Sherry Chandler

Watchin the river flow

Wendell Berry Pulling his Personal Papers from the University of Kentucky

Wendell Berry, perhaps Kentucky’s best-known writer, is pulling many of his personal papers from the University of Kentucky’s archives to protest the naming of Wildcat Coal Lodge.

Berry excoriated his alma matter in a Dec. 20, 2009, letter, saying the decision to name a new dorm for UK basketball players the Wildcat Coal Lodge “puts an end” to his association with the university.

“The University’s president and board have solemnized an alliance with the coal industry, in return for a large monetary ‘gift,’ granting to the benefactors, in effect, a co-sponsorship of the University’s basketball team,” Berry wrote in the typewritten letter. “That — added to the ‘Top 20′ project and the president’s exclusive ‘focus’ on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics — puts an end to my willingness to be associated in any way officially with the University.”

I like the statement made by Ernie Yanarell, an outgoing faculty trustee who was opposed to the name Wildcat Coal Lodge

Yanarella said UK violated its own regulations in naming the building. Coal is not a purpose or function of the lodge, Yanarella said, and hence is included in the name for no reason “other than promotional considerations for the Kentucky coal industry.”

From the New Southerner, an interview with Karen Spears Zacharias, author of Will Jesus Buy Me a Double-Wide: (‘Cause I Need More Room for My Plasma TV):

I didn’t write this book because I was offended by somebody. I wrote it because as a 14-year-old girl I had an encounter with the resurrected Christ. In that sacred moment there was no mention of money, no promise of riches, no assurances that my life would get better or that I would move on up to the big trailer soon.

There was just that moment of simple faith when I understood that no matter what, God would never leave nor forsake me. Best life now or worst life ever, He’s never going to abandon me. What concerns me about Golden Calf theology—this notion that God’s promise to us is to “prosper us”—is the exploitation of all things sacred. Corruption and greed have infiltrated the church. Indeed, there are plenty who would very articulately argue that it has always been a big problem for the church.

There was a time in America when the prosperity gospel was considered a fringe movement. Now the teachings are so mainstream they are taught from the pulpit of the largest church in America. That troubles me deeply.

David Cole on The Roberts Court’s Free Speech Problem:

In the Roberts Court’s world, corporations’ freedom to spend unlimited sums of money apparently deserves substantially greater protection than human rights advocates’ freedom to speak.

Via Marie Gauthier, University of Pittsburgh Press is having a half-price sale on their poetry list until August 1.

Also a mid-summer sale at Phoenicia Publishing.

And Salmon Publishing is offering free shipping on their catalogue. Salmon publilshes local poet Ron Houchen.

You never know how good a Dylan performance is until you hear some one else butcher his work. I was reminded of this the other day when I was looking for an acceptable YouTube version of “Watching the River Flow.” I didn’t find one, but I was fortunate enough to run across this. Man, it is clean, clean, clean.

Some quotes

From Emerson’s The Young American (1844):

The task of surveying, planting, and building upon this immense [bountiful continent], requires an education and a sentiment commensurate thereto. A consciousness of this fact, is beginning to take the place of the purely trading spirit and education which sprang up whilst all the population lived on the fringe of sea-coast. And even on the coast, prudent men have begun to see that every American should be educated with a view to the values of land. The arts of engineering and of architecture are studied; scientific agriculture is an object of growing attention . . .

From Wendell Berry, “The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer” (1970):

I am done with apologies. If contrariness is my
inheritance and destiny, so be it. If it is my mission
to go in at exits and come out at entrances, so be it.
I have planted by the stars in defiance of the experts,
and tilled somewhat by incantation and by singing,
and reaped, as I knew, by luck and Heaven’s favor,
in spite of the best advice.

From Thoreau’s Walden:

Ancient poetry and mythology suggest, at least, that husbandry was once a sacred art; but it is pursued with irreverent haste and heedlessness by us, our object being to have large farms and large crops merely. We have no festival, nor procession, nor ceremony, not excepting our cattle-shows and so-called Thanksgivings, by which the farmer expresses a sense of the sacredness of his calling, or is reminded of its sacred origin. It is the premium and the feast which tempt him. He sacrifices not to Ceres and the Terrestrial Jove, but to the infernal Plutus rather. By avarice and selfishness, and a grovelling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.

