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Wendell Berry US (1934 - 2026) Timeline Secular or Eclectic Poems by Wendell Berry Books - Links |
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Life
He was born in Louisville on August 5, 1934, and raised in Henry County, Kentucky, on land his family had farmed for generations on both sides. That inheritance became the whole subject of his life's work.
He was a gifted young writer. He took degrees at the University of Kentucky, went to Stanford on a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in 1958 (Ken Kesey, Larry McMurtry, and Ernest Gaines were among his classmates), traveled to Italy and France on a Guggenheim, and taught at New York University in the early sixties. He was on the path a promising American writer was supposed to take.
Then, on the Fourth of July in 1965, he moved his wife Tanya and their two children back to Henry County — to a twelve-acre place called Lane's Landing, on the western bank of the Kentucky River near Port Royal. Everyone told him it was a mistake; a writer went to New York, not away from it. In "A Native Hill" he explained his reasoning: he had found the place he was answerable to.
He stayed for sixty-one years. He farmed the hillside with draft horses when tractors would have been easier, kept sheep, wrote in a cabin he had rebuilt himself, and never in his life owned a computer — he wrote by hand and typed the pages on a machine he bought new in 1956, with Tanya as his first reader and editor. This was not nostalgia. It was an argument made with his own body: that scale, limit, and the willingness to do work slowly are not obstacles to a good life but its conditions.
From that fixed point he became a formidable public conscience. He spoke against the Vietnam War in 1968, was arrested at a nuclear plant protest in 1979, debated the Secretary of Agriculture on the ruin of small farms, withdrew his own papers from the University of Kentucky in 2009 over its coziness with the coal industry, and at seventy-six joined a weekend sit-in at the Kentucky governor's office to protest mountaintop removal mining. He accepted honors — including the National Humanities Medal — without ever seeming to need them, and went home afterward to the same chores.
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Spiritual Context
Berry was raised Baptist, baptized at New Castle and belonging, loosely and lifelong, to the small Baptist church at Port Royal. But he was honest about the looseness. He called himself a "marginal" Christian, or better, a "forest" Christian: in good weather he was more likely to be walking his ridges than sitting in a pew. He said plainly that he took the Gospels very seriously — more seriously, he suspected, than much of the church did — and his 1993 essay "Christianity and the Survival of Creation" is one of the most searching indictments a believer has written of his own tradition. If Christians read their own scriptures closely, he argued, they would find themselves called to steward the world rather than strip it.
Out of that came the sentence that may be his most quietly radical: "There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred and desecrated places." It refuses the whole architecture of separation — sanctuary from field, spirit from dirt, worship from work.
His actual devotional practice was walking. Beginning in 1979 he spent Sunday mornings outdoors on his own land, and wrote what came — poems he called the Sabbath poems, an unbroken practice of nearly fifty years. They are the closest thing we have to a record of his inner life: unhurried, attentive, written in the presence of trees rather than about them.
He was a friend, briefly, of Thomas Merton, eighty miles south at Gethsemani; they exchanged letters and shared a lunch in December 1967, a year before Merton's death. The two men were working the same seam from different sides of the cloister wall — silence, place, refusal of the age's momentum.
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The Poetry
Berry's poems are plainspoken to the point of transparency. There is no glitter in them, no straining for the striking image. They read like someone speaking carefully to you across a table, and their power sneaks up: you finish one and find it has quietly taken something off your chest.
The great subject is presence — the ordinary world attended to until it opens. "The Peace of Wild Things" begins in fear, in the middle of the night, and ends in the presence of still water and "the day-blind stars"; it has become, for many readers, something closer to a prayer than a poem. The Sabbath poems have the cadence of the Psalms without their formality. And when he was in the mood to be dangerous he wrote "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front," a poem that instructs the reader in cheerful sabotage of the profit motive and ends with two words that are as good a summary of his theology as anything he wrote: "Practice resurrection."
He knew exactly what silence was worth, and where poems come from. "Accept what comes from silence," he wrote. "Make the best you can of it." And then, with a candor rare in a poet: "To be quiet, even wordless, in a good place is a better gift than poetry."
Poems by Wendell Berry
- A Spiritual Journey
- Enriching the Earth
- Horseback on Sunday morning
- How to Be a Poet
- Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
- Now you know the worst
- Sabbaths 1985, V
- Sabbaths 1998, VI
- Sabbaths 1999, VII
- Testament
- The Peace of Wild Things
- The Real Work
- The Silence
- The Wild Geese
- The Wish to Be Generous
- To Know the Dark
Recommended Books: Wendell Berry
Related Links
KYLIT - Kentucky Writers: Wendell Berry, by Angela Strunk
http://www.english.eku.edu/SERVICES/KYLIT/BERRY.HTM
Profile, bibliography.
Wendell Berry Interview - Sojourners Magazine/July 2004
http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj0407&article=040710x
