Tacked above my desk is a Poetry magazine postcard, a line from editor Christian Wiman: “Let us remember … that in the end we go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both.”
Wendell Berry died Monday at 92 at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky, and the first thing that came to mind was his poem “The Peace of Wild Things.” Social media was alive with it by Tuesday.
The Peace of Wild Things
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 children's 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.
It's a balm for any season, but especially this one, with so much despair and suffering. Writers like Berry work in matters of the heart – grief, wonder, belonging – matters that unite agriculturalists and environmentalists, rural communities and a wider readership.
Berry farmed the same Kentucky River bottomland his family had worked since 1803, plowing behind Belgian draft horses and writing his poems, essays and novels in pencil, by daylight – he refused electric light because the power came from strip-mined coal. Returning home, he said, was what kept him honest: “The landscape was there to check me if I was wrong. I could never go away and make up stuff at cocktail parties about the backwoods of Kentucky.”
Over six decades he produced more than 50 books arguing for small farms, local economies and rural communities against industrial agriculture. In 1988, a University of Kentucky agriculture dean dismissed his ideas as “a primitive agriculture,” fine for someone “with a rich father,” but no model for feeding the country. Berry never budged. Like E.F. Schumacher, he believed small was beautiful – no efficiency was worth what it cost a people's attachment to their land. In 2011, President Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal, honoring “his achievements as a poet, novelist, farmer and conservationist.”
I have my own small piece of him. In 1996, finishing graduate school, I wrote to ask whether he'd give the keynote at my commencement. His reply came back handwritten in black ink, gracious in its decline. I kept it for years – it's packed in a box now – proof a stranger took the trouble to answer an earnest request in his own hand, the way he wrote everything.
This is what literature does at its best: it tells us we are not alone in what we feel. It's why the free Mesa Verde Literary Festival, in downtown Mancos Saturday, is worth attending. It caps the three-day Mesa Verde Writers Conference, bringing more than 40 authors to the town's galleries, patios and shops for readings and panels.
Colorado Poet Laureate Crisosto Apache will be everywhere Saturday: a 9 a.m. chat with Montezuma County poet Meredith Clark, a reading at Sundog Gallery at 10 a.m. and a panel, “Framing the Human Experience One Poem at a Time,” at 2:45 p.m. He'll share the day with Durango's Scott Graham and Jennaye Derge and Montezuma County's Annette McGivney, Gail Binkly, Chuck Greaves and Lisa C. Taylor. Mystery novelist Nina Simon delivers the keynote.
Wendell Berry spent a lifetime insisting that attention – to a place, to a poem, to each other – is itself a form of love. Go. Be attentive Saturday. Pick up one of his books this week. For a time, as Berry wrote, we might rest in the grace of the world, and be free.
