Wendell Berry (1934-2026)

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I’ve so many posts unposted, and a million distractions…but it seems important to share a Wendell Berry poem this morning.

To Know the Dark

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

–Wendell Berry, from The Selected Poems

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/31/us/wendell-berry-dead.html

Also see Poetry Foundation, and this page at Grateful Living for a poem I’ve read dozens of times these past few years,  Berry’s “Our Real Work.”

My Pilgrimage

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I am away from home—away from vacuum cleaners and dirty dishes and laundry and cats-needing-fed and all things routine. Let’s not call it a “trip” (even if it is trippy), but a pilgrimage: to Amherst, Massachusetts, to hang out with Emily Dickinson. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for years and years, and never quite managed, until now.

On the first leg of my journey, my dissertation advisor and Dickinson scholar, Dr. Vivian Pollak, met me in Amherst. Vivian and I spent three days exploring together—visiting not only the Emily Dickinson Museum, but also Smith College (where Vivian attended about a year behind Sylvia Plath) and Chester (where a friend of the Dickinson family and correspondent of Dickinson, Joseph Lyman, was born). I also enjoyed sampling local restaurants with Vivian and her husband.

Emily’s iconic white dress and writing desk (in corner)

Emily Dickinson’s gravestone in West Cemetery, Amherst. All photos by B. Reid.

The Mount, Lenox, MA

On day four, when the Pollaks decamped for Boston, I headed west, to Pittsfield and Lenox. My aim was to tour the Berkshire home of Edith Wharton, The Mount (heady stuff). Although Herman Melville’s Arrowhead was closed, I also visited that property, walking around the house and grounds and trails, catching a view of Mt. Greylock, which is said to have played a role in the creation of Moby Dick (written at Arrowhead in “the bitter winter of 1850-1851.”)

Now I am back in Amherst, staying at a historic bed and breakfast and immersed in what I am defining as the writing-retreat phase of my pilgrimage. Thanks to Vivian, I had an hour alone in Emily Dickinson’s bedroom, scribbling (with a pencil—no ink allowed!) madly. On the 11th, I have a two-hour group session in the same locale.

Today I am at Mt. Holyoke College, visiting their special collections. On Monday, I have an appointment to visit Amherst College’s Dickinson holdings.

I carted along a number of books, and thought I would catch up with blog-reviews on this trip, but some sort of magic seems to be underway and I find myself hard at work (or at play) with my own manuscript, making discoveries, figuring out what my new book of poems is about.

Thank you, spirit of Emily Dickinson.

I’ve done some exploring around Amherst, too, discovering that a number of writers have called Amherst home (including Robert Frost, who taught at Amherst College). I’ve also visited the Eric Carle Children’s Picture Book Museum (oh my!). And, on one of my long rambles, discovered a mill pond and a water fall, completely unexpected and magical. Like the whole trip.

I think this blog post has come out all a jumble, with the photos not staying where I placed them. But I’m exhausted! Thank you, for listening. Enjoy the photos!

You can explore Emily Dickinson’s home virtually at https://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/

To learn about Edith Wharton’s The Mount, hop over to this link: https://edithwharton.org/.

Herman Melville’s Arrowhead is included here: https://berkshirehistory.org/.

Juneteenth

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I am at the Stafford Challenge Conference at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, and having a wonderful time. Naomi Shihab Nye is here, and she is one of my favorite all-time poets, so that’s a joy. I’m also enjoying getting to know Kim Stafford and looking forward to his workshop this morning.

If you’ve no idea what the Stafford Challenge is, please visit the website — lots of information about William Stafford, about the challenge to write a poem a day for a year, and about the founder of this terrific challenge, Brian Rohr.

 

Another poet here, brand new to me, is Emmett Wheatfall. (New to me, she said, out of the well of her incredible ignorance. This guy has done and is doing SO much!)

If there is one thing I would do differently at this wonderful conference (if I were in charge of this conference, and other worries), I would begin the welcome on June 19 with “I, Too, Am America,” by Langston Hughes. And I would ask Emmett Wheatfall to read one or two of his poems.

Luckily, Wheatfall was part of the program at last night’s reading. He is a big poet with a big voice and I would love to have more people, at this moment in history, hear that voice.

In My Country ‘Tis of Thee

In My Country,
‘Tis of Thee
I’m still not free.
Far be it from me
is my Sweet land of liberty.
I’ve lost the will to sing
Of thee I sing.
Yes, Land where my fathers died,
and I’m still not free.
I’m a descendent of slaves,
so I know nothing of
the pilgrims’ pride.
Black bodies
if stacked
rise From ev’ry mountainside.
I for damn sure am not free.
Let freedom ring
from the cracked Liberty Bell
in Philadelphia.
I live in the broken state
being the United States
where here
I’m still not free.

