A Non-Personal Memory of Wendell Berry

I first saw the news Monday about the death of Wendell Berry rather obliquely. Two Facebook friends independently posted poems by him. I stared, realizing the coincidence meant only one thing. He’d died, aged 92. 

Some news events shock you, upending what you understand about the world. An assassination. The fall of the Berlin Wall. A terrorist attack like 9/11. Others reduce you to a sense of profound quiet. It was that second kind I experienced on reading those two poems. Neither post mentioned his death. They didn’t have to. I knew.

 

I don’t have a personal story about Wendell Berry. I know people who’ve gone to his lectures, and people who’ve made pilgrimages to his home in Kentucky. People who’ve met him. But I don’t have a personal story. What I have is a one-off story, which probably tells you more about agriculture, biotech agriculture, and the wars that raged over genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, for three decades. The story also tells you more about Berry’s impact and influence than many obituaries.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Thursday Readings

 

The 2026 Society of Classical Poets International Poetry Competition and the International High School Poetry Competition. 

 

“The Elixir,” poem by George Herbert – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.

 

After the Storm, Still I Float – poem by Riyanka Paul.

 

“The Blind Man and the Elephant,” poem by John Godfrey Saxe – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient & Modern. 

Wendell Berry and "The Mad Farmer Poems”

It was a conversation that went much like you might expect. 

“I don’t understand it,” the executive said. “They hate us. They hate what we do. They don’t even really understand what it is that we do. They don’t understand how important our products are for farmers and for the world’s food supply.”

 

I was sitting in the executive’s office, working with him on a speech he was to give. What he was talking about wasn’t the subject of the speech, but it was clearly on his mind. I listened to what was essentially a rant, and then I asked a question.

 

“Have you read Wendell Berry?”

 

He stared at me. “Who’s that?”

 

And there it was. The animosity about the company’s products, the position of the company in the marketplace, the company’s close identification with “Big Agriculture,” and the executive’s being perplexed with the activists and animosity on social media could all be summed up that that question – “who’s that?”

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Adventures in Storytelling – Andrew Motion at The New Statesman.

 

A Woman Was stabbed to Death on a Train. Wikipedia Wants to Erase Her Story – Ashley Rindsberg at The Free Press.

Six heads of lettuce

I’ve never tried growing them

before, but now I’m tending

six heads of butter lettuce, 

watering and fertilizing and

tearing away dead leaves

(not too many yet) and casting

the evil eye on infernal rabbits

(a redundant phrase). 

My six heads of lettuce, soon

to be joined by six tomato plants,

are my nod in the direction 

of local agriculture; in fact,

this is about as local as you

can get: my backyard patch 

of ground 4 feet x 12 feet.

Each day, except when it rains, 

or when I forget, I fill 

my watering can like

Wendell Berry, and I bathe

my lettuces while reciting

the occasional poem. 

My timbered choir is more

like a timbered soloist, aka

the river birch sitting 

in the corner of the yard

a few feet away, dropping 

twigs and small limbs

instead of arias.

I used to work for one

of those giant behemoths

of agriculture so disdained

by Mr. Berry, but I didn’t

mind; I liked his poems

and his centeredness

in place too much. I often

told colleagues to read

his novels and poems

if they wanted to know

what the criticisms were

all about, but they didn’t

seem to mind either.

The editors of Tweetspeak Poetry are hosting a 30-Day, 30-Poem Challenge for Earth Month entitled, appropriately enough, Poetic Earth Month. Today, the featured poem is “Li Po,” and the poetry prompt is to choose a historical or modern-day figure involved with agriculture and compare yourself this figure.

Photograph by Stephanie Moody via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Poetry of Farming: "Water at the Roots" by Philip Britts

Philip Britts (1917-1949) was an Englishman who joined the Cotswold Bruderhof community. The Bruderhof was (and is) a faith community who live together and share all land and possessions. They are also pacifists. Consider the plight of Britts, who is living and farming in rural England when World War II begins. Some members of the community are German; the Bruderhof started in Germany. The British government and local authorities weren’t terribly impressed by both pacifists and Germans living in rural England when Britain was fighting for its survival against Nazi Germany. The British could accept the pacifists, but not the Germans.

Philip Britts

The community was given a choice – the Germans had to be interned or leave, or the entire community had to emigrate. The Cotswold Bruderhof choose emigration, and eventually settled in Paraguay, the only country which would accept all of them. It wasn’t an easy life; farmland had to be tilled, crops planted and harvested, locusts fought, strange diseases encountered (one would eventually kill Britts when he was 31).

Britts kept a journal, wrote essays, and also wrote poetry.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Wendell Berry’s “Our Only World”

Until I retired in May, I worked for a company prominent in agriculture, a company that was no stranger to controversy. Maintaining a near-religious belief in science, the company often struggled with what it saw as the forces of “anti-science” arrayed against it. To observe openly, as I occasionally did, that this often intense criticism actually didn’t spring from “anti-science” but from something else was typically met with a blank look.

