Wendell Berry: Poet, Farmer, Philosopher

[Note: This article originally appeared in the Poets Who Make Us Better column on Interlitq.]

Growing up in the home of a Christian poet who loves nature and small towns, my son knew I’d be eager to hear the poet who had been invited to speak at our local university. Located in DeLand, Florida, Stetson University often had (and still does) such interesting guest speakers as former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, anthropologist Jane Goodall, and theologian and social activist Desmond Tutu. And so, during a time when my son was completing undergraduate studies, Wendell Berry came to visit. By then Berry had written “Mad Farmer” and other manifestos of which I was unfamiliar, being interested primarily in his poetry.

After hearing this down-to-earth yet sophisticated Kentucky poet-philosopher speak and purchasing my signed copy of his Collected Poems, I began reading this paperback collection of his first eight books, starting with The Broken Ground.

Elegy

I.
“All day our eyes could find no resting place.
Over a flood of snow sight came back
Empty to the mind. The sun
In a shutter of clouds, light
Staggered down the fall of snow.
All circling surfaces of earth were white.
No shape or shadow moved the flight

Of winter birds. Snow held the earth its silence.”

The poem continues for five sections, the latter of which ends:

“The shape of the wind is a tree
Bending, spilling its birds.
From the cloud to the stone.
The rain stands tall,
Columned into his darkness.
The church hill heals our father in.
Our remembering moves from a difference place.”

The next book in the collection, Findings, includes “Three Elegiac Poems,” the second of which offers these lines:

“At the house the light is still waiting.
An old man I’ve loved all my life is dying
in his bed there. He is going
slowly down from himself.
In final obedience to his life, he follows
his body out of our knowing.
Only his hands, quiet on the sheet, keep
a painful resemblance to what they no longer are.”

By the book Openings, the poetic voice speaks with an uncommon clarity and sensitivity as shown in the poem, “My Great- Grandfather’s Slaves,” which concludes:

“I see them go in the bonds of my blood
through all the time of their bodies.

I have seen that freedom cannot be taken
from one man and given to another,
and cannot be taken and kept.

I know that freedom can only be given,
and is the gift to the giver
from the one who receives.

I am owned by the blood of all of them
who ever were owned by my blood.
We cannot be free of each other.”

What profound insight Berry brings as we ponder who owns whom! How many of us with an Anglo-Saxon heritage, for example, realize the need to be free of the enslavement we have – the  inherited guilt of ancestral ownership of other persons? How many of us long for pardon from those whom we have harmed in any way, whether individuals or collected cultures of the one human race we all share?

At this writing, racial tensions have flamed up around the world, and social change continues to be a need and strong priority. But while we look for a more perfect peace found in clarity, wisdom, pardon, and divine inspiration, these lines from Berry’s long poem “Windows” might ease the wait.

“Peace. Let men, who cannot be brothers
to themselves, be brothers
to mullein and daisies
that have learned to live on the earth.
Let them understand the pride
of sycamores and thrushes
that receive the light gladly, and do not
think to illuminate themselves.”

This idea of being siblings to ourselves may well enable us to be better citizens and siblings to one another. 

In the next book included in Collected Poems, Berry addresses Farming: A Hand Book with poems such as “The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer.”

“I am done with apologies. If contrariness is my
inheritance and destiny, so be it. If it is my mission
to go in exits and come out at entrances, so be it.
I have planted by the stars in defiance of the experts,
and tilled somewhat by incantation and by singing,
and reaped, as I knew, by luck and Heaven’s favor,
in spite of the best advice. If I have been caught
so often laughing at funerals, that was because
I knew the dead were already slipping away,
preparing a comeback….”

This sense of life and death, people and place coupled as one entity comes together in the book The Country of Marriage. The first of seven parts in the poem by that name begins:

“I dream of you walking at night along the streams
of the country of my birth, warm blooms and the nightsongs
of birds opening around you as you walk.
You are holding in your body the dark seed of my sleep.”

Part 7. goes on:

“I give you what is unbounded, passing from dark to dark,
containing darkness: a night of rain, an early morning.
I give you the life I have let live for love of you….”

