35 Who Made a Difference: Wendell Berry

A Kentucky poet draws inspiration from the land that sustains him

  • By Paul Trachtman
  • Smithsonian.com, November 01, 2005, Subscribe
 

Wendell Berry, farmer and poet, has lived in sight of the Kentucky River for 40 years, in a landscape where generations of his family have farmed since the early 1800s. The river is probably the only mainstream close to his heart. As a farmer, he has shunned the use of tractors and plowed his land with a team of horses. As a poet, he has stood apart from the categories and controversies of the literary world, writing in language neither modern nor postmodern, making poems that have the straightforward elegance of the Amish furniture in his farmhouse. And in recent decades, he has produced a body of political thought, in a series of essays and speeches, that is so Jeffersonian it seems almost un-American in today's world.

Berry argues that small farms and farm communities are as vital to our liberties now as they were in Jefferson's day. The agribusiness corporations and developers that have all but replaced them, he warns, are eroding our freedom along with our soil. In a recent essay, "Compromise, Hell!" he writes: "We are destroying our country—I mean our country itself, our land....Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us."

At 71, Berry and his wife, Tanya, live on their 125-acre farm, producing almost all the food they eat: table vegetables from the garden, meat from their flock of sheep. They sell some sheep and take firewood from the woodland, and their livestock graze on green pastures. During Berry's years as a writer—he has produced some 40 volumes of poetry, fiction and essays—and a teacher in the English department at the University of Kentucky, the couple has practiced and achieved the respectable degree of self-sufficiency that Berry preaches. They have improved the land, raised a family and seen both of their children take up farming nearby. Their son, Den, and his wife, Billie, raise cattle, corn and hay on a farm five miles away; Den makes furniture to augment the family income. Their daughter, Mary, and her husband, Chuck Smith, ten miles away, have preserved an old farm by turning it into the Smith-Berry winery, while also raising cattle and crops.

Twenty-five years ago, Berry wrote in Smithsonian about the hard work of reclaiming land that had been neglected and abused, of learning how to properly cultivate and care for it. When I visited the farm recently, he was pleased to show me how the land has responded. "Tanya and I just got back from a sheep sale," he remarked, "and I drove up the creek and thought, this is so beautiful, completely beautiful. You don't know how beautiful it is unless you see it every day. You may forget about it in the frustrations and heartbreak of farming and your life, but then it'll come to you again, you'll see it again."

Berry has criticized the environmental movement for separating wilderness from farmland in its conservation campaigns. Showing me around the place, he said, "This is the front line of the conservation struggle too. I don't think people realize how much work, actual physical work, would be involved in restoring this country to some kind of health. My experience over the last 25 years has been that not many people speak, or can think, from the point of view of the land. As soon as the conversation shifts from issues actually affecting the land, to 'the environment,' then you're done for. People think of it as something different from themselves, and of course it isn't."

No less critical of the agricultural establishment, Berry gained considerable public attention 30 years ago with his book The Unsettling of America, a manifesto against the government's advice to farmers: get big or get out. "I suppose the main misfortune in my life," he says, "is that the public situations I've tried to address haven't changed very much. I thought that book was a way of taking part in a public conversation, and the public conversation hasn't happened—not, for sure, in the capitols or in the mainstream media."

Berry has been joined by a growing community of allies, however, in pressing Jefferson's claim that "The small landholders are the most precious part of a state." And the public, for its part, has been showing an increased interest in farmers' markets, locally grown organic produce, and consumer co-ops that offer healthier foods—all signs that small farms, after decades of decline, could someday make a comeback. The greatest obstacle, Berry worries, is a lack of people to work the land. "How are you going to get these people?" he wonders. "And how are you going to keep them at it once you've got them, past the inevitable disillusionment and the weariness in the hot sun?" When I remind him of an old popular song about farm boys returning from World War I—"How're you gonna keep 'em down on the farm, after they've seen Paree?"—he responds: "How are you going to shut up that voice that's now in every American mind, "I'm too good for this kind of work'? That is the most insidious voice of all."

