Over the years since I first read him, I have shouted my appreciation from the rooftops, bending the ear of anybody I could get to stand still about the writing of Wendell Berry, and why his works should be required curriculum in every school in the country. Friends and acquaintances were very familiar with my devotion to his fiction, essays and poetry. So much so that a charismatic friend (Holly Sabiston) in Austin, Texas, put me in touch with another friend of hers, Laura Dunn, who was making a documentary film about Wendell and his vision. I told Laura I would be over the moon to help out in any way I could with her film, so she made me a co-producer on it. Her films are gorgeous and important, and it was a privilege to pitch in on this one, which was called Look & See.
WENDELL BERRY, an essayist, novelist, and poet, has been honored with the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry, the John Hay Award of the Orion Society, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, among others. In 2010, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama, and in 2016, he was the recipient of the Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle. Berry lives with his wife, Tanya Berry, on their farm in Henry County, Kentucky.
wendell berry essay
Wendell Berry, farmer and poet, has lived in sight of the Kentucky River for 40 years, in a landscape where generations of his family have farmed since the early 1800s. The river is probably the only mainstream close to his heart. As a farmer, he has shunned the use of tractors and plowed his land with a team of horses. As a poet, he has stood apart from the categories and controversies of the literary world, writing in language neither modern nor postmodern, making poems that have the straightforward elegance of the Amish furniture in his farmhouse. And in recent decades, he has produced a body of political thought, in a series of essays and speeches, that is so Jeffersonian it seems almost un-American in today's world.
That feminists or any other advocates of human liberty and dignity should resort to insult and injustice is regrettable. It is equally regrettable that all of the feminist attacks on my essay implicitly deny the validity of two decent and probably necessary possibilities: marriage as a state of mutual help, and the household as an economy.
Pleasure, to Wendell, is essential. This essay is a warning, but it is also a reminder of the joy that comes when you live in tune with the natural world. In this manner, too, Wendell could see into the future. He saw the potential for a powerful counterforce to fast food culture, one based around those earthbound values that knit us together as human beings on this planet.
A Small Porch: Sabbath Poems 2014 and 2015 // Obviously these are the poems from just two years, and this book also includes a longfkrm essay called The Presence of Nature in the Natural World: A Long Conversation (which I wasn't expecting, but found to be a deep and thorough read). If you want just a taste of Berry's poetry and a taste of his nonfiction reading, this is a great one to start with.
Poet, essayist, farmer, and novelist Wendell Berry was born on August 5, 1934, in New Castle, Kentucky. He attended the University of Kentucky at Lexington where he received a BA in English in 1956 and an MA in 1957.
Berry is the author of more than thirty books of poetry, essays, and novels. His collections of poetry include: Given (Shoemaker Hoard, 2005), A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997 (Counterpoint, 1997), Entries: Poems (1994), Traveling at Home (1989), The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry (1988), Collected Poems 1957-1982 (1985), Clearing (1977), There Is Singing Around Me (1976), and The Broken Ground (1964).
QI believes that the quotation marks signaled that Hall was not claiming authorship of the saying. He was simply using it as a label for his essay, but this usage was certainly confusing, and some later citations credited Hall with the saying.
“ Marriage is the mutual promise of a man and a woman to live together, to love and help each other, in mutual fidelity, until death . It is understood that these definitions cannot be altered to suit convenience or circumstance, anymore than we can call a rabbit a squirrel because we preferred to see a squirrel. Poetry of the traditionally formed sort, for instance, does not propose that it’s difficulties should be solved by skipping or forcing a rhyme or by mutilating syntax or by writing prose. Marriage does not invite one to solve one’s quarrel with one’s wife by marrying a more compliant woman. Certain limits, in short, are prescribed- imposed before the beginning .” Or this from the same essay: Properly used, a verse form, like a marriage, creates impasses, which the will and present understanding can solve only arbitrarily and superficially. These halts and difficulties do not ask for immediate remedy; we fail them by making emergencies of them. They ask, rather, for patience, forbearance, inspiration–the gifts and graces of time, circumstance, and faith. They are, perhaps, the true occasions of the poem: occasions for surpassing what we know or have reason to expect. They are points of growth, like the axils of leaves. Writing in a set form, rightly undestood, is anything but force and predetermination. One puts down the first line of the pattern in trust that life and language are abundant enough to complete it. Rightly understood, a set form prescribes its restraint to the poet, not to the subject.
