Poetry of Nature and the Stellar Lives of Wendell Berry & Annie Dillard | John Fox, PPM
Updated: Sep 29
Geoff Oelsner and NanLeah continue to bring their great and beautiful gifts to guiding the 8th year of Poetry of Nature.
Often, I feel that what we are doing at IPM – and especially with PON – flows under the national and world radar. That may be true, but that does not dimmish the beauty it delivers each month.
That feels especially true that in the past few weeks we have learned about the life passage of two earth-loving human beings – Wendell Berry and Annie Dillard.
Wendell Berry passed on my birthday, August 31st. Annie Dillard on September 15th.
Wendell and Annie raised our awareness about the living earth connections that Geoff and NanLeah are advocates for in all these years.
Geoff sent me in-depth considerations on the life of Wendell Berry. These are writings from Berry himself. This beginning portion of a longer poem is from The Country of Marriage:
Dear relatives and friends, when my last breath
Grows large and free in air, don’t call it death —
A word to enrich the undertaker and inspire
His surly art of imitating life; conspire
Against him. Say that my body cannot now
Be improved upon; it has no fault to show
To the sly cosmetician. Say that my flesh
Has a perfect compliance with the grass
Truer than any it could have striven for.
Geoff sent this quote from Wendell Berry:
We have to love the earth in order to care enough to want to help preserve the earth.
Wendell Berry says precisely, truly and wisely what Geoff and NanLeah are all about in their outreach to the greater community by using poetry and poem-making to ignite and create a flow to feel and experience earth-love.
NanLeah speaks with grace and love about the influence of Berry in these blog excerpts:
When I think of Wendell Berry, I find myself thinking not only about what and how he wrote, but about the way he taught me to see.
...
The longer I practice this kind of attention, the more the perceived boundary between myself and the more-than-human world softens.
Berry opened that door for me. His gift, despite the despair and grief in our world, was an invitation to look deeply enough that I might discover how I might find the peace of wild things—and then to invite others to look with me.
NanLeah shares more of her story and her recognition of September 8, 2025 in the blog linked below, I hope you will read it, and if I may say so, I believe NanLeah has “known” this gracious attention to poetry, to the poetry of nature, long before 2025.
NanLeah's gratitude for Wendell Berry is shared here:
Geoff's tribute to Wendell Berry is available through this link:
Annie Dillard, naturalist and author of the breakthrough Pilgrim at Tinker Creek published in 1974, also made her passage from this life.
She went on to write Teaching a Stone to Talk and Holy the Firm. She wrote this in Teaching a Stone to Talk:
At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it, there is nothing there. There is nothing but those things only, those created objects, discrete, growing or holding, or swaying, being rained on or raining, held, flooding or ebbing, standing, or spread. You feel the world’s word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: this hum is the silence
A chorused note!
When I wrote Finding What You Didn’t Lose in 1994, the last chapter, Eternity in an Hour, begins with this:
I walk out; I see something, some event that would otherwise have been utterly missed and lost; or something sees me, some enormous power brushes me with its clean wing, and I resound like a beaten bell.
Annie Dillard
When I wrote Poetic Medicine in 1996, the last chapter There Is a Secret One Inside Us, I included this at the very close of the book:
Create a ritual to invite your Muse. What will you offer? How will you prepare a sacred place? What happens when your Muse arrives?
Our life is a faint tracing
on the surface of mystery. . .
Annie Dillard
Those Dillard quotes, especially the “faint tracing” has been with me, close to my heart, for thirty plus years.
They appear in both of my books.
When I wrote Poetic Medicine 30 years ago, I titled the 7th chapter The Peace of Wild Things: Embracing the Earth to Tell Your Story.
I believed then (and now) that our deepest healing must needs include attending to our relationship with Earth — and so 30 years ago, I included that as Chapter 7, inspired by Wendell Berry and his poem.
This isn’t digression although it may seem so. When I was in Cleveland a few weeks ago, I went to a favorite independent bookstore, Macs Backs. I was talking to Lisa, the clerk at the front desk. When she found out who I was, John Fox, author of Poetic Medicine, she exclaimed that she remembered me from a workshop I gave at the American Greeting Card Company 17 years ago!
This was a few days after Wendell Berry died. Macs Backs was featuring his work on a table at the front of the store. I told Lisa I had written Poetic Medicine with that chapter (btw, they had PM on their shelf!) and I was righteously proud to say that chapter was included 30 years ago.
Lisa said to me: “You were ahead of your time.”
The first paragraphs of that Chapter 7:
Giving Yourself Permission to Be Wild and Magnificent
Earth offers us powerful images and metaphors with which to tell our stories. Rather than thinking of the earth’s resources as commodities like oil and wood, poetry suggests we consider the more intangible qualities which nature offers us, such as beauty and spectacle, turmoil and order, mystery and predictability.
A sense of beauty — wild and terrible or lovely and breath-taking — can be more healing than psychology currently acknowledges.
Close contact with nature through poem-making will strengthen your awareness of a healing connection to the earth. This healing relationship will help you create beauty in your life.
My thanks go to Wendell Berry for showing me, showing us this.
While it is not known to me how Wendell or Annie would feel about about each other, I can appreciate how Wendell at 92 and Annie at 82, were older brother and younger sister.
Comments