Tag Archives: Wendell Berry

Reflecting on a Year of Poetry

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I haven’t mentioned it on the blog since, oh, let’s see, it looks like it was last June, but 2011 was the year I started trying to read a poem a day. To recap, I’ve always been a bit intimidated by poetry and haven’t made the time to read much in the past, but when I do read poetry, my mind and thoughts slow down to a pace that is much healthier for my heart and soul. So, I wanted to take time each day for a year to read a poem, preferably out loud.

You might have guessed from the fact that I didn’t mention it again in the second half of the year, but I didn’t exactly read 365 poems in 2011. I did read a couple hundred more than I read in 2010 or any preceding year, though. I started the year off right with Wendell Berry and A Timbered Choir, then read a couple of not-so-memorable books by people whose names I won’t mention (because they’re not memorable), then got bogged down in Emily Dickinson in the summer. Her poems aren’t boggy, but the large “collected poems” volume of hers is quite boggy if you don’t take a break from it. Somewhere around July I found myself reading a poem every other day, then every couple of days. Soon after that, I was reading only poems I came across in literary journals or posted as poem-of-the-day by a few people I follow on Twitter or Facebook.

Honestly, I’m ok with that. Mostly because in 2010 I would skip over a poem in a magazine or newsfeed. Now, I stop and read them. It’s not the same (i.e. not as good, as beneficial, as dedicated) as reading through an entire set of poems by one person, but it has helped expose me to a great many more poets than I’ve ever read before, including some writers who are my contemporaries.

On January 1st of this year, I found myself sitting under a group of trees on the banks of the Columbia, looking back on a few of my favorite poems from last year, trying to take Wendell Berry’s advice about how to read his poetry. My desire to keep reading poems on a regular basis is renewed. As I read back over some of my posts on poetry from last year, I was reminded of my quest to read more poets who aren’t white and from the eastern part of the U.S. My friend Erin left a comment suggesting Rabindranath Tagore, a Bengali poet from the previous century. I remember at the time she left the comment, the library here in the Tri-Cities didn’t have anything by him, and I never got around to finding his work anywhere else. This year, however, the library has a brand new copy of an anthology of his — which makes me wonder if he’s suddenly under demand by others in the Tri-Cities or if the librarians can see a list of search terms and ordered this book after I looked for it. Helpful, but sort of creepy (although, who am I to complain, with my fascination for looking at search terms?).

To sum up, if my goal had been to check a poem a day off a list in my 2011 calendar, I failed. But since I wanted to develop a greater appreciation for poetry, one that I hope lasts a lifetime, I’m calling the year a success.

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Other People’s Thoughts: from Jayber Crow

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“Telling a story is like reaching into a granary full of wheat and drawing out a handful. There is always more to tell than can be told. As almost any barber can testify, there is also more than needs to be told, and more than anybody wants to hear.”

- Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

A fine line to walk, a fine boundary to discover, the right amount of story to tell and the right amount to leave out. Something to think about as a writer and editor, but I imagine it’s also an apt word for just about everyone to apply to conversations with anyone other than a counselor!

 

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A Garden in Our Minds

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April is National Poetry Month, and in a few days I will finish reading my first book of poetry during my year of reading a poem a day. For my first book, I chose A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997 by Wendell Berry. I have thoroughly enjoyed the past few months of reading Berry’s poetry out loud each day, and I look forward to reading his novel Jayber Crow soon (as I promised myself to do in my reading list for the first half of 2011).

A few lines from Berry’s Sabbath poems of 1992 that I found fitting for this season of the year:

“The winter world of loss

And grief is gone. The night

Is past. Along the whole

Length of the river, birds

Are singing in the trees.

 

Again, hope dreams itself

Awake. The year’s first lambs

Cry in the morning dark.

And, after all, we have

A garden in our minds.”

 

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Other People’s Thoughts: A Sabbath Mood

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Still thinking about the concept of work and faith and God’s grace, a few lines from one of Wendell Berry’s Sabbath poems in A Timbered Choir come to mind:

And yet no leaf or grain is filled

By work of ours; the field is tilled

And left to grace. That we may reap,

Great work is done while we’re asleep.

When we work well, a Sabbath mood

Rests on our day, and finds it good.

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Other People’s Thoughts: Reading Aloud

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“These poems were written in silence, in solitude, mainly out of doors. A reader will like them best, I think, who reads them in similar circumstances — at least in a quiet room. They would be most favorably heard if read aloud into a kind of quietness that is not afforded by any public place. I hope that some readers will read them as they were written: slowly, and with more patience than effort.”

Wendell Berry, in the preface to his collection of Sabbath poems, A Timbered Choir

I’m three weeks in to my attempt at reading a poem a day in 2011, and I’ve taken Berry’s advice in reading each of his poems aloud, slowly, though I think I need both patience and effort. So far it’s been an experience both enjoyable and beneficial, bringing a stillness and quietness to my soul as I let the words tumble around in my mouth and work their way into the deep places of my mind. For years I’ve read the Psalms aloud for the same reason.

Kennewick has been chilly with gusty winds since I arrived, so I haven’t ventured out to read poetry out of doors — I want the pages to stay in my book. Maybe when spring arrives I’ll move my daily reading outside.

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A Year of Poetry

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I’ve never been much of one for New Year’s resolutions, though during my years in Asia I had a tendency to spend time around Chinese New Year looking back and looking ahead.  Sometimes this meant setting goals, sometimes it meant trying to gain clearer focus on the work I was doing at the time, sometimes it meant celebrating that I’d made it another year.

I don’t even know when Chinese New Year is this year, for the first time in a decade.  Just haven’t gotten around to googling it.  So I must be fully back on a Western schedule, for better or worse.

Before I came back to the States at the end of last March, I ordered several books I wanted to read and had them waiting for me when I arrived.  Old habit.  Order ahead so that everything’s ready on arrival, even though this time I wouldn’t be heading back overseas any time soon.

Among those books, three are by Wendell Berry, a recommendation that came from several places at once, a sure sign that I needed to start reading him soon.  But the books have sat on my to-read shelf for close to a year now, pushed aside for all the writing books and young adult novels that marked my reading in 2010.

So I’ve decided that 2011 will be my year of poetry.  Or my first year of poetry, it’s hard to tell yet.  I cannot push Wendell Berry aside any longer, and I’m starting with A Timbered Choir: the Sabbath Poems 1979-1997.  I want to read a poem each day in 2011.  A Timbered Choir should take me through March or April.

After that, I may start on the collected poems of Emily Dickinson.  I picked up a hardcover copy last spring at Larry McMurtry’s bookstore in Archer City, on my way to see Willie Nelson in Wichita Falls.  There’s a combination for you — Larry McMurtry, Willie Nelson, and Emily Dickinson.  I felt a need to buy something, anything, at McMurtry’s store, and that book of poems for $5 is what I found after four buildings worth of rummaging.

After I spend a while with Miss Dickinson, I’m not sure where I’ll turn next.  Probably someone not from the eastern part of the States, or maybe not from the States at all.  Any suggestions?  I have 365 days of poems to fill.

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