Meet Poet Wendell BerryFarmer, Essayist, Conservationist, Novelist, Teacher, Poet, 1934 -

“The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and wasteful.”

Tuesday, December 6, 11

“How to Be a Poet”(to remind myself)Make a place to sit down.

Sit down. Be quiet. You must depend upon affection, reading, knowledge,skill--more of each than you have--inspiration,work, growing older, patience,for patience joins timeto eternity. Any readers’who like your poems,doubt their judgment.

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Breathe with unconditional breaththe unconditioned air.Shun electric wire.Communicate slowly. Livea three-dimensioned life;stay away from screens.Stay away from anythingthat obscures the place it is in.There are no unsacred places;there are only sacred placesand descrated places.

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Accept what comes from silence.Make the best you can of it.Of the little words that comeout of the silence, like prayersprayed back to the one who prays,make a poem that does not distrubthe silence from which it came.

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Tuesday, December 6, 11

Wendell Berry (born August 5, 1934) is a United States poet, novelist, essayist, philosopher and farmer. His most well known book, The Unsettling of America, provides a classic critique of industrial agriculture which is foundational to today's agrarianism.

Berry was born in Henry County, Kentucky in 1934, the first of four children born to John and Virginia Berry. His father was a tobacco farmer, and as a young man Berry wanted to farm tobacco as well.

He attended secondary school at Millersburg Military Institute, and then pursued a B.A. in English at the University of Kentucky at Lexington. In 1957 he completed a Master’s degree in English, also at the University of Kentucky; that same year, he married Tanya Amyx.

His poetry is simple and resonant, a kind of plainsong, usually similar in tone to Jane Kenyon but occasionally veering into the territory of Walt Whitman or Biblical prophets. Much of his nonfiction serves as defense of farming and the connectedness he perceives as inherent in rural life.

Tuesday, December 6, 11

In 1958 Berry received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, which he used to study creative writing at Stanford University. In 1960 he and Tanya returned to the 250 acre (1 km²) Berry family farm.

After being granted a Guggenheim fellowship, Berry took his family to Europe in 1961. In 1965 he returned to Kentucky, where he taught for several decades at the University of Kentucky. Today he lives and farms on the family farm at Port Royal, Kentucky, alongside the Kentucky River, not far from where it flows into the Ohio.

He is a prolific author, with fourteen books of poems, sixteen volumes of essays, and eleven novels and short story collections to his name. His writing is rooted in the notion that one's work ought to be connected with one's place. Much of his nonfiction serves as defense of farming and the connectedness he perceives as inherent in rural life.

“A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.” ― Wendell Berry

Tuesday, December 6, 11

“We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.”

Tuesday, December 6, 11

President Obama awarded the National Medals of Arts and the National Medals of Humanities today (March 2, 2011) at the White House, an event that was also streamed on the White House website.“We are here today because these men and woman were not alone in the struggle,” President Obama said in his opening remarks.  ”There are people here whose books poetry and works of history shaped me…They helped me take risks that I wouldn’t have taken.”

Tuesday, December 6, 11