As a young man, Berry thought he would have to leave his native place and way of life. "In high school my teachers were telling me, you can't amount to anything and stay where you're from. So when I left here I assumed I would be an academic wanderer perhaps, that I'd be going with my 'talent' from one university to another, so I could amount to something. When I decided to come back here, a lot of people I respected thought I was deliberately achieving my ruin." Now his life, and his poetry, belong to the place he came back to. "I realize every day how extremely fortunate I've been as a writer to live where my imagination took root," he says. In his poetry he often gives thanks for his surroundings. He seeks to write, he says in a recent poem, in "a tongue set free from fashionable lies."


Wendell Berry, farmer and poet, has lived in sight of the Kentucky River for 40 years, in a landscape where generations of his family have farmed since the early 1800s. The river is probably the only mainstream close to his heart. As a farmer, he has shunned the use of tractors and plowed his land with a team of horses. As a poet, he has stood apart from the categories and controversies of the literary world, writing in language neither modern nor postmodern, making poems that have the straightforward elegance of the Amish furniture in his farmhouse. And in recent decades, he has produced a body of political thought, in a series of essays and speeches, that is so Jeffersonian it seems almost un-American in today's world.

Berry argues that small farms and farm communities are as vital to our liberties now as they were in Jefferson's day. The agribusiness corporations and developers that have all but replaced them, he warns, are eroding our freedom along with our soil. In a recent essay, "Compromise, Hell!" he writes: "We are destroying our country—I mean our country itself, our land....Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us."

At 71, Berry and his wife, Tanya, live on their 125-acre farm, producing almost all the food they eat: table vegetables from the garden, meat from their flock of sheep. They sell some sheep and take firewood from the woodland, and their livestock graze on green pastures. During Berry's years as a writer—he has produced some 40 volumes of poetry, fiction and essays—and a teacher in the English department at the University of Kentucky, the couple has practiced and achieved the respectable degree of self-sufficiency that Berry preaches. They have improved the land, raised a family and seen both of their children take up farming nearby. Their son, Den, and his wife, Billie, raise cattle, corn and hay on a farm five miles away; Den makes furniture to augment the family income. Their daughter, Mary, and her husband, Chuck Smith, ten miles away, have preserved an old farm by turning it into the Smith-Berry winery, while also raising cattle and crops.

Twenty-five years ago, Berry wrote in Smithsonian about the hard work of reclaiming land that had been neglected and abused, of learning how to properly cultivate and care for it. When I visited the farm recently, he was pleased to show me how the land has responded. "Tanya and I just got back from a sheep sale," he remarked, "and I drove up the creek and thought, this is so beautiful, completely beautiful. You don't know how beautiful it is unless you see it every day. You may forget about it in the frustrations and heartbreak of farming and your life, but then it'll come to you again, you'll see it again."

Berry has criticized the environmental movement for separating wilderness from farmland in its conservation campaigns. Showing me around the place, he said, "This is the front line of the conservation struggle too. I don't think people realize how much work, actual physical work, would be involved in restoring this country to some kind of health. My experience over the last 25 years has been that not many people speak, or can think, from the point of view of the land. As soon as the conversation shifts from issues actually affecting the land, to 'the environment,' then you're done for. People think of it as something different from themselves, and of course it isn't."

No less critical of the agricultural establishment, Berry gained considerable public attention 30 years ago with his book The Unsettling of America, a manifesto against the government's advice to farmers: get big or get out. "I suppose the main misfortune in my life," he says, "is that the public situations I've tried to address haven't changed very much. I thought that book was a way of taking part in a public conversation, and the public conversation hasn't happened—not, for sure, in the capitols or in the mainstream media."

