Wendell BerryLife and Selected Works

Wendell BerryLife and Selected Works

And the world cannot be

discovered by a journey of miles, no

matter how long, but only by a spiritual

journey, a journey of one inch, very

arduous and humbling and joyful, by which

we arrive at the ground at our feet, and

learn to be at home.

Wendell Berry

Do not think me gentlebecause I speak in praiseof gentleness, or elegantbecause I honor the gracethat keeps this world. I ama man crude as any,gross of speech, intolerant,stubborn, angry, full

may have spoken wellat times, is not natural.A wonder is what it is.

A Warning to My Readers

Do not think me gentle

because I speak in praise

of gentleness, or elegant

because I honor the grace

that keeps this world. I am

a man crude as any,

gross of speech, intolerant,

stubborn, angry, full

of fits and furies. That I

may have spoken well

at times, is not natural.

A wonder is what it is.

A Warning to My Readers

Do not think me gentlebecause I speak in praiseof gentleness, or elegantbecause I honor the gracethat keeps this world. I ama man crude as any,gross of speech, intolerant,stubborn, angry, full

may have spoken wellat times, is not natural.A wonder is what it is.

A Warning to My Readers

Collected Poems 2

force everywhere, infections move.

We cannot immunize the continents and the oceans

against our con- tempt for small places and small

streams. Small destructions add up, and finally they

are understood collectively as large destructions.

Excessive nutrient runofffrom farms and animal

factories in the Mississippi water- shed has caused,

in the GulfofMexico, a hypoxic or dead zone offive

or six thousand square miles. In forty-odd years, strip

mining in the Appa- lachian coal fields, culminating

in mountain removal, has gone far toward the

destruction ofa whole region, with untold damage

to the regions peo- ple, to watersheds, and to the

waters downstream.

NEWSPAPER EDITORIALS deplore such human-

caused degradations of the oceans as the Gulf

of Mexicos dead zone, and reporters describe

practices like mountain removal mining in eastern

Kentucky. Some day we may finally understand

the connections.

The health of the oceans depends on the

health of rivers; the health of rivers depends on

the health ofsmall streams; the health ofsmall

streams dependsonthehealthoftheirwatersheds.

Thehealthofthewaterisexactly the same as the health

ofthe land; the health ofsmall places is exactly the

same as the health oflarge places. As we know,

disease is hard to confine. Because natural law is in

Contempt for Small Places

There is not a more exemplary history of our

contempt for small places than that of Eastern

Kentucky coal mining, which has enriched many

absentee corporate shareholders and left the

region impoverished and defaced. Coal industry

representatives are now defending mountain

removal-and its attendant damage to forests,

streams, wells, dwellings, roads, and community

life-by sayingthat in10, 15, 20 yearsthe land will

be restored, and that such mining has created

the [level] land needed for further industrial

development.

But when you remove a mountain you also remove

the topsoil and the forest, and you do immeasurable

The Way of Ignorance 3

The Way of Ignorance 4

violence to the ecosystem and the water- shed. These

things are not to be restored in ten or twenty years, or

in ten or twenty hundred years. As for the manufacture

oflevel places for industrial development, the supply

has already far exceeded any foreseeable demand.

And the devastation continues.

The contradictions in the states effort to balance

the competing inter- ests were stated as follows by

Ewell Balltrip, director of the Kentucky Appalachian

Commission: Ifyou dont have mining, you dont have

an economy, and ifyou dont have an economy you

dont have a way for the people to live. But ifyou dont

have environmental quality, you wont create the kind

of place where people want to live.

Yes. And if the clearly foreseeable result is a region

offlat industrial sites where nobody wants to live, we

need a better economy.

The Way of Ignorance 5/6

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my childrens lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

The Peace of Wild Things

Openings 7

The Peace of Wild Things

If we will have the wisdom to survive,

to stand like slow growing trees

on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it...

then a long time after we are dead

the lives our lives prepare will live

here, their houses strongly placed

upon the valley sides...

The river will run

clear, as we will never know it...

On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down

the old forest, an old forest will stand,

its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.

The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.

Families will be singing in the fields...

Memory, native to this valley, will spread over it

Work Song, Part 2: A Vision

like a grove, and memory will grow

into legend, legend into song, song

into sacrament. The abundance of this

place, the songs of its people and its birds,

will be health and wisdom and indwelling

light. This is no paradisal dream.

