It’s not any given Sunday that 400 or so people forego football and gather to hear poetry. But they did on a mid-September afternoon at Northern Kentucky University to hear poet, essayist and novelist Wendell Berry, who makes fewer public appearances these days but gladly made this one on behalf of the Friends of Steely Library.
Mr. Berry, whose literary life has always been woven together with his example of how to live – that is, close to the land and with a sense of responsibility about your community – is a hero in the environmental movement. His words at NKU underscored why. He has been an eloquent voice against mountaintop removal, the strip-mining method for getting at Appalachian coal by blasting the top of mountains. Asked how to stop it, he replied humbly that if he could answer that it would be stopped already. He knew only how to keep telling people that this practice, which he described as “geological genocide,” needs to end before it utterly destroys to splendor of Kentucky’s mountains. He thought maybe joining the citizens group Kentuckians for the Commonwealth might be a good start. If you’ve seen mountaintop removal, you understand. Streams are destroyed, as are homes and wildlife and old, beautiful forests. Yes we need energy, but not this way. Interestingly, both presidential candidates seem to understand this and are on record opposed to mountaintop removal.
Mr. Berry is a hero, too, to those who love storytelling. At the NKU event, I heard an audience member behind me whisper, “There’s nothing like a storyteller,” as Mr. Berry read a short story about a boy’s adventures in science. The boy decided to test the tenets of “Twas the Night Before Christmas” by seeing if he could ascend a chimney. Think soot. Think of a mother unamused and armed with a switch. Think of a boy trying to avoid wrath. Read with warmth and wit, the story had the audience in stitches.
The stunning thing about Wendell Berry is his range. After his public reading, I dug out an old book of his essays and read one about his going to camp for a couple of nights alone into the Red River Gorge, c.1971. It was a reflection on the time it takes a person to move from modern society into a wilderness. It’s not a journey of distance but of spirit. Though you can get there at 70 mph in a hurry from town to trail, the spiritual decompression isn’t so instantaneous. Thirty-seven years after that essay was published, the essay rings even more true today, what with BlackBerrys, cell phones, text messaging and, yes, blogs.
And 37 years later, Mr. Berry is still writing and relevant. His range isn’t just years. It’s also his formats: essays, short stories, novels, poems. The poems are especially compelling for me. My wife, Kate, and I boned up on our Wendell Berry the morning of the event, and as horse owners we especially enjoyed his poem, “Come Forth," which is found in "The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry," published in 1998 by Counterpoint. In the poem, a son dreams he is with his elderly father and they come upon "some horses in a field…” The poem continues:
They were sorrels, as red almost as blood,
the light gold on their shoulders and haunches.
Though they came to us, all a-tremble
with curiosity and snorty with caution,
they had never known bridle or harness.
My father walked among them, admiring
for he was a knower of horses, and these were fine.
I have gone back to the poem a few times since, and asked my daughter, herself a knower of horses, to read it to me so I could hear it in her voice. Poetry is made richer each time it is given a new voice. And each time I heard “Come Forth,” I marveled at the beauty of it and at the perfect combination of words. "Snorty with caution.” Exactly right and devoid of cliché.
Kate and I mentioned our little poetry reading to Mr. Berry in a moment with him, and he of course knew the poem we meant and related that his mother asked him, “Did you really dream that?” He did, he told her. We should all dream in such majestic verse and with such art. Until then, we can celebrate the fact that 400 people gave up their mid-afternoon to hear a poet. No offense to the NFL, but it was worth a Sunday afternoon in the way that some other things are not.
This wasn’t the first score for the Friends of Steely. The Friends have a knack when it comes to landing literary talent. One of the first events I attended after taking a job at NKU last year was a Friends-hosted reading and lecture by Robert Olmstead, whose gem of a novel, “Coal Black Horse” is sort of a “Cold Mountain” from a boy’s eye view and, for my taste, more poetic and haunting. I was taken by the quality of the event and made a promise to myself to attend anything the Friends put on in the future. This year’s reading by Wendell Berry set the bar even higher.
There’s a larger context for this, too. If you’ve not been by NKU in a few years, visit. The physical look of the campus has changed dramatically, which is not to say all of the concrete is gone but there is more architectural diversity among the buildings and more plant life. More significant is what’s happening inside the buildings. There is a flood of cultural contributions that goes unnoticed to much of Cincinnati. Music, art, theater. The examples are endless. I had the pleasure of sitting in on a taping with the string quartet in residents, the Azmari Quartet, one Monday morning. There’s no better way to start a week. If you get a chance to hear them, do so. The upcoming Alumni Lecture Series, with Dee Dee Myers and Karl Rove on Oct. 9 is tailor-made for political junkies. The Military Lecture Series already has a following and the next one, on Lincoln and Grant, with the highly regarded Civil War historian Dr. James Ramage, should add to the following. It’s on Oct. 14 at 7 p.m. on campus.
And the list goes on. It’s a rich and robust menu, and Wendell Berry was a taste of it.