Poet/philosopher/farmer Wendell Berry on his beloved Kentucky farm in 2016.
In a week of high-profile deaths including Dolly Parton, Wendell Berry may not have generated the same buzz, but the loss of his iconic voice struck a deep chord with many. He died in his home on the farm in Port Royal, Kentucky Monday at the age of 92. His Associated Press obituary noted, "Few authors were more tied to their home than Berry, an intellectual and spiritual heir to Henry David Thoreau and such Southern agrarians as Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom. In prose and poetry that mirrored the uncluttered and deeply felt life he advocated, Berry challenged modern assumptions about prosperity and happiness and renewed the mysteries of birth, love, work and death."
This post is adapted from an Earth Day entry from 2011.
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 grew corn, grain, and maintained a kitchen garden on the land where lived, worked, and wrote. Much of Berry’s writing—poetry, fiction, and non-fiction was 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 wrote 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.
One of Berry's most recent collections of verse.
Berry was 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 regulation that threatened to make small scale farming impossible. Not content with just writing or speaking, Berry frequently led or participated in demonstrations, including civil disobedience.
At age 75 Berry was still active both as a writer and activist. He was honored with many prizes and awards, most including 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 |