Its hardship is its reality.

The Way of Ignorance 8

They all had worked together a long time. They all

knew what each one was good at.

When they worked together, not much needed to

be explained. When they went down to the little

weatherboarded church at Goforth on Sunday

morning, they were glad to see one another and had

much to say, though they had seen each other almost

daily during the week.

This neighborhood opened to Mary and Elton and

took them in with a warmth that answered her

parents rejection. The men, without asking or being

asked, included

Elton in whatever they were doing. They told him

when and where they needed him. They came to

the families were conscious of themselves in a way

that set them apart from one another. Here, in this

new world, neighbors were always working together.

Many hands make light work, Uncle Isham Quail

loved to say, though his own old hands were no

longer able to work much.

Some work only the men did together, like haying

and harvesting the corn. Some work only the women

did together: sewing or quilting or wallpapering or

housecleaning; and whenever the men were together

working, the women would be together cooking.

Some work the men and women did together:

harvesting tobacco or killing hogs or any other job

that needed many hands. It was an old community.

A Jonquil for Mary Penn (excerpt)

It was a different world, a new world to her, that she

came into thena world of poverty and community.

They were in a neighborhood of six households,

counting their own, all within half a mile of one

another. Besides themselves there were Braymer

and Josie Hardy and their children; Tom Hardy

and his wife, also named Josie; Walter and Thelma

Cotman and their daughter, Irene; Jonah and Daisy

Hample and their children; and Uncle Isham and Aunt

Frances Quail, who were Thelma Cotmans and Daisy

Hamples parents. The two Josies, to save confusion,

were called Josie Braymer and Josie Tom. Josie

Tom was Walter Cotmans sister. In the world that

Mary Penn had given up, a place of far larger and

richer farms, work was sometimes exchanged, but

Fidelity 9

Fidelity 10

Fidelity 11/12

him when he needed them. He was an apt and

able hand, and they were glad to have his help. He

learned from them all but liked best to work with

Walter Cotman, who was a fine farmer. He and

Walter were, up to a point, two of a kind; both were

impatient of disorderI cant stand a damned

mess, said Walter, and he made noneand both

loved the employment of their minds in their work.

They were unlike in that Walter was satisfied within

the boundaries of his little farm, but Elton could not

have been. Nonetheless, Elton loved his growing

understanding of Walters character and his ways.

Though he was a quiet man and gave neither

instruction nor advice, Walter was Eltons teacher,

and Elton was consciously his student.

Once, when they had killed hogs and Elton and Mary

had stayed at home to finish rendering their lard, the

boiling fat had foamed up and begun to run over the

sides of the kettle. Mary ran to the house and called

Walter on the party line. Tell him to throw the fire to

it, Walter said. Tell him to dip out some lard and

throw it on the fire.

Elton did so, unbelieving, but the fire flared, grew

hotter, the foaming lard subsided in the kettle, and

Eltons face relaxed from anxiety and self-accusation

into a grin.

Well, he said, quoting Walter in Walters voice, its

all in knowing how.

Pray for good luck fishing

when the river floods.

V

Dont own so much clutter that you will be relieved to

see your house catch fire.

VI

Beware of the machinery of longevity. When a mans

life is over

the decent thing is for him to die. The forest does not

withhold

itself from death. What it gives up it takes back.

VII

Put your hands into the mire.

They will learn the kinship

of the shaped and the unshapen

Prayers and Sayings of the Mad Farmer

It is presumptuous and irresponsible to pray for other

people. Agood man would pray only for himself-that

he have as much good as he deserves, that he not

receive more good or more evil than he deserves,

that he bother nobody, that he not be bothered,

that he want less. Praying thus for himself, he should

prepare to live with the consequences.

II

At night make me one with the darkness.

In the morning make me one with the light.

III

If a man finds it necessary to eat garbage, he should

resist the temptation to call it a delicacy.

IV

Dont pray for the rain to stop.

Collected Poems 13

the living and the dead.

VIII

When I rise up

let me rise up joyful

like a bird.

When I fall

let me fall without regret

like a leaf.

IX

Sowing the seed,

my hand is one with the earth.

Collected Poems 14

Wanting the seed to grow,

my mind is one with the light.

Hoeing the crop,

my hands are one with the rain.

Having cared for the plants,

my mind is one with the air.

Hungry and trusting,

my mind is one with the earth.

