‘A Timbered Choir’

 Yesterday’s note was on Wendell Berry’s collection of Sabbath poems, A Timbered Choir. I’m not sure you’d enjoy it, but I thought I’d give you some samples so you could see what kind of book it is.

My favorite poem is just four lines, and I’ve quoted it before:

 

Best of any song

is bird song

in the quiet, but first

you must have the quiet.

 

I’ve written essays about why I am, by profession, a woods walker. Berry got it in 17 words.

Some of Berry’s poems always provoke a personal reaction — that is, they get to me in a way they might not get to you. Berry, while walking the woods on Sunday mornings, sometimes mused about his work as a writer.

 

I would not have been a poet

except that I have been in love

alive in this mortal world,

or any essayist except that I

have been bewildered or afraid …

 

I read those lines and knew in my bones I was an essayist, though newspaper people call them columnists.

Finally, there is no level ground in the Geogia Piedmont. The Wise Woman and I live on a slope with a woodlot and a garden on terraces made by hand with a shovel and crowbar.

 

We keep an old way

In light and breath to stay

This household on its slope.

 

Berry wrote more than 50 books. I’ve admired his essays on agriculture and rural life, his long essay on American racism and his short stories. But if I were looking for a place to start on this wonderful American writer, it’d be A Timbered Choir.

• Source: Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir; Berkeley, Calif.: Centerpoint, 1998, pp. 207, 182, 128.

Where no path is worn

 I think of Wendell Berry as an essayist, but I tend to read his poetry. 

He made it a practice to spend Sunday mornings in the woods, just being quiet and listening. A Timbered Choiris a collection of his Sabbath poems from 1979 to 1997. Here’s the beginning of II from 1979: 

 

Another Sunday morning comes

And I resume the standing Sabbath

Of the woods, where the finest blooms

Of time return, and where no path

 

Is worn but wears its makers out

At last, and disappears in leaves

Of fallen seasons. The tracked rut

Fills and levels; here nothing grieves

 

In the risen season. Past life lives

In the living.

 

Berry called himself an amateur poet. He said he did the work for the love of the work to his own satisfaction. Those were two of the conditions of self-employment, he said.

I’m not a poet. But, like Berry, I’m a self-employed woods walker. And like Berry, I sometimes find that my mind seems open and aware for a moment. I see things that I had overlooked — those “finest blooms” that I previously had been in too much of a hurry to see.

I get a whiff of what these poems are about. I tend to come back to them. I can’t imagine a spiritual life that doesn’t grow out of the natural world.

• Source: Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir; Berkeley, Calif.: Centerpoint, 1998, p. 6.

Wendell Berry, 1934 – 2026

 Wendell Berry was the kind of fellow who hated to go anywhere without his pocketknife or his dog. He was the kind of fellow who spoke to me, the kind of writer I read.

News of any death is sad. But I’m grateful that such a writer lived in our lifetime. The landscapes he saw are the landscapes in front of us now. We can see them, appreciate them and conserve them. Or we can, as we are apt to do, see nothing much at all.

I’m going to be reading Berry for bit. I think I’ll start with A Timbered Choir.

Thoreau and the publishing world

 A recurring theme: I’m trying to think about writing — not the craft of writing but the part that comes before it.

Imagine Henry David Thoreau at 25, being told by everyone that he really should find a career. He’s got a degree from Harvard, though he often wonders what it’s for. He’s tried keeping a school. There had been more spectacular failures, one can suppose.

He worked for Emerson for a while, and the great man got him a gig tutoring a nephew. Ralph Waldo’s brother William was a businessman on Staten Island, close enough to give Thoreau a gateway to the publishing world of New York.

The problem, in 1843, was there wasn’t much of a publishing world.

Poe was scraping by, barely, with poetry and short fiction. Longfellow was publishing poetry, but it’d be another decade before he felt he could leave his teaching job and focus on writing.

Can you imagine Thoreau trying to write for a market? Doing a knockoff or cover of one of Poe’s horror stories, for example? Or a long poem narrating the exploits of a Revolutionary War hero?

No one was writing the kind of thing that Thoreau wanted to write. He was interested in the question of the best way to live. He wanted to conduct tests and trials — to travel on rivers or hike across Cape Cod or maybe live in a cabin at Walden Pond — and report on the experiences. What could he learn? What could he convey to friends and readers?

That’s a vital bit of knowledge, finding out what it is that you want to do. Thoreau wasn’t clear when he left college.

He was clearer after seeing the glittering publishing world of New York. By seeing what was there, he got a better sense of what he didn’t want to do. And it wasn’t long before he began thinking about books that contained reports of his investigations and what he’d learned.

• Source: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, pp. 128-49.

Panola Mountain, late August

 The forest canopy is thick, but the early turners have some yellow leaves. The early turners are mostly tulip trees, maples, sweetgums and hickories. But a lot of the yellow you see in the canopy is not from the trees but from muscadine vines.

The berries on American beautyberry are just turning purple — some are still green. Ivy-leaved morning-glory is putting out those lovely blue flowers.

We saw two big batches of Canadian geese — one near Alexander Lake and one resting in a clearing in the woods. In honor of the Current Occupant’s idea to call Lake Ontario “Lake America,” we are calling Canadian geese “Donald ducks.”

If Americans can’t appreciate idiotic ideas, idiotic ideas cannot be appreciated.

Rilke’s two pens

 Ulrich Baer says that Rilke had two pens. One was for poetry and fiction. The other was for other business, such as paying bills and writing letters.

This might be the simplest metaphor for the notion that there is more than one part or aspect to a person or personality. If the person is a writer, like Rilke, he must decide which parts will remain in the privacy of the notebooks and which will meet the public in published works.

I have been trying, without much success, to get a firmer grip on the notion that when we teach writing we usually start with craft of writing. As I’ve said before, the part of writing that interests me the most is the part that comes before the questions about craft.

What kinds of things come up before craft?

A writer has two pens. Which does he choose?

Which aspects of a personality are allowed to speak in tackling this piece of work? Which must remain silent?

• Ulrich Baer’s essay is in Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life, which Baer edited and translated; New York: The Modern Library, 2006, p. vii.  For another stab at this topic, see “The other part of writing,” Aug. 17, 2026. It’s here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2026/08/the-other-part-of-writing.html

Rabbit tobacco

 School has started, and rabbit tobacco is putting out loads of little white flowers.

I suppose I connect Pseudognaphalim obtusifolium and school because it’s one of the plants once used by little boys in Texas who were learning to smoke. We learned by rolling our own. We performed this top-secret ceremony at one of our secret hideouts. One of my early memories is getting a dose of discipline from my outraged mother, who had a gift for finding secret hideouts.

Rabbit tobacco grows across the eastern part of the continent. I’ve run across a Georgia gardener who managed to make himself sick by smoking the same plant as a boy.

The plant is in the aster family. The stems and the undersides of the leaves are coated with white hairs, so part of the plant appears to be light gray, almost white.