The love of his wife of many years widens the poet’s embrace of the land, nature, people in particular, community, and peoples in general. However, this vision of a land at peace – an earth in love with life and the lives of every living thing – is not sentimentalized in Berry’s poems and other works as shown by these lines in the poem “The Clearing” from the book of that name.

2.

“Vision must have severity
at its edge:

against neglect,
bushes grown over the pastures,
vines riding down
the fences, the cistern broken;

against the false vision
of the farm dismembered,
sold in pieces on the condition
of the buyer’s ignorance,
a disorderly town
of ‘houses in the country’
inhabited by strangers;

against indifference, the tracks
of the bulldozer running
to gullies;

            against weariness,
the dread of too much to do,
the wish to make desire
easy, the thought of rest.”

In A Part, the book dedicated to his mother, Berry offers “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.”

I would be more inclined, though, to call it wisdom and perhaps the inversion of pride – not arrogance but delight in the timeless cycles of life and death as shown in this oddly named poem “Desolation” from the book The Wheel.

“A gracious Spirit sings as it comes
and goes. It moves forever
among things. Earth and flesh, passing
into each other, sing together.”

Although I have other books by Wendell Berry – and he has far more published than I have shelf space – his Collected Poems give us a sweeping view of his insights and his farsightedness. As an author, essayist, naturalist, and “mad farmer,” who challenges us to expand our thinking, the perspectives of this poet might make our views better too.

 

by Mary Harwell Sayler, ©2020

 

Poet-writer Mary Sayler maintains the Poetry Editor blog and provides resources for other poets and writers on her website. Her recent books include A Gathering of Poems and Talking to the Wren: Haiku, Short Verse, and One Long Poem published by Cyberwit.net.

 

…

The wit and poetry of Billy Collins

[Note: This article originally appeared in the PoetsWho Make Us Better column on Interlitq.]

Many poets with prestigious awards have served as Poet Laureate for the United States, as has Billy Collins, so you might wonder what makes him so special. For one thing, people who don’t normally read poems buy his poetry books, contributing to his status as the most beloved living poet in North America.

Down-to-earth or up in the clouds, Collins has a way of studying ordinary subjects most of us can relate to and then addressing them in an extraordinary, often amusing way. For example, in his “first real book of poems” (since reissued) The Apple That Astonished Paris begins with “Vanishing Point” – a subject artists are compelled to study to get the perspective right:

“You thought it was just a pencil dot

art students made in the middle of the canvas

before they started painting the barn, cows, haystack,

or just a point where railroad tracks fuse,

a spot engineers stare at from the cabs of trains

as they clack through the heat of prairies

heading out of the dimensional.”

Then, in a unique turn-about, that’s like a signature, the poet continues:

“But here I am at the vanishing point,

looking back at everything as it zooms toward me….”

Speaking of perspective, Collins even addresses the viewpoint of sea creatures in “Walking Across The Atlantic.”

“…for now I try to imagine what

this must look like to the fish below,

the bottoms of my feet appearing, disappearing.”

Another quirky viewpoint In “Flames” tells us how…

“Smoky the Bear heads

into the autumn woods

with a red can of gasoline

and a box of wooden matches.”

Reportedly, Smoky has had it!

“He is sick of dispensing

warnings to the careless,

the half-wit camper,

the dumbbell hiker.

He is going to show them

how a professional does it.”

Later in the book, the poet gives professional “Advice to Writers.”

“Even if it keeps you up all night,

wash down the walls and scrub the floor

of your study before composing a syllable.”

The poem goes on to recommend “cleaning” with the assurance that “The more you clean, the more brilliant/ your writing will be….” But, after this encouragement to polish poems or other writings, the poet ends with this suggestion:

“…cover pages with tiny sentences

like long rows of devoted ants

that followed you in from the woods.”

In the book, Questions About Angels, the title poem turns its attention to one often asked:

“Of all the questions you might want to ask

about angels, the only one you ever hear

is how many can dance on the head of a pin.”

Those opening lines give an excellent example of how Collins takes the ordinary, the familiar into another realm as the “I” of the poem asks:

“Do they fly through God’s body and come out singing?

