© 2024 WUKY
background_fid.jpg
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

In Depth: A Profile of Kentucky Poet and Activist Wendell Berry

By Graham Shelby

http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wuky/local-wuky-965441.mp3

Louisville, KY – April is National Poetry Month. And one of Kentucky's most prominent poets has been the object of recent attention at both the local and national level. Kentucky Public Radio's Graham Shelby offers this look at the life and work of 76-year-old writer, farmer and activist Wendell Berry.

It's a rainy spring afternoon on Wendell Berry's hillside farm in Henry County, northeast of Louisville. He's taking a break, sitting at his kitchen table, talking about meeting The President of the United States.

"It's extraordinary. It was an experience totally unprecedented for me. But I'm not a person who's much at ease in public circumstances especially not in exalted public circumstances. So I felt relieved when it was over and I had not disgraced myself."

Berry received the National Humanities Medal in a White House ceremony in March. He says winning the award was a great honor, but it also begged an uncomfortable question:

"Is this what I've been working all my life for?"

To understand what Berry has been working for all his life, it's important to understand his work. For nearly 50 years he's farmed the same plot of ground not far from where he grew up. He's also published more than 40 books including novels, poetry and essays. He's never had a bestseller but he has fans and admirers, among them, Garrison Keillor, who anthologized several of Berry's poems in his Good Poems anthology series.

"His passion for the land is moving and it's not put on, it's not romantic. There's something ageless about Wendell Berry."

"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."

That's Berry reading from his poem, "The Peace of Wild Things" on the public radio program Speaking of Faith. While he's earned a reputation as a writer, he's willing to put that reputation on the line. In February, he joined a group called Kentucky Rising that held a sit-in at the office of Governor Steve Beshear. The group was protesting the state's sanctioning of mountaintop removal coal mining, among other issues. Berry and thirteen others spent three days and nights there, sleeping on the crowded floor. Matt Murray is the editor of the UK student newspaper. Murray spent that weekend covering Berry and the protesters from inside the governor's office.

"Anytime people seemed tired, sad, down, hungry, he'd be the one to say 'We're doing it for this reason. He was the constant reminder of why they were there, but not the guy who would say, 'We need to do this, this and this."

Berry says there's no justification for doing permanent damage to the environment - although he doesn't say it that way. Wendell Berry hates term 'environment'.

"We've got to quit talking about the environment, and start talking about places that we call by name. I refuse to call myself an environmentalist or to use that word as if it meant something."

The term is too vague, he says, and it doesn't help communicate what he sees as the central problem: That we've created an economy and a society that neglect one of the primary laws of evolution - adapt to your local, natural surroundings or die.

"The answer is to consider the uniqueness of places and then try to understand how the human economy can be fitted to those unique places, and you can't get to that by talking about the environment. Nobody has ever called their home places the environment."

He pauses then, checks the clock and looks outside. The rain has stopped. He's ready to get back to work. Writing may have earned him more awards than farming but that's not why he's done either of them.

"If you have work that you feel called to do and you feel capable of doing and that you like and you've been free to do it for many years, you are extremely fortunate. That is the real reward - doing the work itself."

Wendell Berry puts on his boots and his coat and heads back out to the farm.