Upcoming Summer Trips

My wife, Barbara, and I had Long talked about developing a summer program situated in the Lake District and North Yorkshire in England. We wanted to bring students to the landscapes of the north and the associated poetry with the intention of hiking daily for the experience of coming to know physically the special beauty of the terrain, and to dwell in poetry connected to those  particular places. In the spring of 1998 thanks to the support of President Toll, Provost Scholz, and Chairman of the Board of Visitors and Governors Jay Griswold we were encouraged to develop a program at Kiplin Hall. They trusted us by allowing us to shape the program in any way we thought and maintained that trusting relationship throughout the twenty year length of our involvement in the program.  During those years the program expanded to include new sites in England and Scotland as well as a week in Ireland where we hiked and read Irish poetry.  The central core and commitment to basic goals remained firm.

A basic element of the original Kiplin Hall Program was getting students to encounter the physical world with their senses uncluttered by the distractions endemic in our time. A clear focus on the immediacy of where we were and what our relationship to the physical features surrounding us, centers us. Capturing the nuance of human interaction, and the rhythms of nature in various landscapes was a way to begin the development of a lifelong contemplation of our place in the world. Students were required to hike into the mountains and moors of Northern England, the mountains and valleys of West Cork and Kerry in Ireland for the purpose of connecting the literature written in or about the landscapes we encountered.

Finding stillness and having time and a place to focus on discovering the meaning of ourselves individually and within a group became a goal for the program. A prevailing principal was to move students through their reading of the poems and link the literature we studied with  specific sites that we had to reach on foot and with varying degrees of difficulty. Combining physical exertion and poetry, we believed, would allow students unique ways of understanding what they felt and thought. The emotional context we aimed for was joy.

The physical challenges of hiking and climbing were difficult, but the satisfaction of completing each day’s experiences in a supportive group, we believed, would lead to joy in personal satisfaction. Learning takes place in a positive environment. Understanding poetry requires concentration, open mindedness,  precision, as well as cultural and historical awareness and imagination. Physical exertion demands discipline, will power, confidence, and physical fortitude. The elements of  each part of our goal we conceived as being complementary. We wanted them to go where poetry goes, taking them to new perceptions and new ways of understanding their experience, and how they read poetry. By studying and experiencing poetry along with the demands of hiking  in distinctive landscapes, searching for connections between the natural world and the poems they would read, we believed, would move them to understand the knowledge derived from poetry and their physical effort, fusing their unique experiences.