From Wendell Berry, “The Wages of History” (1970):

Men’s negligence and their
fatuous ignorance and abuse
have made a hardship of this earth.
Living on these plundered
hillsides on Kentucky is harder
for crops and for men too
than on the terraced slopes
of Tuscany of Japan, where care
has had a history centuries
old. . . .
For generations to come we will not
know the decency and the poised ease
of living any day for that day’s sake,
or be graceful here like the wild
flowers blooming in the fields

A Mad Farmer’s Manifesto

In about the middle of Farming, A Hand Book (Harcourt, 1970), Wendell Berry has placed “Prayers and Sayings of the Mad Farmer.” Dedicated to James Baker Hall, this four-page poem is basically a collection of aphorisms. It’s one of my favorites in this collection.

II.
At night make me one with the darkness.
In the morning make me one with the light.

IV.
Don’t pray for the rain to stop.
Pray for good luck fishing
when the river floods.

VIII.
When I rise up
let me rise up joyful
like a bird.

When I fall
let me fall without regret
like a leaf. [pp. 56-57]

Over at Good Reads, Farming is rated and average of 4.16, a stellar rating it well deserves. His fourth volume of poems, it serves as a sort of manifesto, as in these lines from “The Mad Farmer in the City:”

As my first blow against it, I would not stay.
As my second, I learned to live without it.
As my third, I went back one day and saw
that my departure had left a little hole
where some of its strength was flowing out,
and I heard the earth singing beneath the street. [p. 48]

Or these from “Independence Day,”

As America from England, the wood stands free
from politics and anthems. So in the woods I stand
free, knowing my land. My country, tis of the
drying pools along Camp Branch I sing
where the water striders walk like Christ,
all sons of God, . . . and the bobwhite’s
whistle opens in the air, broad, and pointed like a leaf. [p. 34]

That last line is worth the price of admission. Farming: A Hand Book is filled with lyric moments like that and like the passage I quoted in the comments yesterday from “The Satisfactions of the Mad Farmer:”

the quiet in the woods of a summer morning,
the voice of the peewee passing through it
like a tight silver wire;

. . .

fox tracks in snow, the impact
of lightness upon lightness,
unendingly silent.

What I know of the spirit is astir
in the world. The god I have always expected
to appear at the woods’ edge, beckoning,
I have always expected to be
a great relisher of the world, its good
grown immortal in his mind. [pp 62-63]

But all in all, Farming: A Handbook is a book with a moral. Aphorisms, after all, are distilled wisdom and this is the poetry of a man who has found wisdom, not one who is searching for it. His is the old religion wherein the earth is woman, fertile, passive, and the farmer is the plowman, the husbandman. There is a hint of King James in the vocabulary and the rhythms.

And I am agnostic.

The view from [near] Daniel Boone’s grave

My friend Ernie Stamper has shared these photos that he took yesterday from the cliff above the Kentucky River overlooking Frankfort, our state capitol.

Daniel Boone is buried on this cliff. Although Daniel shook the dust of Kentucky from his sandals in some disgust in 1799, his remains were dug up from their original burial site near Defiance, Missouri in 1845. Developers in Frankfort brought Daniel and Rebecca “home” to be re-interred in this cliff-side grave with considerable pomp — a great parade of Masons (some claim Daniel was a Mason), Oddfellows, militias and original settlers — and speechifying.

Accusations have been made of some chicanery in getting the family permission for this move and some in Missouri claim the Kentuckians didn’t get the right set of bones and Daniel still lies with them.

In this photo you can see the Capitol:

This one looks, I believe, up the river:

and the next two look down the river at the old downtown. The Capitol building would be to the left. The nearer bridge was later shut down for fear of floating debris:

Situated in a narrow valley between cliffs and beside a river, Frankfort is somewhat accustomed to being flooded. One of the tensest scenes in Wendell Berry’s novel Jayber Crow has Jayber trying to cross a bridge in Frankfort during the 1937 flood.