Do they swing like children from the hinges

of the spirit world saying their names backwards and forwards?

Do they sit alone in little gardens changing colors?’

Another poem in the book contemplates investigating “A History of Weather.”

“The snow flurries of Victorian London will be surveyed

along with the gales that blew off  Renaissance caps.

The tornadoes of the Middle Ages will be explicated

and the long, overcast days of the Dark Ages.

There will be a section on the frozen nights of antiquity

and on the heat that shimmered in the deserts of the Bible.”

In a more down-to-earth tone, Collins begins the book The Art of Drowning with a note to the “Dear Reader.”

“…you could be the man I held the door for

this morning at the bank or post office

or the one who wrapped my speckled fish.

You could be someone I passed on the street

or the face behind the wheel of an oncoming car.”

Whether those last few words show someone about to mow down the poet is not for me to say, but, like many others, the title poem  for that book weaves dark threads lightly through its lines.

“I wonder how it all got started, this business

about seeing your life flash before your eyes

while you drown, as if panic, or the act of submergence,

could startle time into such compression, crushing

decades in the vice of your desperate, final seconds.”

Instead of that last flash, the “I” of the poem recommends:

“How about a short animated film, a slide presentation?

Your life expressed in an essay, or in one model paragraph?

Wouldn’t any form be better than this sudden flash?”

For some, those questions might be rhetorical, but Professor Collins apparently gives such matters important consideration worthy of being dignified with answers, albeit odd.

In “The End of the World,” for instance:

“It is a subject so profound I feel I should

be underwater to think about it properly.”

The poem continues:

“But here in the calm latitudes of this room

I am thinking that the end could be less operatic.

Maybe a black tarpaulin, a kind of boat cover,

could be lowered over the universe one night.

A hand could enter the picture and crumple the cosmos

into a ball of paper and hook it into a waste basket.”

Clearly, Billy Collins compels us to think about things we might not otherwise consider. For example, in the book Picnic, Lightning, the poem “I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey’s Version of ‘Three Blind Mice’” asks why the farmer’s wife wanted to cut off their tails with a carving knife.

“And I start wondering how they came to be blind.

If it was congenital, they could be brothers and sisters….”

And….

“…how, in their tiny darkness,

could they possibly have run after a farmer’s wife

or anyone else’s wife for that matter?

Not to mention why.”

With Collins’ poems in hand, one begins to see how much we take for granted – how many times we don’t bother to look closer or beyond the obvious. Such probing can be delicious too, as “Japan” reveals:

“Today I pass the time reading

a favorite haiku,

saying the few words over and over.

It feels like eating

the same small, perfect grape

again and again.

I walk through the house reciting it

and leave its letters falling

through the air of every room.”

As poets and writers, we do well to devour bushels of poetry, yet taking time to really taste each poem. And we do well, too, to read Collins’ book, TheTrouble with Poetry, discussed, of course, in poems.

Again the poet invites us into his world by acknowledging “You, Reader.”

“I wonder how you are going to feel

when you find out

that I wrote this instead of you.”

Those few beginning lines express how I feel, reading Collins’ work: Oh, I could have written that! But I didn’t. He did. He took the time and energy to take everyday thoughts and phrases to a new level. Or, maybe he can’t help himself!

As the title poem, “The Trouble with Poetry,” expresses it:

“Poetry fills me with joy

and I rise like a feather in the wind.

Poetry fills me with sorrow

and I sink like a chain flung from a bridge.

But mostly poetry fills me

with the urge to write poetry.”

And that’s another reason the work of Billy Collins makes us better. It makes us want to read poetry again. It makes us want to write.

Then, reading “Quandary” from Collins’ book Aimless Love, I wonder, too, if poetry makes us better because we use the pen, rather than the sword, to extinguish our enemies. To begin:

“I was a little disappointed

in the apple I lifted from a bowl of fruit

and bit into on the way out the door,

fuzzy on the inside and lacking the snap of the ripe.”

After considering “all the people/ who would be grateful to have this apple,” the poet finishes with this quick toss of a phrase:

“Then I took a second bite, a big one,

and pitched what was left

over the tall hedges hoping to hit on the head

a murderer or one of the filthy rich out for a stroll.”

