Happy Birthday to Poet Wendell Berry

by Gary Berg-Cross

It’s Wendell Berry’s birthday.  He was born on August 5, 1934. WB is known as a prolific American novelist, essayist, poet, and environmental activist. Well he is also prominent as a cultural critic, and notable as a hybrid academic-urban-farmer with a poetic attitude towards nature. In 2012 he gave the 43^rd Jefferson Lecture (“IT ALL TURNS ON AFFECTION”) which is perhaps the highest award given in the humanities this side of the Noble Prize for Literature.

I will say, from my own belief and experience, that imagination thrives on contact, on tangible connection. For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it. By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy.

                 From AWARDS & HONORS: 2012 JEFFERSON LECTURER

                 Wendell E. Berry Lecture   “IT ALL TURNS ON AFFECTION”

He’s a needed voice and we can celebrate with a poem that finds comfort in the natural world and not just its Wordswothian scenery.  Describing his poetry & essays in 1978 Robert Joseph Collins  wrote A Secular Pilgrimage: Nature, Place, and Moralilty in the Poetry of Wendell Berry.

Here is a poem that illustrates pretty much encompasses much of above and speaks a bit of despair & comfort in troubled times:

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
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 for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

                From http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-peace-of-wild-things/

A Noble Life: Seamus Heaney

by Gary Berg-Cross

I was sad to read that Seamus Heaney died in Dublin in late August at the age of 74. The passing of Ireland's greatest living writer and its first Nobel prize-winning poet since Yeats is a loss to us all. He was an author of 13 collections of poetry, 4 books of criticism, two plays, and numerous translations (the highly acclaimed Beowulf in 2000 which was my first purchase), lectures, and other writings. Some of us learned of, Heaney when he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. 

You can see & hear his modest Nobel Lecture online. Known is the UK as “Seamus Famous“ he was a multi-talented writer-translator- professor-broadcaster. According to one source in 2007, his books accounted for 2/3rds of the poetry sales in the UK. Why?  He was a clear, but hard edged, Humanist voice. His was a Shakespeare-like mind that could creatively shape language to purposeful use. Like “stoked up, stiff as a broom” from his early poem Lint Water.

His themes often drew from his father’s generation of farm life but he could re-frame even earlier classics, such as Dante’s Inferno, to provide historical and cultural continuity to current times.

With his death many have spoken out on his impact. Irish American Joe Biden put it this way quoting from a Heaney poem on the Irish problem:

 "…. Heaney taught us that 'once in a lifetime, the longed-for tidal wave of justice can rise up, and hope and history rhyme'. We have been lucky in our lifetimes to see that tidal wave of justice rise and to find our hopes reflected in historic moments of opportunity. But most of all, we were lucky to have a poet with the grace of Seamus Heaney, whose simple, honest wisdom could help us better understand ourselves and the world we inhabit. I am sorry that we lost him, but grateful that his words will live on."

 

Seamus was beloved locally because he could paint an Irish landscape in words.  In  The Forge he hammers us with action words to give us a clear picture of the life of a blacksmith he knew as a child and adult. We see a creative, joyful process at seemingly simple action.  But the totality of grunting skill forges simple metals into refined art and useful tools.

All I know is a door into the dark.
Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting;
Inside, the hammered anvil’s short-pitched ring,
The unpredictable fantail of sparks
Or hiss when a new shoe toughens in water.
The anvil must be somewhere in the centre,
Horned as a unicorn, at one end and square,
Set there immoveable: an altar
Where he expends himself in shape and music.
Sometimes, leather-aproned, hairs in his nose,
He leans out on the jamb, recalls a clatter
Of hoofs where traffic is flashing in rows;
Then grunts and goes in, with a slam and flick
To beat real iron out, to work the bellows.