That something else was Wendell Berry. People in the company weren’t familiar with him. Michael Pollan, yes. Wendell Berry, no. It was a serious mistake.

For most if not all of his adult life, writer Wendell Berry (born 1934) has been remarkably consistent in his belief and his worldview that the industrialization of America had created a kind of violence upon the land, communities, and the people. In more than 50 works of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, he’s adhered to that belief, which is informed by his Christian faith.

Industrialization includes everything from an agriculture dependent upon fossil fuels and chemicals and mining practices that scour the landscape to the destruction of forests. He sees both major political parties have having facilitated this, and indeed often with the collusion of environmental groups. And he sees corporate capitalism as having wreaked destruction upon the political, social, and economic landscapes as well as the physical landscape.

In Our Only World: Ten Essays, Berry continues his discussion of that violence and destruction, along with a focus on examples of where he sees people are making a difference. The title is something of a misnomer; the 10 essays are actually 10 articles, speeches and essays. But they are simultaneously vintage Berry and contemporary Berry. And he has much to say, and much that needs to be listened to and heeded.

Wendell Berry

The two longest essays in the book are the fullest discussions of his philosophy and belief. “A Forest Conversation” discusses historical forestry and logging practices but focuses on a family in Pennsylvania that has undertaken sustainable forestry for decades. “Our Deserted Country” focuses on agriculture, and considers how industrialized agriculture has changed local communities, the land, our attitudes about the land, and even our attitudes about the value of people.

“Caught in the Middle” tackles two social issues that Berry sees as connected to what industrialized has wrought – abortion and homosexual marriage. He generally opposes the first and supports the second, but he laments that both have become so politicized that the middle ground has essentially been destroyed. Even if you disagree with him on these issues, his gentle and thoughtful arguments will at least make you consider just how well your own beliefs are thought out. And his arguments are well worth reading.

Our Only World is not a long book but it is a worthwhile one. Much of what he says resonates with common sense, and much of what he says about industrialization is, I would say, on the mark. The question, as he well knows, is what do we do about it.

Related:

My review of Berry’s That Distant Land.

Wendell Berry and the Land

My review of Berry’s Jayber Crow.

Wendell Berry and This Day: Poems at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Wendell Berry and Terrapin: Poems at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Top photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Language of Food

Our discussion at The High Calling this week of The Spirit of Food: 34 Writers on Feasting and Fasting Toward God covers three essays, we’re taking a turn toward the political. Not that the political is necessarily a bad thing, but politics now permeates virtually all aspects of American life, including food. Sometimes it becomes very wearying, indeed.

I love the stories, poems and novels of Wendell Berry, whose essay in this collection, “The Pleasure of Eating,” is taken from his previously published work What Are People For? His fiction, poetry and non-fiction are of a piece, reflecting a particular philosophy, faith and worldview. Berry has become something of the patron saint of the local food/slow food movement, which (among other things) espouses knowing where your food comes from and living close to where your food is produced, even producing some or all of it yourself if possible.

The definition of local has varied. Originally, local meant within five miles, which was a problem for the great urban centers of New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, not to mention the rest of us who live in much smaller urban centers. Today, “local” is generally suggested to be something within 400 miles of where you live, which seems to me to stretch the idea of “local.” Can you really “know” the farmer who grows your food if he or she lives 400 miles away?

I hesitate to criticize Berry. I have friends who half-jokingly refer to him as St. Wendell. As I said, I enjoy his poetry and fiction. And I work for an agricultural company that Berry sees as part of the problem with American food and agriculture, so anything I might say would be immediately suspect.

I don’t criticize Berry for his writings and beliefs. He has a very well considered philosophy of agriculture and farming, better thought out that a lot of the current celebrities who run around today publishing books and making speeches. Berry’s philosophy and the articulation of it are cohesive and holistic.

My problem is the language.

“Eating is an agricultural act.” “Industrial farming.” “Bichemical agriculture.” “Like industrial sex, industrial eating has become a degraded, poor and paltry thing.” Passive consumers are “persuaded to want” what they buy. There are notions of the food industry conspiring to prevent people from knowing where their food comes from, and even a direct statement that our very freedom is at stake in the politics of food.

Others (not Berry) go further: if you don’t believe these things, if you don’t believe what I believe, then you are part of the problem; and if you’re one of those big companies involved in agriculture, then you are de facto evil.

I have this stubborn tendency not to trust anyone on any side of an issue who claims to be absolutely correct. I am peculiarly sensitive to statements made with “the sentiment of superiority,” which assumes that if you don’t agree then you must be stupid, manipulated or both.

What I really don’t like is what it this language communicates about 99 percent of farmers: that farmers are manipulated, misled, or worse, active participants in the destruction of the environment, producing the food of “industrial eating.”

This is plain, flat-out wrong.

This is the language of superiority; it is also the language of exclusion and implied denigration. If you don’t accept what lies behind this language, you become the demonized other.

Berry may right on one thing: our very freedom may indeed be at stake in the politics of food.

Only not the way he believes it to be. We may have far more to fear about the language of food.


To see more posts on The Spirit of Food, visit the discussion at The High Calling.