The book The Rain in Portugal shows a softer, sensitive side, however, as  “The Bard in Flight” occupies the adjacent seat on a flight from London – presumably Shakespeare’s first plane ride filled with the awe of ice cubes until the sudden turbulence results in…

“…the frenzied eyes of the nervous passengers,

and the Bard reaching for my hand

as we roared with trembling wings

into the towering fortress of a thunderhead.”

As one of the poets most likely responsible for the shaping of the English language as we know it, Shakespeare might have been more dismayed by the “Poem to the First Generation of People to Exist After the Death of the English Language.” If you’ve ever tried reading poetry in Middle English, these lines will mean even more to you.

“I’m not going to put a lot of work into this

because you won’t be able to read it anyway,

and I’ve got more important things to do

this morning, not the least of which

is to try to write a fairly decent poem

for the people who can still read English.”

The decent poem continues, lamenting “English finding/ a place in the cemetery of dead languages,” and what a loss that would be. And,

“So I’m going to turn the page

and not think about you and your impoverishment.

Instead, I’m going to write a poem about red poppies

waving by the side of the railroad tracks,

and you people will never even know what you’re missing.”

That last line expresses my sentiments for those who have not yet read at least one book of Billy Collins’ poems.

…

Reviewer Mary Harwell Sayler began writing poems in childhood but, as an adult, wrote almost everything except poetry! Eventually, she placed three dozen books in all genres including books of poems and how-to’s on poetry and writing. She continues to maintain the Poetry Editor blog and provide resources for poets and writers. Cyberwit.com has just published her newest poetry book, Talking to the Wren: Haiku, Short Verse, and One Long Poem.

...

The Poet’s Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke

The following post originally appeared on the “Poets Who Make Us Better” column for Interlitq (The International Literary Quarterly.)

In the introduction to The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, the former U.S. Poet Laureate and prize-winning poet Robert Haas summarizes the central theme of Rilke’s poetry as “…the abandonment of ordinary life for the sake of a spiritual quest.” Our interest in this quest, shared by other poets and prophets, draws us to Rilke’s work as a standard for improving our poetry and seeing our lives embraced by both mystery and clarity.

The very first poem in the collection, entitled by its first line, gives a glimpse of that quest:

I am, O Anxious One. Don’t you hear my voice
urging forth with all my earthly feelings?
They yearn so high that they have sprouted wings
and whitely fly in circles around your face.
My soul, dressed in silence, rises up
and stands alone before you: can’t you see?
Don’t you know that my prayer is growing ripe
upon your vision, as upon a tree?

That poem originated in Rilke’s renowned The Book of Hours, but to get an overview of his life’s work, I chose the Vintage Books edition of poems edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell, who selected poems from Rilke’s books written between 1905 and 1926.

This does not, of course, include the must-have Letters to a Young Poet since that book consists, not of poetry, but of the correspondence between 27-year-old Rilke and 19-year-old Franz Kappus, who asked for a critique of his poems but received a 5-year-long discussion on poetry and the life of a literary artist.

For example, in the first letter of the book Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke wrote, “Things are not as easily understood nor as expressible as people usually would like us to believe. Most happenings are beyond expression; they exist where a word has never intruded.”

Rilke’s adventures into a life-expressed continue throughout ten letters to Kappus with everyday conversations but also brilliant observations such as this timeless insight from Letter 8:

 “It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing.”

Also in Letter 8, the poet-mentor challenged the novice with these words:

“Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien.”

The startling statement that “sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien” gives an excellent example of how Rilke’s words call us to read his work again and again.

Regarding the questions the poet likely intended to be rhetorical, the answer just might be fear – the common lack of courage to face life head-on, regardless of its pleasantries or lack thereof, and a frequent factor in our tendency to pull back or shy away from living life to its fullest.

Not only do Rilke’s letters enlarge our ability to embrace our own existence and expand our view of life and poetry, they let us know where he was coming from in the poems he wrote.

For instance, the poem “Lament” from The Book of Pictures, expresses Rilke’s openness to the sadness that well might be a prerequisite for joy.