That bold part definitely sounds like Berry is taking a quasi-Catholic turn and linking the meaning of marriage to fertility and reproduction, a move which by necessity leads to a natural law case that same-sex sexual behavior is unethical. What’s more, if you’re defining marriage in terms of potential fertility, it categorically makes such a thing as same-sex marriage categorically impossible. Anyway, let’s continue. Here’s another excerpt from the same essay:
Interesting take. I've only read a little of Berry's fiction - I recall quite a few instances of unsettling and dark story lines. Real tragedies were portrayed. I never got an anti-city vibe from Berry - just anti-industrial complexes. Furthermore, I think his more sentimental stories should be understood as such, just as his "membership" stories should be understood as being more normative than positive. I interpreted some (not all) of his stories as mediums to help us imagine what a community-oriented bucolic lifestyle could look like (in other words, I wasn't expecting him to show me a documentary of what it really was or is like - let Vance do that). When one reads Donald Hall essays (especially A String Too Short To Be Saved), one sees both a bucolic idyll actually existing, but it is infused with the horrific realities of old farm living. So, while Hall stands on his own, maybe one must pair Berry with Hayden Carruth or Wyeth's bleaker watercolors? Finally, I think that most fiction doesn't run on all cylinders. Most stories hold a few dimensions constant in order to better explore the main ideas they want to hit. But, that said, I understand and appreciate the unsatisfied feeling of reading something that is too nice-nice, especially when one knows of the accompanying horrors that are left out of the picture. And, good point about how people can be good at earth-care, but terrible at human-care. I think I do agree with you in that I also get the impression that Berry thinks a bucolic lifestyle is a kind of tonic that will make people better (though, I don't think he says this outright or would claim to believe it.) And, good quote from Bonhoeffer. Thanks for the article.
Thank you for this essay. A link to it allowed me to discover "Plough," which I shall continue to explore. Berry's fiction is akin to Jan Karon's Mitford -- nostalgia seen through a sunshine filter -- but with eco-political overtones. (Not that the eco-politics are directly in the fiction, but because I read Berry's fiction knowing about his nonfiction.) [Disclaimer: I haven't read ALL of Berry's work. He's prolific.]
Don't miss Rod Dreher's thoughts after reading this essay, shared on his blog at The American Conservative: -wendell-berry-gets-wrong/.And here's a response to Tamara Hill Murphy's view of Wendell Berry by Jeffrey Bilbro of Front Porch Republic: -wendell-berry-have-rose-colored-glasses/.Let us know what you think.
Wendell Berry, writer, teacher, farmer, and ecological activist, preaches a message America is dying to hear. Doggedly determined to promote an economy built on sustainable agriculture, Berry addresses us in every way he knows how: poems, essays, novels, lectures, and letters. No matter the medium, though, his approach is unrelenting and contrarian. He famously writes books without a computer, farms his Kentucky land without a tractor, and practices his faith without spending much time in church. He is both lauded as a preacher of hope and disparaged as a prophet of doom.
But there are exceptions to this. He wrote parts of his first novel, Nathan Coulter, while on fellowship at Stanford from 1958-1960. He wrote an extended essay, The Hidden Wound, over the winter of 1968-1969 while a visiting professor at Stanford, and he wrote his short novel Remembering during winter 1987 while writer-in-residence at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.[9] 2ff7e9595c
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