Berry has been joined by a growing community of allies, however, in pressing Jefferson's claim that "The small landholders are the most precious part of a state." And the public, for its part, has been showing an increased interest in farmers' markets, locally grown organic produce, and consumer co-ops that offer healthier foods—all signs that small farms, after decades of decline, could someday make a comeback. The greatest obstacle, Berry worries, is a lack of people to work the land. "How are you going to get these people?" he wonders. "And how are you going to keep them at it once you've got them, past the inevitable disillusionment and the weariness in the hot sun?" When I remind him of an old popular song about farm boys returning from World War I—"How're you gonna keep 'em down on the farm, after they've seen Paree?"—he responds: "How are you going to shut up that voice that's now in every American mind, "I'm too good for this kind of work'? That is the most insidious voice of all."

As a young man, Berry thought he would have to leave his native place and way of life. "In high school my teachers were telling me, you can't amount to anything and stay where you're from. So when I left here I assumed I would be an academic wanderer perhaps, that I'd be going with my 'talent' from one university to another, so I could amount to something. When I decided to come back here, a lot of people I respected thought I was deliberately achieving my ruin." Now his life, and his poetry, belong to the place he came back to. "I realize every day how extremely fortunate I've been as a writer to live where my imagination took root," he says. In his poetry he often gives thanks for his surroundings. He seeks to write, he says in a recent poem, in "a tongue set free from fashionable lies."

I ask if he sometimes feels like an Old Testament prophet, a voice in the wilderness. He can't afford such thoughts, he says. He is determined to have hope. "Part of the reason for writing all these essays is my struggle never to quit, to never utter those awful words 'it's inevitable.'" His writing has sometimes been called radical, but he thinks of himself as a conservative, conserving what is most human in our landscape and ourselves. "You know," he says, laughing, "if you subtracted the Gospels and the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence from my work, there wouldn't be very much left.”


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Comments (5)

Has Mr. Berry considered the possibility of meeting our nation's loss of small farm operations with America's growing need to put a capable and knowledgable corps of senior citizens to work ... perhaps by managing and investing in properties needing restoration and return to active production?

We retired Americans need a challenge such as this one. Might it work?

Michael Keating
seniorsmarts@hotmail.com

(Might you folks be able to pass on this email message to Mr. Berry, please?)

Posted by Michael Keating on December 8,2011 | 02:58 PM

Dear Mr. Berry -- I heard you on NPR recently and was humbled and intrigued by your wisdom. I am working on a film project which would be a followup to Joseph Campbell's myth series: the stories of people who live lives dedicated to the mythic realms -- whether they know it or not. These are the folk whose lives are lived as antidote to the dominant western modalities of consumerism, political polarity and warfare waged against those with whom we disagree.

I hope to start shooting a fund-raising reel this spring and wonder if you would be willing to be interviewed sometime in May. I realize you would need to know a lot more about my work to consider this. But just start by considering the e-mail address! I am singer, writer, and lover of children, trees and faeries.

Thanks and I hope to hear from you as I begin reading your work. I am starting with Life is a Miracle. Indeed.

sincerely.

mary jo.

Posted by Mary Jo on January 15,2010 | 09:49 AM

can you tell me a place where i can buy smith berry wine in my area

Posted by sue eaton on December 19,2009 | 12:01 AM

The fervent attachment to land of small farmers to their piece of land, reminsicent of the attachment of Joads famliy in Steinbeck's novels and of the numerous farmers in my country, India, which is mostly rural, is heartening. Salutations to Wendell Berry for standing boldly against the mad insistence on "Get Big or Get Out." Let the fight go on!
Prof S S Prabhakar Rao
Formerly Professor of English
J N T University,
Hyderabad, India

Posted by S.S.Prabhakar Rao on September 30,2009 | 09:18 PM

You are one of the wisest person on earth due to your love and connection to land that is so vital and important to our survival and your article on inverting the economic order is the most important revelation on how to preserve our future that I have ever seen in my 82 years. Thank you so much.
Love
Werner

Posted by Werner Hertz on September 6,2009 | 06:42 PM



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