Monday, June 21, 2010
making what you know
THE LAW THAT MARRIES ALL THINGS
1.
The cloud is free only
to go with the wind.
The rain is free
only in falling.
The water is free only
in its gathering together,
in its downward courses,
in its rising into the air.
2.
In law is rest
if you love the law,
if you enter, singing, into it
as water in its descent.
3.
Or song is truest law,
and you must enter singing;
it has no other entrance.
It is the great chorus
of parts. The only outlawry
is in division.
4.
Whatever is singing
is found, awaiting the return
of whatever is lost.
5.
Meet us in the air
over the water,
sing the swallows.
Meet me, meet me,
the redbird sings,
here here here here.
-- Wendell Berry
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13 comments:
this poem is profound
singing the blues
counts as singing too
i hope
meet me meet me meet me
i could sing that song
while i swing
on my swing set
thanks little redbird
i learned a new song last night
on my viola
st. anne's reel
This poem had me fooled at first. Then I saw past the Methodist Zen into the place I always end up with Berry's verse--He's the Barry Manilow of American poetry. If that sounds like an insult then you've never danced at the Copa, Copacabana in Kentucky.
he's not edgey
of course he's not edgey
he wants to sound
like a barnyard
or a fenced in field
nicely groomed
he's not glitsy
c'mon now
barry manilow is glitsy
there must be a cogitive
distinction made between
smooth skinned jewish entertainers
and crusty old farmers
hey pal
if you can't muster some
literary agreement
on the quality of berry's poems
you're going to have to stand alone
in a puddle of tepid
observation
barry manilow seems to say
(and i don't want to stress the point)
hey just listen to me an you'll feel better
berry seems to say
i write poems because it's important
for you to think about what the hell's going on
so
i outrightly and completely reject your comparison
short of being completely outraged i will simply dismiss your streethack jibe judgement as literary doodah
wendell barry shouts
"grow your own food"
manilow croons
"i write the songs that make the yong girls cry"
one activity is good
the other is a form of
sexual perversion
it's just that logical
i don't expect you to get it
right away
but
if you think about it
wendell berry is like the CEO
of verse
we all answer to him now
sorry
WV
flater
(a procurator of farts)
jh
Wendell BERRY??
as in....HuckleBerry
Serio, I enjoy some of his writing as well jh. Fiddling
Thoreauvian surely's superior
to Manilowian.
His essay writing impresses me
though he seems a bit...Luddite-ish.
(Hi Dr. Sally. violas make such a nice sound. I play piano, at least when slightly inebriated, and it's semi-competent...imagine dyslexic Bach )
thanks J
i aspire to being
semi-compentent on the viola
not quite there yet
I have no question whether Berry's heart is in the right place--just as Manilow may or may not know that he is a glorified hack. As verse, "I write the songs" is akin to (I pick a page at random from CLEARING: "Vision reaches the ground/ under sumac and thorn/ under the honeysuckle/ and begins its rise." As songform this would be:
I write the poems that watch the trees grow
and make the whole world want to
pick of a hoe
But then as they say, One man's drivel is another's compost spittle.
good point bill
especially the drivel
i liken berry's style more to someone like john clare
although clare was a bit insane
there will be wendell berry festivals
i doubt there'll ever be barry manilow festivals
but you never know
i mean
i'd go with
bruce springsteen
berry is the bruce springsteen
of 20th century poetryee
i tend to trust things more that grow out of the dirt more
rather than things that get hoisted into our faces with electric glitz rather
yet i grant you the
translation of genre
does snyder do
better justice to earth and land
inspired poetix in your mind
well
hell
my bias for berry here is a
sort of christian one
not an antisemitic one so much
i'm very attracted to anyone who can join with a wife who will type out his manuscripts
maybe that's all i like about berry
he's not making a case for the poet
he merely happens to be one
and
it ain't no big goddam deal
or is that
goddam big deal
i never know
it's too late to argue
but
the edge is all i have
free in the tearing wind
eeeerrrrrrhhhhhhht
jh
The Manilow comparison seems a bit insulting. Berry's not a jingleheimer. Maybe he's not Coleridge or yr favorite beatbardnik either, but Berry seems to follow in the Emerson-Thoreauvian tradition, mas o menos (Huckleberries, as the gangsters say).