Eating the fruit,

my body is one with the earth.

X

Let my marriage be brought to the ground.

Let my love for this woman enrich the earth.

What is its happiness but preparing its

place?

What is its monument but a rich field?

Collected Poems 15/16

Xl

By the excellence of his work the workman is a

neighbor. By selling only what he would not despise

to own the salesman is a neighbor. By selling what is

good his character survives his market.

XII

Let me wake in the night

and hear it raining

and go back to sleep.

XIII

Dont worry and fret about the crops. After you have

done all you can for them, let them stand in the

weather on their own.

If the crop ofanyone year was all, a man would have

to cut his throat every time it hailed.

But the real products of any years work are the

farmers mind and the cropland itself.

If he raises a good crop at the cost of belittling

himself and diminishing the ground, he has gained

nothing. He will have to begin over again the next

spring, worse offthan before.

Let him receive the seasons increment into his mind.

Let him work it into the soil.

The finest growth that farmland can produce is a

careful farmer.

Make the human race a better head. Make the world

a better piece of ground.

How long does it take to make the woods?

As long as it takes to make the world.

The woods is present as the world is, the presence

of all its past and of all its time to come.

It is always finished, it is always being made, the act

of its making forever greater than the act of its destruction.

It is a part of eternity for its end and beginning

belong to the end and beginning of all things,

the beginning lost in the end, the end in the beginning.

What is the way to the woods, how do you go there?

By climbing up through the six days field,

kept in all the bodys years, the bodys

sorrow, weariness, and joy. By passing through

Sabbaths 1985 V

the narrow gate on the far side of that field

where the pasture grass of the bodys life gives way

to the high, original standing of the trees.

By coming into the shadow, the shadow

of the grace of the strait ways ending,

the shadow of the mercy of light.

Why must the gate be narrow?

Because you cannot pass beyond it burdened.

To come into the woods you must leave behind

the six days world, all of it, all of its plans and hopes.

You must come without weapon or tool, alone,

expecting nothing, remembering nothing,

into the ease of sight, the brotherhood of eye and leaf.

A Timbered Choir 17/18

Biography

Wendell Berry was born on August 5, 1945 in Henry County Kentucky. Wendell graduated from the University of Kentucky with a Masters degree in English. After College he returned to his home to work the land that his family has farmed for two centuries.

He completed his first novel in 1960 and since then has written numerous books and poetry collections. Berry is a strong defender of family rural communities, and traditional family farms. Berrys father

was one of the founders of the organic farming movement, and today he and his father practice organic farming methods. He believes humans must learn to live in harmony with nature or realize they will perish. These strong ties with nature are extremely evident in writing.

Berry still uses a pen and paper, and occasionally a 1956 era typewriter, to do all of his writing. When asked why he does not get a computer he simply says he doesnt want to get sucked into buying

a piece of expensive equipment when he is already accustomed to using a pencil and paper.

Over the years Berry has written more than thirty books of poetry, essays, and novels, and has plans for even more. He is the poetic voice of the environmental movement and continues to support efforts to help preserve and protect nature.

List of Works

Andy Catlett: Early Travels

A World Lost

Fidelity

Hannah Coulter

Jayber Crow

Nathan Coulter

Place on Earth

Remembering

That Distant Land

The Memory of Old Jack

The Wild Birds

Three Short Novels

Watch With Me

Whitefoot

Fiction

An Eastward Look

A Part

A Timbered Choir

The Broken Ground

Clearing

The Collected Poems

The Country of Marriage

Entries

The Farm

Farming

Leavings

The Mad Farmer Poems

Openings

Sabbaths

Sayings and Doings

Traveling at Home

The Wheel

Poetry

Essays

A Continuous Harmony

Another Turn Of The Crank

Citizenship Papers

The Gift of Good Land

In the Presence of Fear

Life Is a Miracle

Meeting the Expectations of the Land

Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community

Standing By Words

Standing on Earth

Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community

What Are People For?

Bibliography

Berry, Wendell. A Timbered Choir : The Sabbath Poems, 1979-1997. Washington, D.C. : Counterpoint, c1998.

Collected poems, 1957-1982. San Francisco : North Point Press, c1984.

Fidelity: Five Stories. New York: Pantheon, 1992.

Openings. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1968.

The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays. Washington, D. C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005.

2011 E. M. Roper

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