Agrarian Spirit Book Club
First meeting took place last night. Of the nine people enrolled, two were no-shows, three cancelled in the last minute, and one person I’d never met, Chris, friend of Sequoia, took part. That made five of us. The last minute cancellations had me discouraged, especially since they consisted of three preferred members, and after I’d spent alot of time organizing, preparing the session on Wendell Berry, cleaning house and setting up refreshments. Nevertheless I felt exhilirated throughout the two hours and afterward. My personal intention to share some of my teaching, scholarship, and personal history with beloved City Farm colleagues was fulfilled. And it was unexpectedly enhanced by the presence of Chris a Navy Veteran, outdoor enthusiast, Diablo Canyon Supervisor, who had done the homework with interest and care. Most enjoyable for me, still the inveterate English teacher, were the moments of close reading when hidden meanings and patterns of the words suddenly came to light through group scrutiny. There’s hope that the sessions will continue.
Copied below are some preparatory documents.
________________________________________
January 17 2026
Hiya CFS Staff, Board, and Farm Friends –
Steven and I are starting a book club! See information below and reply to this email if you’re interested in joining us.
Thank you Steven, for putting this together and offering to coordinate the group for 2026.
Feel free to extend the invite to other CFS folks.
~~~~~
Agrarian Spirit Book Club
Purpose: An opportunity for people involved with City Farm SLO to discuss books about farming food, community, and related subjects, promoting reflection and inspiration and widening the scope of common experiences.
Program: A two-hour evening meeting per month with snacks and beverages centered on a book selected by one member who leads the discussion. The meeting takes place at the home of another member or other scheduled location. It’s assumed that discussion leaders have read and found their books worthwhile before assigning them. An annually chosen secretary coordinates schedule of leaders, locations and books. Titles are announced early enough for members to borrow, exchange or purchase the books.
Some possible titles:
Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac
Wendell Berry, Farming a Handbook (poems) plus any of his twenty-five books of poems, twenty-four volumes of essays, and fifteen novels and short story collections
Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life: A Memoir of Farming, Food, and Love
Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food
Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer [novel]
James Rebanks, The Shepherd’s Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape
Ruth Ozeki, All Over Creation [novel]
Wes Jackson, Hogs are Up, Stories of the Land
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
Kayla Rutland
Executive Director, City Farm SLO
[email protected] // (860) 949 0366
Facebook/Instagram: @cityfarmslo
Get City Farm SLO’s produce delivered through Harvestly.org
________________________________________
Berry notes
A. Message March 5: two weeks before we meet, two days before the Spring Equinox
1. Getting book
2. Stay in touch
3. Pick a couple poems, or maybe just lines or phrases to talk about
4. Enjoyment, awakening
5. Special connection of his words to your experience or thought or momentary feeling
6. To City Farm SLO—last poem–133
B. Returning to old familiar ones from past decades and new
1. Written between 1964 and 2018—54 years
2. I read Farming a Handbook in 1968
a) Unfinished dissertation on Pastoral tradition, Thoreau, Agrarian Spirit and dream
b) Vietnam war, Columbia revolution
c) Back to the land, B.C. 1970
3. Returning and familiarity and focus and attention open doors, hidden in plain sight…maybe from how to be a poet
4. Agrarian spirit
a) Reflecting, saving, restoring
b) Alternative to modern world, tech, politics, war, ambition
c) Reconciling City and Farm
d) not a place, but a literary place, a home, holding the past, and maybe the future, for a while—like those gravestones
e) Where I’m coming from: dirty hands and the library; PhD and book on Pastoral
(1) pastoral, primitivism, rural vs. urban, country vs. court
(2) nostalgia, innocence,
(3) youth and age,
(4) past, present, future,
(5) literature and literary traditions, literary scholarship
(6) words and things,
(7) hackmatack, packers corners, lund, calpoly, cityfarm
C. Themes
1. What is a life in the passage of time, in nature
a) Mutability, impermanence, transitoriness, transience, chance, randomness, fluidity see creek, river, “the slip.” Gravestone poem, the horrors of environmental destruction,
(1) Shakespeare, Buddhism
b) People as part of nature, not conquerors and destroyers
c) Complementary Opposite is tradition, family, persistence, nature, natural things, soil vs. screen
d) Agrarian spirit: holding on, preserving, like the monasteries in the middle ages, saving the classics
2. The modern world from the perspective of one who rejects much of it and has found alternatives
a) Low tech
b) Community and family
c) Place and work
d) Mission
e) Art
D. Poetics
1. How do words in sound (and even printed appearance), express, display, resemble, enact, the “things” actions, relationships that they stand for?
2. How do words, combinations of words, poems, take things out of the natural cycles of birth, growth, decline and death and move them into another realm?
