John Caddy is an American poet and naturalist.
Early life
John Caddy (15 November 1937 - 7 August 2021) was born in Hibbing, Minnesota and grew up in Virginia, Minnesota. His great-grandfather, Hibbing Pioneer Tom Caddy, was a Mine Captain from Upper Michigan via Cornwall who sank the first underground mine shafts in Hibbing. John taught at the University High School and the College of Education of the University of Minnesota for eight years. In 1967, John was one of the founding poets of the Minnesota Poets in the Schools Program (now COMPAS).
He was a partner in Sundog Center, a 1970s residential center for environmental education near Bemidji in northern Minnesota.
He lived near Forest Lake, Minnesota on woodlands with ponds and beavers for the last 30 years of his life.
Career
John Caddy’s upbringing in northern Minnesota was nature-saturated, and as a teacher and poet his work has ever reflected these beginnings. During the 1960s and 70s he began a long career as a teacher of writing, working with students ranging from kindergarten through graduate school, in over 800 schools. To recognize his 35 years of teaching as a resident artist, Caddy received the 1997 Sally Ordway Irvine Award for Arts Education.
Caddy has long used poetry and other art forms in his environmental teaching, and in the mid-1990s, he began his Self Expressing Earth program. Among other things, SEE offered immensely successful workshops for teaching artists, naturalists and classroom teachers. These were week-long events, taught in residential environmental ed camps. They were not just about art and the environment, they were deep, experiential immersions in both, and many participants reported that these weeks were life-changing.
In 1994, shortly before establishing his SEE program, Caddy suffered a stroke, and he is now hemiplegic, paralyzed on his left side. In his own words: “In 1994 I suffered a stroke, and was elated to find myself alive, somewhat sensible, and still capable of making poems.... [When I] came home to the land, I was freshly amazed by beauty; in my absence, green had learned a thousand new names.... After stroke therapy, I decided to spend the rest of my allotted time writing and sharing poems of celebration and helping people recover their intuitive connections with Earth.”
Self Expressing Earth evolved into Morning Earth,a non-profit 501(3)c educational organization. Originally sponsored by Hamline University’s Center for Global Environmental Education, Morning Earth has become, among other things, a web site of over 400 pages that Caddy describes as “an antidote to environmental despair, a resource toward ecoliteracy for teachers of students of all ages, and for everyone interested in the confluence of ecology and the arts.” Perhaps the most striking aspect of Morning Earth is the five-day-a-week combination of a nature photo and a short ecologically literate poem, taken and written each day by Caddy working from his home in the Minnesota woods. This pairing is sent out each morning to some 1,500 subscribers many of whom are classroom teachers. They are also updated daily on the website, Many hundreds of these photo-poems are archived on the web site which now receives several thousand unique visitors a month.
In 1984 John and his collaborators won a Studio X-2 Grant from the Jerome Foundation, for which he teamed with choreographer Susan Delattre and composer Pat Moriarty to present onstage his poem cycle "The Heronry" with voice, jazz and dancers.
Caddy's poetry honors include the Lakes and Prairies competition of Milkweed Editions which resulted in his first full book,"Eating the Sting,including The Heronry", in 1986. A Loft/McKnight award quickly followed, as did a Minnesota State Arts Board award. In 1989 John won the Poets & Writers' Writers Exchange Award, which had him reading at the American Poetry Society in Manhattan, then at West Coast venues in Los Angeles and San Francisco. In 1990 John also won the Bush Foundation's Individual Artist Fellowship. John's 1989 book, "The Color of Mesabi Bones", won the 1990 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry and the Minnesota Book Award.
In 1992 John first visited Cornwall, Britain, and found cousins and great homecoming feelings. During subsequent visits to Cornwall John did several reading tours, and completed a chapbook, "Presences the Blood Learns Again," which in 2001 resulted in his initiation as a Bard of the Cornish Gorseth, an honor given to artists of Cornish heritage.