Fifteen in Fifteen: A blogger’s defence of English literature

Part 1. Wendell Berry

The rules of the game are very simple. Give yourself fifteen minutes. In no order of preference, write down fifteen authors whose work has affected you and which will always stay with you. In my case, the sight of the resulting list makes me smile almost as much as my (two) well-stocked bookcases do. The omissions glare at me more than the occasional inclusions whose presence on the list may not be entirely merited – where is Jostein Gaarder? CS Lewis? Liza Picard and her wonderful social histories? Have Richard Holmes’ biographies in fact had more influence on my opinion of Coleridge than Coleridge’s work itself? On the opposite side of the equation, what influence has George Herbert really had on my life? But on the whole, a desert island library stocked with these authors would contain for me many pathways into being human. And with the recession tightening and the government busy reducing funding to everything that makes life worthwhile – as well as in order to do my bit for National Novel Writing Month - maybe now’s the time to celebrate those authors who have a special place in my life.

Wendell Berry feels like an odd place to start, because all I know of him is a single poem. It’s called “How To Be A Poet”, although to me it reads like a guide not only to how to be a poet, but how to be a Christian and, in many respects, how to be a person. It’s easily available online, and I’d advise everyone to take a look. I was introduced to it six months ago by a dear friend and fellow poet – he read it out to me over a cup of tea, and it was the first (and thus far only) time a poem has left me speechless. Once I’d recovered, we quoted back to one another all the best phrases from the list of instructions Berry gives, and in so doing repeated much of the poem.

As with all the best poems, I’m not sure I understood it all right away, nor do I think I understand it all now. Many of the lines contain a wealth of treasure, of possible meaning, which will need a lot of living with before I feel I’ve got to the bottom of them. “Accept what comes from silence” is a line I’ve spent the past month trying to live out – accepting what comes from the silence of prayer, of unemployment, the silence of waiting, the silence of no place you have to be and nobody needing you around. Other lines are more straightforward, although making a place to sit down can be remarkably time-consuming, and staying away from screens (or “anything which obscures the place it is in”) is great advice, but something I signally fail to do. Maybe I should pay attention, since most my poetry comes from my “three-dimensioned life”. Places I have seen, people I have met, feelings I have experienced first-hand – these all seem to translate more easily into verse than things I’ve only read about in books.

I don’t want to read any more of Wendell Berry’s work. “How To Be A Poet” is, for me, such an extraordinary poem that to know anything more about the author or his work would be to break the spell. And it’s a poem I fully intend to carry on living with, exploring what it might mean for there to be no unsacred places, or to depend upon more affection, knowledge and skill than I have, in the hopes that I might yet be able to “make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came”.