3. How is a poem like a puzzle—jigsaw, crossword, code deciphering
4. How to be a poet [how to read a poem] p. 101
E. Poems
1. 25*The Peace of Wild Things
a) Title poem…its prominence
b) contrast
c) Nighttime despair, fear
d) Tax their lives with forethought
e) Day-blind stars
f) Rest in grace of the world (for a time)
2. 3 *The Apple Tree
a) Design of Nature, appreciate “unalterable congruity and form of its casual growth”—accidental and necessary
b) Contrasts: “song imposed on the blunt lineaments of fact” “crimson finches appear and disappear”
c) we experience it in the words
(1) “Essential prose,” “necessary prose”
(2) Art and Nature
3. 17 *The Finches
a) Description: feeling, visual, sound
b) Seasonal dynamic felt
4. 4 *Architecture
a) “the clear stanza of bird song”
5. 36 Sowing [absorption in the world—thought/mind and “the world”
a) Connection to land is to its past
b) His claim…mingled in the fate of the world
6. 39 Enriching the Earth
a) Composting: death and life, composting self
b) Body serves, mind’s service
c) *Offal raised into song
7. 56*The Arrival
a) Harvest season…extravagance to enough
8. 6 The Wild
a) Consolation of natural process – still the world—beautiful dusk…trying to stop the questions…as in title poem
b) Trash and shamble of empty lot
c) City vs. nature, nature triumphs
9. 9 The Broken Ground
a) Natural reproduction, birth, vegetative growth “perching above its shadow/on the piling up/darkened broken old/husks of itself:” “the seed”
b) What is left/is what is…gnomic final line
10. 13 The Thought of Something Else
a) Decision to come away—attractions of country, peace and space
11. 15 To my children fearing for them
a) Pain of the world
12. 16 March Snow
a) Late winter seasonal—quiet—rhythm of event caught in language
13. 18 The Porch over the River
14. 20 The Sycamore
a) Growing older; scars and harms
b) Gathered all accidents, form emerging, uniqueness
15. 21 The Dream
a) Nostalgia, wish to go back, taking on the responsibility—ambivalence about progress
16. 22 *The Meadow
a) Gravestones decaying, back to nature.
b) The town’s ancestry…become a meadow
17. 23 *Against the War in Vietnam
a) Agony of children
b) 1968 setting… what about today
18. 26 The Want of Peace
a) Complaint and wish for dumb life of roots
b) Inconsistency, moods
c) See Awake at Night 46
19. 35 The Supplanting (plants and self)
a) Back to the Land, starting out
20. 38 Winter nightfall
a) Within and within and within
21. 40*A Wet Time
a) Vivid description of water taking land…recurrent theme…see The Slip, Farmer and the Sea
b) We feel the mud
22. 42-44 Urgings to self and rant—this way of life is right
23. 47* The Heron
a) Labor vs. Leisure
b) Description
c) Peace of Wild things: conclusion
d) Prefumo Creek
24. *The Old Elm Tree by the River
a) The process of dying
b) The strength it takes to live
25. *The Wild Geese
a) Going elsewhere…the thought of something else
b) Abandon
c) Urge to leave vs. what we need is here
d) Poem’s inner drama
26. 70 The Cold Pane and 71 A Meeting
a) Looking at the dead/death
27. 74*Ripening
a) Marriage and aging…bitter and sweet
28. 76*For the future
a) How do we know? Back to 70 and 71—the unknowability of the future and of our individual deaths
b) Use of rhyme
29. *Traveling at Home
a) Now and here are always changing
b) Make intent of accident…see Apple Tree
30. 77*The Slip
a) More on death and departure…the river takes the land and leaves nothing…death is in the healing [natural processes]
b) Intro into next section about old age
31. 81 Rising
a) Life cycle, youth to age…that paradox
b) Completeness of a life
c) Persistence in others of community
32. 86 Our Children coming of age
a) Cycle of generations
33. 91 A Parting
a) Passage to old age and nursing home after life of work, the visit of neighbors
34. 92 *A wild rose
a) Long marriage affirmation
b) Also The Blue Robe and father on a horse (95) and *They (99)
35. 101*How to Be a Poet
a) Didactic instruction: stay away from screens, accept what comes from silence
36. 107 * Sabbath III
a) What are we…
b) Works of light, photosynthesis
37. 108 *Sabbath IV
a) Cleft in time, otium/rest
38. 112 *Sabbath VII
a) Broken tree, imperfection, restless mind
39. 118 *Sabbath XII
a) Succession and form of rhyme/stanza
40. 120 * Sabbath XIII
a) Gift of sleep
41. 133 * Sabbath XXIV
a) Last poem; despair and hope
_________________________________________