There is something as ancient and deep about poet Wendell Berry as the rich Kentucky farm country where he grew up and where he now lives. His poems burn with a passion for the land and are lovingly haunted by its ghosts.
Berry may be an academic - teaching creative writing at the University of Kentucky, having taught at such prestigious schools as Stanford - but he knows what it is to get his hands dirty. That's because he also is a farmer, who must answer daily to the call of his cows as well as to his muse."It's a small hillside farm," he said, calling from that very farm near Port Royal. "It's pretty marginal. Our first concern is to live as much as we can off the land.
"We produce our own meat, vegetables, milk and heating fuel," he said.
As his farm keeps Berry in touch with a way of life that has vanished for most Americans, his poems are infused with values and virtues that some might call "old fashioned." Others, however, would call them eternal. In "From the Distance" he writes:Remembering who we are,
we live in eternity;
any solitary act
is work of community. . . .
The wheel of eternity is turning
in time, its rhymes, austere
at long intervals returning,
sing in the mind, not in the ear.Like John Donne, Berry sees all of our lives - present, past and future - woven into a single fabric, a tapestry of light in which we are wrapped even in the grave.
This connectedness with the land, with the past and the future is reflected in Berry's life.
After graduating from the University of Kentucky, he left the state of his birth, traveling to San Francisco, where he and his wife, Tanya, lived for two years before moving to New York.
But in 1964, he and his wife and family decided to change their lives. From the urban hubbub of New York, they would return to their Kentucky home. In the fall of that year, they bought their present farm and by 1965 they were living on it.
"Our first thought was that it would be a summer place and we'd continue to live the urban academic life," he said. But as they worked on getting the farm into shape, they realized that it was here they wanted to live and to raise their son and daughter, Pryor Clifford and Mary. "We wanted to live as much on the land as we could."
Even as he celebrates the life he leads, there is no danger that he'll romanticize it. "A milk cow is a lot more demanding than a marriage," he said. "You've got to be there twice a day no matter what."
Even as he was able to return to a style of living that was handed down to him, his children are continuing it into the next generations: His son moved onto the old family farm and his daughter lives with her husband and three children on a nearby farm as well.
"I'm surprised and not surprised," he said concerning his children's closeness in this volatile society. "They've never heard ME affirm the virtues of a highly mobile existence. At the same time I didn't insist that they stay here; being here is what pleases them."
The values of morality and religion always have been a part of his poetry, although you seldom find "churchy" words.
"I found traditional religious language about useless for my purpose," he said. "But quite a bit is explicitly religious. I'm pretty much a biblical writer."
For Berry, however, religion is not a Sunday sermon kind of thing but rather part of the essence of life.
"I've been interested in the connection between religion and economic life," he said. "That's a concern that seems to have pretty much lapsed. But they have a connection willy nilly. Very much the way we make our money is a religious statement.
"If it's disconnected from the economy, from your housekeeping, from your way of living, you have no practice of religion," he said. "Going to church is not a practice of religion."