Leavings: Poems

Wendell Berry, Leavings: Poems, Counterpoint, Berkeley, CA, 2010. (132 pp.)

I have been living for the past few weeks with Wendell Berry's latest anthology of poems in my backpack and have decided it is time to share a few thoughts about it. The book is in two parts: the first part is a potpourri, an all-too-short assortment of letter poems, occasional pieces, and brief reflections (the 20 titled poems in the collection are here); the second part is entitled "Sabbaths 2005-2008" and carries the tag line, "How may a human being come to rest?" (54 numbered poems make up this section.)

The title Leavings is not the title of any of the poems, but seems to sum up the book, as if Berry were deliberately taking leave of his readers. "It is hard to have hope. It is harder as you grow old." (2007.VI) "In time a man disappears..." (2007.VII) "I know I am getting old and I say so,..." (2005.VII) There are other leavings here too, other than the merely personal, predominantly that of the descending water that flows out from a lowly stream named Camp Branch. Falling tones, falling leaves (literally), falling steps, falling stones, falling snow and falling rain transport the reader to the Kentucky countryside where we see the place that has meant and still means the world to Mr. Berry. This small collection takes the reader on a painful but beautiful journey, a shared pilgrimage down familiar paths measured in ever slower and more halting steps, made all the more valuable for the fact that the reader is not required to leave his native place to join Mr. Berry except in imagination. "So many times I've gone away from here, where I'd rather be than any place I know.... It is death." (2008.X)

One of my favorite poems in this collection, one I know I'll return to many times, occurs early in Part I and is entitled simply "An Embarrassment." The severe economy of language--3 or 4 word lines mostly, mostly 1 or 2 syllable words--conveys the embarrassment of friends who regularly offer thanks for a meal when they eat alone but who are now trying to decide whether to do so when they are together. One of them, having decided to make a go of the prayer, leaves (!) them both embarrassed as the prayer falls awfully flat. I'll not ruin the ending for you, but it is a Berry-esque show stopper. For someone who makes his living as a pastor, that one poem was worth the price of admission. But there are many others from this book that will now join my ever growing list of Berry favorites: e.g., "A Speech to the Garden Club of America," which admonishes us to go "back to school, this time in gardens." Or "While Attending the Annual Convocation of Cause Theorists and Bigbangists at the Local Provincial Research University, the Mad Farmer Intercedes from the Back Row." (If you've read The Mad Farmer Poems, you'll appreciate the appropriateness of this addition to the corpus.

I have been reading (and re-reading) Wendell Berry's work for quite a while now. That means I've heard many of the words and seen many of the ideas before. But these poems are new, encountered for the first time like today's bracing walk in a familiar woods I've visited many times. In that sense they are very gratefully received; it is, after all, November and there are too few such walks left to me ...and to you.

It wouldn't be right to end the review without a full list of Wendell Berry's poetic works. Check your shelves! If you do not have all of these, you'll want them on a shelf close by when the winter winds begin to blow the snow around.

The Broken Ground: Poems

Clearing









Farming: A Hand Book







Openings: Poems (Harvest/Hbj Book)

A Part (Part Paper)

Sabbaths


Sayings and Doings





The Wheel

The Soil and Health

Sir Albert Howard, The Soil and Health: A Study of Organic Agriculture (Culture of the Land), with a new introduction by Wendell Berry, The University Press of Kentucky, 2006.

This book is one of A Series in the New Agrarianism by UPK, edited by Norman Wirzba, that bears the title Culture of the Land. The book was originally published in 1947. It followed the publication and good reception of An Agricultural Testament in 1940. (One may hope that An Agricultural Testament will also be added to this series or reprinted by some other publisher soon.) This book is one of a set of classic texts, along with F. C. King's Farmers of Forty Centuries,
Lady Eve Balfour's The Living Soil (Soil Association Organic Classics), and the like, that have occasionally been reprinted and should remain always available in print. One suspects that they will be widely accessible again as soon as they enter the public domain. In the meantime, short run or print on demand--or re-sale by abebooks.com and the like--must suffice to keep a new generation of readers informed.

This book certainly deserves the reputation it has received as a "classic." Sir Albert Howard is plain spoken and easy for any agricultural practitioner--including this one--to understand. Though it is somewhat getting the cart before the horse to say so, Howard truly exemplifies the purpose of the series, demonstrating a profound appreciation for the "intimate and practical connections which exist between humans and the earth." Perhaps that is because Howard was, as is often stated, a pioneer and founding source for the New Agrarianism and the organic movement. Nowhere have I seen the connection between humans and the earth more profoundly and clearly stated than in the progression of Howard's outline for Part II of the book, "Disease in Present-Day Farming and Gardening." Howard moves with deliberation from diseases of the soil, through diseases of crops, to disease and health in livestock, and ultimately to a brief and convincing statement of the relationship between soil fertility and human health.

