The Land Poets

When calves sleep, they sleep like they’ve spilt. I’ve spent years watching them, waking with them sneezing outside my front door, sitting next to them under the only tree to offer shelter in a hailstorm, seeing their rodeo play. The herd and calves I got to know this summer were nomadic, walking from the mountain, through the fallen stonewalls between fields, right to the edge of the ocean. They tore up the short grass as if it was on bone.

There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

Today, I have been wondering about the poets with soil under their fingernails. Not just those who farmed, but those who grew and tended and worked with the land, who had a living calender. Henry David Thoreau planted two bean crops near Walden pond during the two years he lived there, he also advised locals on which native trees to plant and claimed he could tell the time of day by which flowers were open. Emily Dickinson, not content with the lack of practical clothing for women designed and made her own ‘house dress’ so she could garden and study botany outdoors.

One farmer says to me, 'You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with; and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

I went to find Thoreau’s bean field once. It was surprisingly small: what would have been a few rows which are now in the deep shade of a deciduous wood. A Shropshire poet called Marilyn Gunn wrote almost all her poems in the greenhouse of her allotment, and contemporary poet Richard Osmond is a professional forager, whose written about his searches for winter chanterelle mushrooms and the right tint of green among all the greens.

The world and our life in it are conditional gifts. We have the world to live in, and the use of it to live from, on the condition that we will take good care of it. And to take good care of it we have to know it and we have to know how to take care of it. And to know, and to be willing to take care of it, we have to love it. And we’ve ignored all that.

Wendell Berry

When Wendell Berry, was asked at an event what connected his art with his farming he replied, that farming like poetry, is an art. And that he does the best he can to connect the two, all the time. Historically, many farming poets were self-taught. Irish poet and farmer Patrick Kavanagh would walk to the library in the evenings to read poetry, Kurdish poet, Bejan Matur grew up on a farm and would sit up a tree as a child to escape her duties and read the classics. There is a long line of poets who grew up on, or in farming families: ancient Roman poet, Virgil; Zimbawean poet, Togara Muzanenhamo; Chinese poet, Yu Xiuhua; Australian poets Les Murray and John Kinsella, and here in Ireland Seamus Heaney (whose father was a cattle-dealer and farmer) and Bernard O'Donoghue. Then there are those who chose farming: Robert Frost, Robert Burns, Tess Taylor, Ted Hughes, and those who worked as agricultural labourers, the most famous of which is John Clare.

I found my poems in the fields
And only wrote them down

From John Clare's poem, Sighing for Retirement

In 1840, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, George Ripley stood up in front of the Transcendentalist Club and voiced an idea he’d had. By the next year it was a reality and the first farm based on the ideals of Transcendentalism was established. It was named Brook Farm and was a community of like-minded women and men who shared the labour collectively, were paid equally and shared the profits. The vision behind it was that this would give them more free time to pursue intellectual ideas and leisure activities. Fruitlands was the second farm, set up two years later by the Transcendentalist, Amos Bronson Alcott. It was a completely vegan farm, using no animal labour and no animal products (including no wool, beeswax for candles or whale oil for lamps). Both were visionary projects, full of hope and gusto. Ripley believed his experiment would be a model for the rest of society. He predicted: "If wisely executed, it will be a light over this country and this age. If not the sunrise, it will be the morning star.”

The Man Born to Farming
 
The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,
whose hands reach into the ground and sprout,
to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death
yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down
in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.
His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.
What miraculous seed has he swallowed
that the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth
like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water
descending in the dark?
 
Wendell Berry

Before I was born, my parents lived off-grid. They had a small holding in Ireland which they shared with my Uncle and his partner. They grew almost everything they ate, harvested peat from the moor for the fire, lit paraffin lamps for light, went everywhere on horse and cart and built a runnel to get water down from the lake. My eldest brother Jesse, who was just a baby at the time learned to walk on those runnels. It was a time of abundant crocheting, with my Dad being the most abundant. This is evident in their wedding pictures in which the hats and buttonholes are all crocheted. The only things they bought were oats, rice, wool and paraffin, which they financed by making and selling crocheted fairies. I am in Ireland at the moment, not far from where they lived, looking up at one of the black, hectic skies they always described, and when they described it, they talked of shock, tiredness, love.

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
 
Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.
 
James Wright