I think that the star
glittering above me
has been dead for a million years.
I think there were tears
in the car I heard pass
and something terrible was said.

Then these lines conclude the poem:

I would like to step out of my heart
and go walking beneath the enormous sky.
I would like to pray.
And surely of all the stars that perished
long ago,
one still exists.
I think that I know
which one it is –
which one, at the end of its beam in the sky,
stands like a white city….

Perhaps my background and interests cause those lines to bring to mind the long-ago shining star over Bethlehem and the bright new Jerusalem yet to come. However, another poem selected from The Book of Pictures shows Rilke’s skill in observing and comparing what’s right before us in these opening lines of “Evening.”

The sky puts on the darkening blue coat
held for it by a row of ancient tress.

An observer of all aspects of nature – whether plant, animal, human, or Divine – Rilke clearly sees the predicament of “The Panther” in New Poems:

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

A less poetic voice might have said something like, “The panther only sees the bars of his cage, and after staring at them for ages, he no longer believes there’s anything ‘out there,” but bars.” So Rilke is not satisfied merely to notice something; he must enter it.

Also in the section of New Poems, we find one of Rilke’s best-known pieces, the “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” which ends with the often quoted statement, “You must change your life.” However, my favorite from New Poems is “The Flamingo,” which portrays a flock of the exotic birds in this exquisite word-picture:

“…They rise above the green
grass and lightly sway on their long pink stems,
side by side, like enormous feathery blossoms….”

Having returned to my almost-native Florida after several years in Virginia, I can easily envision the flamingos here looking like the blousy pink peonies that bloomed alongside my sister’ Virginia farmhouse, but I never thought about that until Rilke made the connection – the fresh comparison and delightful depiction that, hopefully, challenges us to spend enough time with our own poems for them to come fully into bloom.

Highly adept at letting poems unfold, Rilke even managed to let life unfurl in death! For example, his book Requiem includes the poem “Requiem For A Friend,” which begins:

“I have my dead, and I have let them go,
and was amazed to see them so contented,
so soon at home in being dead, so cheerful,
so unlike their reputation….”

This inclination to turn a concept or assumption onto its head and shake out its pockets is a high mark in Rilke’s poetry and prose. For instance, in his book The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, his poem on the well-known biblical figure, “The Prodigal Son,” gives this unique account:

He “…didn’t even want to have the dogs with him, it was because they too loved him; because in their eyes he could see observation and sympathy, expectation, concern; because in their presence too he couldn’t do anything without giving pleasure or pain.”

Instead of the degenerate young man typically portrayed, Rilke saw the prodigal as the younger son surrounded by so much love, he had to get away to keep himself from suffocating.

In the “First Elegy” of the Duino Elegies, Rilke gives us another fresh perspective:

“…the knowing animals are aware
that we are not really at home in
our interpreted world.”

In the “Second Elegy” of that same book, Rilke asks:

“Does the infinite space
we dissolve into, taste of us then. Do the angels really
reabsorb only the radiance that streamed out from themselves….”

And in The Sonnets of Orpheus, the first poem to Orpheus describes him as a “tall tree in the ear,” then says, “you built a temple deep inside their hearing.” Conversely, the poem “At once the winged energy of delight” astonishingly states, “For the god wants to know himself in you.”

Apparently, Rilke also wants us to know ourselves in our poems – and vice versa. Returning to The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, which some call a semi-autobiographical novel, the master poet offers us this counsel in his poetic prose “For The Sake of a Single Poem”:

“…Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough) – they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained….”

The sage advice goes on, “And it is not enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves – only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.”

Rilke frequently presents the flip side of what’s obvious,  taken for granted, and/or unexplored beyond a shallow surface or assumption, enticing us to open ourselves more fully to a well-lived life, and perhaps, in the process, finding ourselves becoming better people, better poets.

...

©2020 Poet-writer-reviewer Mary Harwell Sayler began writing poems in childhood but, as an adult, wrote almost everything except poetry! Eventually, she placed three dozen books in all genres including books of poems and how-to’s on poetry and writing. She continues to provide resources for poets and writers on her website.