The little town of Monterey, in Owen County where I grew up, is also accustomed to floods but according to MSNBC, this one may be one of the worst. The river crested yesterday at 42.6 feet, 11 feet above flood level . It is not expected to recede to normal levels until Saturday.

Nothing to compare to Nashville, but the floods have been bad enough here in Kentucky. Seventy of our 120 counties have declared flood emergencies and four people have died.

Some perspective here.

Ernie Stamper’s photos are available at this link.

Father

At this year’s Appalachian Writers Workshop, I had the pleasure of meeting Jeff Daniel Marion, a man whom Appalachian writers hold in the same veneration as they hold Jim Wayne Miller and James Still.

Danny, as he is known to one and all, is a generous conversationalist and a fine story-teller, with a smile warm as a winter kitchen. One fellow conference participant said he’d look like Santa Claus, but he’s too short. Which statement left me to wonder just how tall Santa Claus might be. He is, after all, an elf, which would seem to imply diminutive (unless you’re J. R. R. Tolkien).

But that’s a diversion. Certainly Danny is a gentle man, a gentleman in the best sense of the word, tender.

Ron Rash says of Danny Marion,

For twenty-five years Jeff Daniel Marion has eschewed poetic fashion and poetic posturing, going his own way, making poems that are confident enough to speak quietly to us, even gently. Yet to call these poems modest is a mistake . . .

Danny shows his poetic confidence in titling what I think is his 13^th collection simply Father. It takes a lot of courage, in my opinion, to put so stark a name on a book, with no attempt to find a metaphor or a figure to tweak the curiosity of the reader. The volume is what it is: 40 poems in contemplation of his working class father, who died in 1990.
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Civil disobedience

Join Wendell Berry and Bill McKibben in Civil Disobedience Against Coal-Fired Power Plants :

There are moments in a nation�s � and a planet�s � history when it may be necessary for some to break the law in order to bear witness to an evil, bring it to wider attention, and push for its correction. We think such a time has arrived, and we are writing to say that we hope some of you will join us in Washington D.C. on Monday March 2 in order to take part in a civil act of civil disobedience outside a coal-fired power plant near Capitol Hill.

Follow the link for details.

Via

Read als Blowing away King Coal at Salon.

I live in a state where coal is king and I realize that the issues are not completely simple. However, even if coal is to remain king, mountaintop removal is a stupid way to get at the coal:

After witnessing 470 mountains in central Appalachia get blown to bits by strip mining, the Coal River wind proponents were drawing a line in the sand. The verdict was in on mountaintop removal, which had been launched in 1970 as a quick and dirty option to cheaply procure coal. Thirty-eight years and a million and a half acres of destroyed hardwood forests later, mountaintop removal had run its course in the region with appalling effects. It had not only destroyed the natural heritage, it had ripped out the roots of the Appalachian culture and depopulated the historic mountain communities in the process.

Over 1,200 miles of waterways had been sullied and jammed with mining fill. Blasting and coal dust had made life unbearable for anyone in the strip-mined areas. Wells had been busted and polluted with toxic waste. Given the mechanization of aboveground mountaintop removal, and its shakedown of a diversified economy, coal mining jobs had plummeted as poverty rates rose in strip-mining areas.

In December, West Virginians saw what happened at a Tennessee power plant. A restraining wall burst and a billion gallons of coal ash poured out of a pond and deluged 400 acres of land in 6 feet of sludge. The proposed mountaintop removal site on Coal River Mountain rested beside a 6 billion-gallon toxic coal waste sludge dam above underground mines. If the proposed blasting took place, a fracture along the sludge lake could be catastrophic for the communities downstream.

The residents asked: Why should Coal River Mountain be the last mountain to die for a mistake?

Wendell Berry on Hayden Carruth

The voice of that time in my memory is that of the white-throated sparrow, who is mostly silent when he winters with us in Kentucky.

Read Wendell Berry’s On Hayden Carruth: A Friendship in Poetry