I was bemused to discover again the depth of my ignorance. I am a product of U.S. public schools--primary, secondary, and college all in the great agriculturally dependent state of Tennessee--from 1972 to 1984. I took "biology" as a school course (not counting the units of biology in early science classes) twice, once in High School and once again in college, but never do I recall hearing of the "Mycorrhizal Association" or the "web-like mycelial strands" that surround and invade some plant roots. As recently as 2007 I took the Master Gardener course from the Purdue Extension service, and again do not recall having heard anything about the mycorrhizal association in some roots. Certainly there was an emphasis on keeping organic matter high in our gardens and an emphasis on care in working the garden not to destroy the soil structure (not to work too often, or when the soil is too wet or too dry), but nothing was said about the importance of the symbiotic relationship with some microbes for the growth of some plants. It is clear that the association is understood as scientific fact and that its importance for plant growth is also understood, though the remedies (adding more synthetic phosphorous to what Howard would have called the "artificial manure" mix) are not necessarily ones embraced by organic agriculture. (e.g., Purdue note regarding the effect of flooding on helpful fungi.)

The fact that the mycorrhizal association is recognized and still studied today as an aspect of forestry and natural resource management suggests that Howard's drawing of connections between the forest (Howard recommends "afforestation," including forests in the long-term agricultural rotation) and a sustainable agriculture and human health is true, even if viewed by today's agro-science technicians as impractical. The book, 300 pages of small type, is too extensive to do it justice with a single review. Perhaps the best recommendation for the book is its constant citation by others more qualified than I to speak about organic agriculture. I think it is for good reason that Howard and his "Wheel of Life" (with its imperative to return everything to the soil whence it came) has formed a constant touchstone for authors like Wendell Berry (e.g., "The Use of Energy" in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry). Perhaps the best and most important thing to take from a first (hopefully not the last) reading of Howard is that "The first duty of the agriculturalist [farmer or gardener] must always be to understand that he [or she] is a part of Nature and cannot escape from his environment" (p. 194). This maxim leads everywhere in the book to delightful conclusions like the following: "the attempt to raise natural earth-borne crops on an exclusive diet of water and mineral dope--the so-called science of hydroponics--is science gone mad; it is an absurdity which has nothing in common with the ancient art of cultivation" (ibid.)

To which this reviewer can only add "amen!"

The Virtues of Ignorance

The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge (Culture of the Land) (A Series in the new Agrarianism) Edited by Bill Vitek and Wes Jackson. The University Press of Kentucky, 2008.

The question of the book is this: "Since we're billions of times more ignorant than knowledgeable, why not go with our long suit and have an ignorance-based worldview?" In other words, why not try humility in the face of our incurable ignorance rather than hubris-ic bravado. This is a new-old epistemology, as several of the authors point out--at least as old as Plato, Aristotle, Isocrates and the rest, maybe even as old as the Garden of Eden. The question is pondered, chewed like cud, by a "who's who" of thinkers and garden philosophers from a wide variety of disciplines and professions: Wendell Berry, Robert Perry, Richard D. Lamm, Conn Nugent, Raymond H. Dean, Steve Talbott, Anna L. Peterson, Paul G. Heltne, Charles Marsh, Peter G. Brown, Strachan Donnelley, Robert Root-Bernstein, Marlys Hearst Witte, Peter Crown, Michael Bernas, Charles L. Witte, Herb Thompson, Jon Jensen, Joe Marocco, and Craig Holdrege.



In other words, this is a book of collected essays based on a symposium held in June 2004 in Matfield Green, Kansas, and suffers all of the weaknesses such books incur, especially an unevenness of quality, abrupt changes in the level and focus of the discourse, and a tendency toward successive monologues rather than true dialog.

That having been said, the book's subject is timely and vital. As I write, the Republican standard bearer and Republican VP candidate are priming every audience they meet with chants of "drill, baby, drill"--hardly a humble stance toward the consumption of fossil fuels or the dangers of global warming. Palin, the GOP VP candidate, still doubts the science of global warming. This would be fine if her stance were one of humility and reverence for life (all of life, not merely the unborn individual human life) in the face of her ignorance, but instead she insists on exhausting the natural world now and squandering on the present generation what it took nature "geologic time" to build.

It is also ironic that I am posting this review on the eve of the first operation of the Large Hadron Collider. As the New York Times so cleverly opines: Fingers Crossed, Physicists Are Ready for Collider to Roll. Why "fingers crossed"? Because once again we humans are willing to roll the dice with nature in order to increase our knowledge. We love to open Pandora's box again and again, to eat every now and again of the tree of knowledge--to take a chance on blowing up the world for the sake of a little science. (Collider Article 2, Collider Article 3). The problem with science as it is--with the knowledge-based world view we have inherited--writes Peter G. Brown is "the dictum that moral judgments have no place in science." The question is always whether we can, not whether we should. Without moral judgments and without a basis for such morality in our respect for nature, we cannot ever answer whether we should. In the case of the collider, for example, whether dangerous black holes emerge or not (something you cannot know before you smash a few particles), is it moral to spend $8 billion, not counting the toll on natural resources, to create such a monster for the benefit of rarefied science? Is it? On what moral basis did we decide to act in such blatant disregard for a reverence for life?

The authors of this book urge humility, a recognition that "We do not own the world but are simply voyagers on it along with millions of other species--many extinct, many yet to come--with whom we share both heritage and destiny." (Brown)

If we want to avoid a tumbledown fate for our planet, one that equals the tumbledown state of our farms, we would do well to heed their advice.

I highly recommend this very difficult read, for goodness sake.