Many urban beats--or gangsters, for that matter--object to ANY nature writing, whether Gary Snyder's bric a brac or Ed Abbey, Barry Lopez, what have you. That said, I don't...really perceive the christian aspects, jh. Vaguely franciscan perhaps, but I doubt Mr Berry's enjoying brunch at ..Cafe La Misa.
Diogenes J.
i regard berry as a catholic
his recognition of the importance of the land the family the community the interaction of all that hearkens back to the ancient understanding of christian community a pattern that worked quite well around the mediterranean for 1000 yrs or more
i sense that berry sees church as intergral to all that
he attends a local christian community church in port royal
or he did
his words have been incorporated into a significant body of catholic writing in recent years
your'e right thought J
i think that sense of
"listening to the land" which pervaded the transcendental movement and much of american poetry - perhaps the rural aspects of our poetry is the foundation upon which we can understand what berry is getting at
in someways he continues the mmods and observations of frost
although i think berry isn't quite as dark as frost
he does however utilize the same elements of land characters natural phenomenon and the connection to social tendencies
frost admitted he couldn't farm
even though he preferred to live on a farm
berry took it up as a way of life
barry manilow???
give me a BREAK!!!!!!
jh
Maybe...Thoreau & co, freethinkers, nature worshippers now reside in
Hell (and ah'm pretty sure HDT did not take La Misa, or convert on his deathbed) . Walden Pond, turned into Cocytus, the icy lake at the bottom of Inferno. YOu think Lord Lucifer allows the huckleberries to ice skate at times?? No se nada
J
you're judgements are harsh
the spiritual regard for nature adn the movement whcih started in new england seems to me to be an effort to reinstate something that was lost to the protestant world
something the RC world never lost
for if the Latin Mass was about anything it was about the mystery and the beauty of transcendence and the papists experienced a natural cycle of natural imagery and theme throughout the liturgical year - something the protestant world more or less dumped - so the development was merely an effort to capture something "earthy" that had been lost through religious abstraction
wallace stevens gives witness to this fact at the end of his life
a poet at ease with themes of nature even though he was essentially a urban dweller - he began to see then saw fully that the poetry of traditional uninterupted liturgical practice held the force and power of nature
it could be argued that the environmental movement has become a sort of ersatz religion - and people take the voices and efforts of thoreau emerson leopold agassiz john burroughs even john wesley powell and john muir- as prophetic witnesses for the land
argued further it appears that at the very least these idealists and people of natural goodwill lend a sort of "spiritual" aspect to what would otherwise be insufferably dry science
at that level i think they are good and even though we can't seem to get back to a primitive sense of holiness of a sort expressed naturally by the indigneous peoples of north america we at least can incorporate a sort of ongoing poklitical interest in preserving something of the inherent beauty of nature
would dante consider all this heretical???
maybe
but i think he'd place everyone in purgatory -- those people who were looking for god but out of some sort of ignorance were blinded
-we could interpret purgatory as a means of opening the eyes and the heart
i hold out for purgatory
lucifer be damned
strange that we live on a speck of dust in the vast universe and to our understanding this is all there is by way of intelligent life
jh
Scuzi. I was being slightly facetious, jh, and respect those old Bawstonians to some extent--Thoreau's essays, and journals, Walden, etc. still carry some weight, one would like to think. But...they were not believers in any traditional, monotheistic sense, but "Unitarian" in the older monistic sense (not the new agey sense). Thoreau mocks the religious fundies.
HDT at least was more philosophical--and anarchistic-- than many realize. He wrote an interested essay on mining (Life without Principle, or something)--nearly..Lysander Spooner like. I would not doubt that some rednecks or puritans handed Thoreau a TB-infected blanket (as they did to many natives). Berry seems to have that Thoreauvian iconoclastic sense, to some degree (tho' also a bit more pious).
if berry comes off a bit pious it's because he is reverent when it comes to understanding man's place in the natural world
and is more inclined to refer to God than thoreau was
some have complained that berry's piety does him some disservice
i wonder what HDT would think of the 20th century chemical subjugation of nature both the natural world and the subjugation of women's bodies to chemical control
i don't think HDT ever wrote with the sense that "hey we could really phuq this up" that berry has
even
an undertone of despair that kreeps into his poems and essays - all the while his conclusions remain hopeful
berry cries out with indignation at the sins against the earth and the presumptions of science where thoreau and most of the transcendentalists don't go much beyond awe
awe shuks
kp t rl
jh
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