Note: Due to conflicting demands, today's entry and
poem are an exact re-run of the one on this date last year. Way to celebrate Earth Day—recycling!
How better to honor Earth Day than with a salute to the
unofficial poet laureate of the American
environmental movement?
Wendell Berry was born with deep roots in the soil of Henry County, Kentucky in 1934. His father was a lawyer and tobacco
farmer. Both sides of his family had
tilled the local soil for five generations.
After graduating from a local military academy, he attended the University of Kentucky where he decided
to become a writer. He completed his Masters degree there in 1957 and
married. The following year he was named
a Wallace Stenger Fellow at Stanford University where he studied
under Stenger with Ken Kesey, Larry McMurtry, and other emerging
writers. He continued academic pursuits with studies in Europe on a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship before
taking up teaching at New York
University’s University College in the Bronx.
While in New York, he completed
his first book of poetry, November
Twenty Six Nineteen Hundred Sixty Three, a single long poem in ten stanzas as an elegy to John F. Kennedy and national loss.
Later in 1964 he published his first collection, The Broken Ground which explored the themes that would
dominate his work, “the cycle of life and death, responsiveness to
place, pastoral subject matter, and recurring images of the Kentucky River and the hill farms of
north-central Kentucky.”
Berry returned to the University of Kentucky in 1965 to teach creative
writing. He moved in a circle of writers
that included Thomas Merton. He also began farming his property, Lanes Landing in north central Kentucky
on the western bank of the Kentucky River, not far from where it flows into the
Ohio. He grows corn, grain, and maintains a kitchen
garden on the land where he still lives, works, and writes. Much of Berry’s writing—poetry, fiction, and
non-fiction has been rooted in his experience on the land and in the
surrounding community.
Berry left teaching in 1977 to
devote himself to farming, writing and activism. By then he had a major body of work already
completed and was being recognized as voice of the emerging environmental
movement. In addition to a regular
output of poetry including 26 volumes including chapbooks, short fiction, and essay memoirs of his farming
experiences, Berry wrote practical guides to subsistence and small farmers for Rodale Press including Organic Gardening and Farming
and The New Farm. He
has also written eight novels that together are a chronicle of a fictionalized
Kentucky River town, Port William. This long series has allowed him to trace the
complex relationships between the land, the people, and the economic and
technological changes that impact them.
Berry has also been a front-line activist not only for environmental
causes, but against the Viet Nam War,
nuclear energy, land raping mountain top removal coal mining, and against
government regulatory inclusion that threaten to make small scale farming
impossible. Not content with just
writing or speaking, Berry has frequently led or participated in
demonstrations, including civil disobedience.
At age 75 Berry is still active both as a writer and activist. He has been honored with many prizes and
awards, most recently the National
Humanities Medal in 1965.
The Mad Farmer Revolution
Being a Fragment
of the Natural History of New Eden, in Homage To Mr. Ed McClanahan, One of the Locals The mad farmer, the thirsty one, went dry. When he had time he threw a visionary high lonesome on the holy communion wine. "It is an awesome event when an earthen man has drunk his fill of the blood of a god," people said, and got out of his way. He plowed the churchyard, the minister's wife, three graveyards and a golf course. In a parking lot he planted a forest of little pines. He sanctified the groves, dancing at night in the oak shades with goddesses. He led a field of corn to creep up and tassel like an Indian tribe on the courthouse lawn. Pumpkins ran out to the ends of their vines to follow him. Ripe plums and peaches reached into his pockets. Flowers sprang up in his tracks everywhere he stepped. And then his planter's eye fell on that parson's fair fine lady again. “O holy plowman,” cried she, “I am all grown up in weeds. Pray, bring me back into good tilth.” He tilled her carefully and laid her by, and she did bring forth others of her kind, and others, and some more. They sowed and reaped till all the countryside was filled with farmers and their brides sowing and reaping. When they died they became two spirits of the woods. On their graves were written these words without sound: “Here lies Saint Plowman. Here lies Saint Fertile Ground.”
—Wendell Berry
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