Silliman's Blog

Wendell Berry receives a lifetime services award
from the Kentucky Environmental Quality Commission,
Earth Day 2004

Wendell Berry may well be the finest conservative poet now writing. I mean that both formally and politically – Berry is that rare poet who will write in opposition to a woman’s right to choose not to carry a pregnancy to term as well as he is a constant advocate for the preservation of America’s remnants of agrarian culture. That may seem like a complicated position, but Berry is not at all unthoughtful. It’s that he takes the word conserve very literally.

This month, Shoemaker & Hoard will issue Given, Berry’s first volume of poetry in a decade. As with all his poetry, it is absolutely worth reading. The book opens with two introductory sections composed of the kind of short, often occasional poems one associates with Berry, as in “They”:

I see you down there, white haired

among the green leaves,

picking the ripe raspberries,

and I think “Forty-two years!”

We are the you and I who were

they whom we remember.

This is as effective a love lyric as I have read in a long time. For a poet who is not afraid of rhyme, it is interesting to note here how carefully the prosody of this piece is set up, with each of the first four lines containing an odd number of syllables, just enough variation to shake the gait of the language toward prose, setting up the glide of the metrically even final sentence. It’s a pleasure to read someone so fully in control of his craft.

The third section of Given is a short verse play entitled “Sonata at Payne Hollow,” issued previously as a chapbook. The play invokes the lives of painters Harland and Anne Hubbard, of whom Berry has written previously. I say “invokes” because in the play the two characters carry forward literally from the beyond the grave, set up through a foundational dialog between a man and a boy. It’s a complex little piece, just 12 pages long, but one that I think demonstrates both what can be so attractive about Berry’s poetry as well as problematic with the vision that motivates it.

But the final section of Given is the real news here, taking up as it does two-thirds of the volume. Berry has been writing poems he calls “Sabbaths” since 1979 and the selection here carries that project forward from 1998 through 2004, continuing the work already collected in his last collection, A Timbered Choir. More personal than the mostly short pieces of the two opening sections, “Sabbaths” is the work for which I think Berry will ultimately be known. In general – there are exceptions, including one elegy here for Denise Levertov that would have fit better elsewhere – Berry’s focus in this ongoing series tends to be the natural world, especially that around his farm in Kentucky. This offers his writing a level of specificity that is often lost in other works, especially those that tend toward the polemic. My favorite work in the book is a poem from 2002 that, on the face of it, appears to have no purpose whatsoever:

The Acadian flycatcher, not

a spectacular bird, not a great

singer, is seen only when

alertly watched for. His call

is hardly a song –

a two-syllable squeak you hear

only when you listen for it.

His back is the color of a leaf

in shadow, his belly that

of a leaf in light. He is here

when the leaves are here, belonging

as the leaves belong, is gone when

they go. His is the voice

of this deep place among

the tiers of summer foliage

where three streams come together.

You sit and listen to the voice

of the water, and then you hear

the voice of the bird. He is saying

to his mate, to himself, to whoever

may need to know: “I’m here!”

Even in Berry’s “Sabbaths” tho, description often turns to parable &, regardless of how well written it might be, I find myself increasingly uncomfortable with the contradictions that are at the heart of his vision. I have the same problem with his view, ultimately, that I have when watching the films, say, of Michael Moore. To construct their respective world views, they’re required to omit far too many of the details, many of which simply cancel out their reasoning. In Moore’s case, telling what happens to the city of Flint when a factory moves presents a cross-section of a detail taken from a larger, far greater process. Moore’s utopia is the industrial segment of the American Midwest while Berry’s is somewhat closer to an early agrarian view – and the political conclusions they draw are for the most part quite different.¹ But each is largely bemoaning the movement of the world away from what they perceive to have been its optimum moment. Both are telling narratives of decline.

Berry’s a utopian poet, but utopias can exist only outside of history. Berry’s idea of a self-sustaining local economy was already fatally passé even before the growth in the population of nomadic hunter-gatherers led to the rise of agriculture &, with agriculture, property, cities, divisions of labor, armies, and all the rest, up to & including nuclear pollution & genetically modified crops. When he rails against science and medicine, as he does in “Some Further Words,” a credo from which the book’s second section takes its name, it’s not because these methodologies help people, but because they ultimately force change, tipping the world off of its axis into a spiral of decay & despair. Yet the only communities historically that have ever been to survive for extensive periods in the kind of suspended animation Berry seeks have been those, mostly in the South Pacific, that have evolved in isolation on islands, with substantially lower levels of agriculture than that figured in Berry’s imagination. Even there, it was historical change – migration – that populated those nations in the first place. There is no such thing as an “indigenous” population, nor any such thing as a local economy, which is just a Prairie Home Companion version of Stalin’s Socialism in One Country model. It didn’t work for Stalin & it won’t work for Berry. It’s not clear whether or not he actually knows this, but all the ways in which the world fails to adhere to his vision of the possible will no doubt continue to fuel some of the saddest, sweetest verse we can get.

¹ They would, I suspect, agree on the stupidity at heart of the war on Iraq & at the idea that we can dictate democracy & modernism to the Middle East at gun point.