From http://poetry.rapgenius.com/Seamus-heaney-the-forge-lyrics#note-1282225

You can see him reciting his short, early-years, froggy image-poem “Death of a Naturalist' recorded by PBS. This is simple, lyrical nature poetry, romantically brooding over the then disappearing unspoiled world of rural Ireland. Of course it may be metaphoric for the relatively unspoiled world of politics preceding the Troubles. Some see the later works North (1975), Field Work(1979), and The Haw Lantern (1987), as Heaney attempted to grapple very personally with Ireland's bloody troubles. His early Catholicism evolved into a more secular voice in his mature years.

An even shorter poem recalling a departed person “When all the others were away at Mass.” And if that wets your appetite you can see more here.

 

Images

From “Seamus Heaney reads his poems on video – which is your favourite?”

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/aug/30/seamus-heaney-poems-video-favourites

 

Remembering Humanist Walt Whitman (& his friend Bob Ingersoll)

By Gary Berg-Cross

It is wonderful to celebrate May 31 as the birthday of poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892).  Like many other non-DC natives (Ingersoll for one & WW was very much a native New Yorker), he spent time here in later life.  No fluke that one of Bethesda's HSs is named after him.

Like Ingersoll there is even a DC tour of his life here (see map at end of article).
Whitman’s DC-time occurred during the Civil War and is notable for many reasons, including the fact that Lincoln served as a kindred spirit and Robert Ingersoll as a friend. To his friend, Horace Traubel, Whitman said of Ingersoll:

“I consider Bob one of the constellations of our time—our country—America—a bright, magnificent constellation.”

It's a bit like what Emerson had said earlier of Whitman. In turn, as one might expect Ingersoll, the orator, could entertain people on Whitman virtues and we have a record of some of this. In his testimonial of Whitman Ingersoll said of his first publication Leaves of Grass:



At this time a young man—he to whom this testimonial is given—he upon whose head have fallen the snows of more than seventy winters—this man, born within the sound of the sea, gave to the world a book, "Leaves of Grass." This book was, and is, the true transcript of a soul. The man is unmasked. No drapery of hypocrisy, no pretense, no fear. The book was as original in form as in thought. All customs were forgotten or disregarded, all rules broken—nothing mechanical—no imitation—spontaneous, running and winding like a river, multitudinous in its thoughts as the waves of the sea—nothing mathematical or measured. In everything a touch of chaos—lacking what is called form as clouds lack form, but not lacking the splendor of sunrise or the glory of sunset. It was a marvelous collection and aggregation of fragments, hints, suggestions, memories, and prophecies, weeds and flowers, clouds and clods, sights and sounds, emotions and passions, waves, shadows and constellations.
 

Like Ben Franklin WW spent early years in the print business and publication, including one run by Edgar Allen Poe. (They met in the offices of the Broadway Journal at 304 Broadway Street, New York City, where Poe was editor in 1845.) The result was a liberal & lusty mind like Ben’s that was able to analyze early American life. Leaves of Grass is an American epic that celebrated the common man and captures some of it growing immigrant-worker experience in contemplative poems like "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry":

I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever
so many generations hence,
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a
crowd,
Just as you are refresh'd by the gladness of the river and the
bright flow, I was refresh'd,

Whitman was by all measures a freethinking Humanist – “There is no God more divine than yourself”. This is evidenced in his first, great work Leaves of Grass as well as his later advice dealing with problems like slavery and women's lack of freedom: “Resist much, obey little” and ““Be curious, not judgmental.” This free voice of the common man had  his classic Leaves poem banned in Boston, as they say, in the 1880.  It was deemed ‘obscene,’ ‘too sensual,’ and ‘shocking’ because of its frank portrayal of sexuality including women's sexuality.

All of this independent spirit is amplified in details in a famous passage copied below, which remains among the best of advice even unto our age:

“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem

(Links to books by WW )

Images

WW as an old man: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Whitman

Whitman Tour in DC: http://washingtonart.com/beltway/whitman2.html             

Ingersol on Whitman: http://www.robertgreeningersoll.org/?attachment_id=284