment.

Working at the Academy of American Poets for her beloved mentor, Elizabeth Kray, and hanging out at clubs with Andy Warhol’s crowd at night, Norris found herself immersed in an exciting and emotionally turbulent new world. Her memoir of that time—of her friendships and encounters with poets, including Jim Carroll, Denise Levertov, Gerard Malanga, Erica Jong, James Merrill, Stanley Kunitz, and James Wright—is an inspiring tribute to poetry and a stunning evocation of time and place. Her tenuous balancing act on the bridge between naïve experimentation and indirection and the more focused responsibilities of adulthood, makes for a dramatic and illuminating account of coming-of-age at a tumultuous moment in our history.

“Through three bestselling books published over the past six years, Kathleen Norris has captured [readers’] hearts and fed their souls.” —Common Boundary


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781501272219
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Publication date: 06/01/2015
Edition description: Abridged
Product dimensions: 5.10(w) x 6.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

About The Author

Kathleen Norris is the award-winning, bestselling author of Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith; The Cloister Walk; and Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, in various anthologies, and in her own three volumes of poetry. She divides her time between South Dakota and Hawaii.

Table of Contents

1. The Virgin of Bennington
2. Worlds
3. How to Be a Poet
4. Falling Off
5. Salvation by Poetry
6. Gravity
7. Taking Wing
8. "Only Connect"
9. Solicitude
10. Tonasket

Coda. "We Should Form a Company"
Acknowledgments

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“An unegotistical anti-memoir.”—San Francisco Chronicle

Virgin will interest Norris devotees who wonder about her life before Dakota.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“It mentions booze, sex, narcissism and self-destruction, but this isn’t a story about Hollywood. Kathleen Norris’s engaging memoir describes her coming-of-age as a college student in Vermont, and her subsequent immersion in the vibrant, often incestuous poetry world of Manhattan in the early ‘70s—a milieu that proved to be both suffocating and inspiring for the young poet…As Norris shares the lessons she learned in her younger years—she offers valuable, practical advice on the art of writing.”—Newsday

“Norris appeals to every reader’s struggle to achieve adulthood, both personally and professionally…While gaining an education in urbanity and sophistication that might have made another soul more cynical and self-destructive, Norris managed to maintain a certain appealing innocence and optimism…This inner strength leads her eventually to sever her dependency on Manhattan. Norris writes with warmth, frankness and amazing vividness about formative moments and events in her life, many of which readers…will be able to identify with and to learn from.”—Publishers Weekly

“A magnetic, poignant, often funny, and genuinely inspiring portrait of her mentor…Norris entrances and enlightens her readers with supple insights into the elusive nature of goodness.”—Booklist

“A must-read coming-of-age memoir for those who revere the talented writer and spiritualist, Kathleen Norris… A fascinating and intimate look inside the Manhattan poetry scene in the 1960s and ‘70s…a worthwhile journey through an interesting woman’s unique moment in history.”—Denver Rocky Mountain News

“Lucid, often startling prose.”—The New York Times Book Review

“[A] story of a time and a place that nurtured poets and their work.”—New York Daily News

“Norris is a remarkable writer…The Virgin of Bennington, which features Norris’ signature pitch-perfect prose and engaging first-person narration, is an essential addition to her exploration of self…She is never the irritating memoirist forever introspecting and seeking our approval. Rather she is a reasonable, trustworthy narrator who merely tells it how it was.”—Portland Oregonian

“A story for all writers and artists.”—Tampa Tribune & Times

“Very frank and honest…an interesting and many-layered book.”—Traverse City (MI) Record-Eagle

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