Wendell Berry's "September 2"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 5 September 2023

⏱️ 6 minutes

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Summary

Today’s poem is by Wendell Erdman Berry (born August 5, 1934), an American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer.[1] Closely identified with rural Kentucky, Berry developed many of his agrarian themes in the early essays of The Gift of Good Land (1981) and The Unsettling of America (1977). His attention to the culture and economy of rural communities is also found in the novels and stories of Port William, such as A Place on Earth (1967), Jayber Crow (2000), and That Distant Land (2004).

He is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, a recipient of The National Humanities Medal, and the Jefferson Lecturer for 2012. He is also a 2013 Fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences and, since 2014, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.[2] Berry was named the recipient of the 2013 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award.[3] On January 28, 2015, he became the first living writer to be inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.[4]

— Bio via Wikipedia

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm David Kern and today's Tuesday,
0:05.7	September 5th, 2023. Today's poem is by an American poet, much beloved here on this podcast,
0:14.1	and in many other places as well. Wendell Berry, he's of course a novelist as well as a poet, an essayist,
0:22.2	an environmental activist, a critic, a farmer. He's of course a novelist as well as a poet, an essayist, an environmental activist,
0:29.6	a critic, a farmer. He was born in August of 34, August 5th. So we missed his birthday earlier in August, but he has a poem that is perfect for this time of year. As you might know,
0:36.9	Barry has won numerous awards from a Guggenheim
0:39.5	Fellowship all the way up to the Henry Hope Read Award, which he won from the University of
0:45.1	Notre Dame School of Architecture in 2022. He's won the Allentate Poetry Prize and the Russell
0:50.8	Kirkpatia Prize and the National Humanities Medal and so many other awards.
0:56.8	The poem that I'm going to read today is from earlier in his career.
1:00.8	It's called September 2.
1:03.1	And it's from May of 1970.
1:05.7	It's actually published in Poetry Magazine in May of 1970.
1:11.2	I'll read it once offer a comments, and then read it again.
1:16.4	September 2nd by Wendell Berry.
1:20.3	In the evening, there were flocks of nighthawks passing southward over the valley.
1:25.9	The tall sunflowers stood burning on their stalks to cold seed by the still river,
1:32.5	and high up the birds rose into sight against the darkening clouds.
1:36.6	They tossed themselves among the fading landscapes of the sky like rags as an abandonment
1:42.4	to the summons their blood knew.
1:48.5	And in my mind, where had stood a garden straining to the light, there grew an acceptance of decline. Having worked, I would sleep.
1:58.3	My leaves all dissolved in flight.
	...

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