Poetry - Charlie Grimes

Wendell Berry is an American poet, born in 1934 in the small, rural Henry County, Kentucky. In addition to poetry, Berry has written a number of fictional novels (ex. Nathan Coulter, A World Lost) and has received widespread acclaim for his works, being inducted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.

The collection I chose to explore is called The Broken Ground from the anthology The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry. This particular collection, like much of Berry's poetry, talks of nature and humans' relationship with it, as well as rural life and the interactions that are had in it. "The Plan" is a prime example of these subjects all in one poem: an old friend of the speaker invites the speaker on a fishing trip some time in the future, to which the speaker agrees, but knows that the increasingly busy lifestyle of the modern world will most likely keep them from enjoying this time among nature together. In "Elegy," Berry describes in detail the beauty of nature and how it reminds him of people in his life, saying "River and earth and sun and wind disjoing, over his silence flow apart. His words are sharp to memory as cold rain But are not ours."

"The Wild"

In the empty lot - a place

not natural, but wild - among

the trash of human absence,

the slough and shamble

of the city's seasons, a few

old locusts bloom.

A few wood birds

fly and sing

in the new foliage

--warblers and tanagers, birds

wild as leaves; in a million

each one would be rare,

new to the eyes. A man

couldn't make a habit

of such color,

such flight and singing.

But they're the habit of this

wasted place. In them

the ground is wise. They are

its remembrance of what is.

This poem perfectly exemplifies the ways in which Wendell's upbringing in a rural area shape his thinking and subjects in his poems. The speaker observes an empty lot, describing it as the "trash of human absence." But in this same scene, there are birds flying about and singing, reminding the speaker of the beauty that was once present in this certain area. "In them the ground is wise. They are its remembrance of what is." Berry's environmentalist tendencies are displayed in this poem, and clearly show his affinity for the natural world and the creatures inhabiting it.

Nearly all of these poems are free verse, and have a meandering kind of prose that indicates to me the author's stream of consciousness thoughts about his surroundings. There are no set rhyme schemes or meter. Berry's poetry is especially interesting to me because my I am also quite interested in the natural world and our relationship with it. In my poetry, I would be sure to include these kinds of observations of the environment and how it affects me.

MLA Citation:

Berry, Wendell. The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1998. Print.