—Emmett Wheatfall, from Contradictions from an Uncertain Silence (Fernwood Press, 2025)

Contradictions has as its epigraph a line from Jean-Paul Sartre, “Every word has consequences. Every silence, too.” The book is dedicated “To all the poets who dare speak their mind….” One of his poems is a couplet, “If the 45th President Is Reelected”: “we will not have knocked the meteor out of the night sky / we will have punched a hole in that Founding piece of paper.”

“Every word has consequences. Every silence, too.” — Emmett Wheatfall

Wheatfall ended his reading last night by declaring (throwing out his arms like a Pentecostal preacher) “I love America!,” and then reciting “America the Beautiful.” Have you really looked at those words lately? How are we honoring them? How can we honor them better?

I want to add that, when I was able to talk with Emmett later in the day, he told me he was glad he wasn’t asked to be the voice for Juneteenth — three black people here, and, you know, he said. I also attended his workshop on performance and had my eyes opened — not only to all the performing he has done — but the possibilities for his workshop students to step up their own performance. You can learn more about Emmett Wheatfall at the Oregon Library Association website, or his personal website. Be sure to explore some of the links he offers.

And let me throw in some additional information about Juneteenth and this moment in our country’s history. I hope you read Robert Reich’s “The Truth about Juneteenth” and our current political situation (catch it here). Or see Heather Cox Richardson’s Juneteenth Substack.

William Stafford might advise us:

For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid

There is a country to cross you will
find in the corner of your eye, in
the quick slip of your foot — air far
down, a snap that might have caught.
And maybe for you, for me, a high, passing
voice that finds its way by being
afraid. That country is there, for us,
carried as it is crossed. What you fear
will not go away: it will take you into
yourself and bless you and keep you.
That’s the world, and we all live there.

—William Stafford (1914-1993)

(Poem used in Christopher Luna’s workshop on writing a political poem.)

These are messages that we can amplify.

On my walk this morning I saw a sign at a house across from the Lewis & Clark campus: Whoever you are and wherever you are from, I am glad you here.

So am I.

Bethany

 

Lana Hechtman Ayers, STILL LIFE WITH SORROW & JOY

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Still Life with Sorrow & Joy, Lana Hechtman Ayers, The Poetry Box, 2026

What a lucky thing to have poet-friends.

I had two big deadlines at the end of May (didn’t quite make them, but almost);  I’m teaching another Creative Retirement Institute Class (on William Stafford, and it’s going beautifully); and I seem to have forgotten all about being a blogger. But then comes this package in the mail, two books from none other than the Lana Hechtman Ayers, managing editor (and one-woman dynamo) of the Concrete Wolf Poetry Series, MoonPath Press, and World Enough Writers.

As a bonus, Lana will be reading for Poem After Poem, on Zoom this Sunday afternoon, with Donna Hilbert. I’ll be there. You can join by pre-registering at https://lanaayers.com/News.htm.

Penelope Scambly Schott calls Still Life with Sorrow & Joy ” a joyous celebration,” full of both grief and delights. The collection plays with form, pays tribute to other poets, dreams wildly, and blends paeans to beloved pets with longing for lost two-legged loved ones. The poems are all about love, though at times they keen over our failure to love enough. In the very short, “Night Vision Goggles,” we get these three bare lines: “All we do not understand / could fill battlefields — // and does.”

Here’s one more:

“The Words We Speak Become the House We Live In”

— Hafiz

The first speech is apology.
House of fractured glass,
roof of Van Gogh nebula
that allows in all weather.

The second speech is question.
Swaying Schrödinger rope bridge
that may or may not collapse
above a black hole of assumption.

The third speech is desire.
Longing for blue lake and fog,
worldly wiles of musk,
the way crows caw at dusk.

Fourth speech is tongue-tied.
Apple that bobbles into
your palm bruised,
battered with sweetness.

The fifth speech is easy song.
Salmon shapeshifting along
upstream, lyrical shivering scales,
and the pale, pale riverboat sky.

The final speech is goodbye.
Shudder of butterfly wings,
sigh of fire that alters
the glint in God’s eyes.

— Lana Hechtman Ayers

Again, here is the link to see more information on Lana’s Poem After Poem reading this Sunday at 3 p.m. Pacific Time.