Spade & Spoon: Localizing the Way Westerners Eat

Working Collaboration at The Wave Poetry Farm

By Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel, 11-13-07

Two thousand years ago, the poet Virgil wrote in the didactic Georgics about, “What makes the cornfield smile.” Like the farm-owner poets that would follow, he wrote of the bucolic view of farms. More recently, poets reveal connections between the beauty of the farm and the destructive ways we grow food. In, ”Stacking the Straw,” Amy Clampitt writes:

“In those days the oatfields’
fenced-in vats of running platinum,
the yellower alloy of wheat and barley,
whose end, however gorgeous all that trammeled
rippling in the wind, came down
to toaster-fodder, cereal
as a commodity, were a rebuke
to permanence...”

In Wisconsin, this long standing connection is made tangible at the Wave Books’ Poetry Farm. With “primitive” lodgings and no Internet access, the Wave Farm gives poets who want to do more than just sit among the bean fields a chance to work on the organic fruit and vegetable farm for four hours a day in exchange for room, board and the time to write.

For Brandon Shimoda and Phil Cordelli, the Wave Poetry Farm offered a rare place to collaborate in person. While the two regularly work together on projects, Shimoda lives in Montana and Cordelli in New York, making it difficult to immerse themselves in common work. Subsequently, they look for spaces that will let them to come together and release what Shimoda calls, “a third person,” who comes out with creative ideas neither would have without the other.

This third person emerges best when the two poets take walks and do something that has seemingly little to do with poetry. So once they arrived at Wave Farm, Shimoda and Cordelli farmed much more than the required four hours a day. Instead, they worked twelve hours a day, cooked and ate meals together, walked through the fields silently and then returned to their room to write. For one project, called, “Man and Wife and Man,” they each wrote for twenty minutes and then exchanged papers and continued writing where the other person had stopped.  And while two poets, Lisa Fishman and Richard Meier, are also a part of the farm, Shimoda and Cordelli talked much more with full-time farmer Henry Morren about the plants and the fields. As Shimoda says, this was vital to their creative work because, “you can talk about farming and poetry in similar ways—the process and seasons. We were excited to use that vocabulary.”

It took just one week within the confined spaces of their shared room, the small kitchen and the rows of tomato plants, for them to plan and begin multiple projects and poems.

A week may not seem like much time for farming and writing, but Shimoda says that it was so generative because time on the farm passes differently. It is marked by the dual rhythms of field work and creative ideas. “When doing work that matters,” Shimoda says, “time changes.”

While the work of writing was hinged to the act of farming for Shimoda and Cordelli, their acts of farming are necessary for the viability of the small farm. With twelve acres of orchards and vegetables, farm-working poets mean that the weeding, harvesting and watering are done. Beyond this symbiosis, they also, perhaps unintentionally, reinvigorate the collaborative spirit once central to farming. Less than a hundred years ago, farm work was collaborative by necessity. Communities formed around shared labor, tools and even land because they had no choice. As the work changed with large machinery and larger swaths of land, communities shifted, individualized and often fell apart.

As more of us eat locally and support smaller farms and local farmers, communities centered around farming are growing. These include the Willing Workers on Organic Farms program, where people interested in farming travel, often from around the globe, to live in a new place and work on an organic farm and Community Supported Agriculture programs that require members to work voluntarily on the farm.

At Wave Farm a similar community forms through collaborative choice and further revives the poetic and agricultural work that matters.

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