To participate in resurrection, one / first must be dead ("The Rejected Husband")

For Lent this year I re-read a favorite book of poetry — the New Collected Poems (2012) by Wendell Berry. I almost never re-read books, which is to say that Berry occupies a special place in my pantheon of poets. The book collects 266 poems that were published in eleven different volumes from 1964 to 2010.

Berry was born in 1934 into a family that had farmed Kentucky land for five generations. After studies and travels took him to the University of Kentucky, Stanford, France, Italy, and the Bronx, in 1965 he bought his own farm in Port Royal, near the place of his birth.

The poet-farmer has been tilling the earth and pounding out books ever since then. Over fifty books of poetry, novels, essays, and short stories have earned him numerous awards as one of the leading truth-tellers of our day. He's a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. I think of Berry as a prophet. Whereas our pastors rightly comfort the afflicted, Berry the prophet afflicts the comfortable.

The New Collected Poems explore the ideas that have shaped Berry for fifty years.  The "dominant theme of our time" is the violence done against life and the land.  Ever since the Industrial Revolution we have had to face the "fundamental incompatibility between industrial systems and natural systems, machines and creatures." And so Berry prefers the "world made without hands" to "industrial humanity," which he considers an "alien species" with a death wish. "Sometimes he thinks the earth / might be better without humans."

Global corporations violate local communities. There's an estrangement between the technological economy and natural ecosystems, for technology has become a means to efficiency and profit without greater ends to constrain it. People are reduced to finding a job to survive rather than a vocation to enjoy.

Some people consider Berry an extremist. I'd agree that he reads better in his analyses than in his alternatives.  For example, he praises the Amish as "the only communities that are successful by every appropriate standard," the Jeffersonian ideal of small landholders, logging with horses instead of mechanical skidders, and a romanticized rural Kentucky of a hundred years ago when young people actually did something instead of sitting around doing "nothing."

Berry admits that he's a classic curmudgeon ("The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer"). He laments "idiot luxury," "our economy of greed" with its "bitter taste of money," "fantasy capitalism," "fashionable lies," the destruction of mountains to mine coal, stupid politicians, the violence of war, and all manner of machines like cars and planes. In "Some Further Words" he describes himself as "an old-fashioned person" who "likes the world of nature despite its mortal dangers."

The New Collected Poems include all eleven of Berry's "Mad Farmer" poems. The farmer is "mad" in two different but related ways.  First, he is angry. Second, he is crazy — that is, when judged by our standard cultural narratives. In fact, his madness is a form of sanity.

"For I too am perhaps a little mad, / standing here wet in the drizzle." "To be sane in a mad time," says the farmer, "is bad for the brain, worse / for the heart." This sane-madness echoes the desert dweller St. Anthony (born c. 250): "A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, 'You are mad, you are not like us.'"

Berry embraces his "mad" calling with relish: "I am done with apologies," says the Mad Farmer. "If contrariness is my inheritance and destiny, so be it."

My favorite mad farmer poem is his Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front. It was first published in The Country of Marriage (1973). It's a great example of how a poem that is almost fifty years old can still speak with remarkable power.

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

The Mad Farmer "quietly walks away" from our national madness, and "returns to the small country he calls home." This is a smaller place of family and friends, work and rest, blessing and sorrow, woodlands and crops. It's where one "goes to the care of neighbors." And so "calling and calling," the Mad Farmer invites us to a life that is resurrected from our cultural ruins.