Essay
I guess it’s too late to live on the farm I guess it’s too late to move to a farm I guess it’s too late to start farming I guess it’s too late to begin farming I guess we’ll never have a farm I guess we’re too old to do farming I guess we couldn’t afford to buy a farm anyway I guess we’re not suited to being farmers I guess we’ll never have a farm now I guess farming is not in the cards now I guess Lewis wouldn’t make a good farmer I guess I can’t expect we’ll ever have a farm now I guess I’ll have to give up all my dreams of being a farmer I guess I’ll never be a farmer now We couldn’t get a farm anyway though Allen Ginsberg got one late in life Maybe someday I’ll have a big garden I guess farming is really out Feeding the pigs and the chickens, walking between miles of rows of crops I guess farming is just too difficult We’ll never have a farm Too much work and still to be poets Who are the farmer poets Was there ever a poet who had a self-sufficient farm Flannery O’Connor raised peacocks And Wendell Berry has a farm Faulkner may have farmed a little And Robert Frost had farmland And someone told me Samuel Beckett farmed Very few poets are real farmers If William Carlos Williams could be a doctor and Charlie Vermont too, Why not a poet who was also a farmer Of course there was Brook Farm And Virgil raised bees Perhaps some poets of the past were overseers of farmers I guess poets tend to live more momentarily Than life on a farm would allow You could never leave the farm to give a reading Or to go to a lecture by Emerson in Concord I don’t want to be a farmer but my mother was right I should never have tried to rise out of the proletariat Unless I can convince myself as Satan argues with Eve That we are among a proletariat of poets of all the classes Each ill-paid and surviving on nothing Or on as little as one needs to survive Steadfast as any farmer and fixed as the stars Tenants of a vision we rent out endlessly
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Bernadette Mayer
The Golden Book of Words
New Directions 2025
originally published by Angel Hair Books, 1978
