Wendell Berry's ‘Farming’ is a long marriage to the land
In his 1971 collection, Farming, Wendell Berry negotiates the landscape of his passion for Appalachia in a reckless stagger that resonates with the same power as Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot. The scale shifts from poem to poem–now a vista, now a dollhouse, now a microscope slide. But his words always conduct to the reader his conviction of the land’s primeval power; like the Kentucky Mountain Craftsman, the lightning has entered at the big tendons of our wrists, and in the night, we’re not afraid anymore. Berry is rooted in land that has been wrecked and ravaged, in part by the hopes of our own ancestors who traded living ground for money in hope of a life easier than that of a farmer.
A farmer’s work, according to Berry, is the enrichment of the land. He acknowledges the destruction of Appalachian topsoil, the way the ground has been stripped bare of nutrition and must now be coaxed along to new growth. “I have plowed in the seeds of winter grains and of various legumes… I have stirred into the ground the offal and the decay of past seasons and so mended the earth and made its yield increase.” He views his land as a project, as a passion, as a duty, as an ailing parent, as a child. He acknowledges often the durability of land, the impermanence of human life. “All that I serve will die… like a tree in a field, passing without haste or regret… my life a patient willing descent into the grass.” Everything will end, whether by human hand or natural decay. It’s the sense of being in what my evolution professor, trained in geology, referred to as “E World,” the part of the world that is going away as the rains and snow carry its fragments out to sea. We’re here so briefly; Berry knows that even his land will pass on eventually, and he’s committed to letting it live its golden years in peace and plenty.
The date of publication shows. You can hear casual, often-unconscious sexism, even though the text intends to honor the nature and labor of women. You can hear the way Berry believes his land belongs to him by right of spiritual inheritance, passed down by the people pushed off of it by colonization. Reading these portions can be difficult. One is sometimes tempted to agree with the sentiment, framed as it is in the context of his obvious love for his home. It has aged and become confusing in the fifty years since its publication. Even with these difficulties, none of the book is bad. It’s not for kids, perhaps, because of some imagery that tends toward the risque (specifically regarding Berry’s stewardship of his farm as a marriage to the land). But the moments where it lets you feel uncomplicated awe, fierce protectiveness, or wrenching loss still shine. All of it is well-written and moving, and the moments that seize your heart and drag it into the flooding river are scattered liberally throughout, well worth finding.
Beginning to read a poetry collection is an interesting sort of commitment. By cracking the spine, you enter an agreement with the author; you will stare, unflinching, and they will bare some piece of their soul to you, your mind shielded from theirs only by the gossamer veil of words that stretches between you. A poet’s task, most often, is to create something that’s emotionally moving, sometimes borderline coercive, wooing forth the feelings they want to create with screamed and whispered images of their own internal world. For someone raised on land like this, Farming presents a viscerally familiar sense of Appalachia’s age, its power, and its pain. This is a book you should read if you feel adrift. It will seize you, plunging you back to earth in a way that makes you feel free, grounding you in a world that buzzes with life and will. Stewardship is planted in the cracked earth and fed with mysticism, heritage, and heroism. The shoots that pierce through after the last frost are graceful and compelling.
