Actor Nick Offerman does not recommend launching a small open boat into the East River. He tried that once.
“There are some vicious currents and the wake created from just something as benign as a water taxi just about swamped us,” Offerman told Gothamist.
It’s exactly the sort of adventure that reminds him of his literary idol, the farmer, naturalist and National Humanities Medal-winning poet Wendell Berry. Offerman has been reading Berry’s work in a weekly series on WNYC’s “All of It” for poetry month this April.
Offerman’s nautical adventure took place in 2008, when he was craving an escape from New York City. He’d just moved to the Upper West Side with his wife Megan Mullally, who was starring in “Young Frankenstein” on Broadway.
While looking to keep himself busy, he had a revelation. “By God, I want to build a canoe,” he recalled. “I mean, even saying it now thrills my blood.”
He carved the canoe from cedar by hand in a Red Hook woodshop. And while his maiden voyage nearly ended in catastrophe, he felt the journey was a triumph: He’d connected to wild nature in the concrete jungle of New York.
Berry also felt the call of the wild when he moved to New York in the ’60s to teach at NYU. He found the city overwhelming and yearned for home in Kentucky.
“It's such a great superhero origin story that he moved back home and then wrote just this explosive, prolific body of work that is so beautiful and multicolored,” Offerman said.
Berry writes about plants, animals, farming and small towns. He often draws on these symbols to impart wisdom on a person gone astray.
In one of Offerman’s favorite poems, “The Wild Rose,” Berry describes a brilliant new rose growing from the edge of a dark bramble — "where yesterday was only shade / and once more I am blessed, choosing / again what I chose before."
Offerman said Berry’s work helps guide him through a world he finds increasingly impersonal, corporate and destructive.
“Like, Amazon would love for you to just become a matrix flesh-pod in your room, ordering everything off your phone and allowing corporate interests to curate your life and thereby take your income,” he said. “It’s a long-winded way of saying that I think what you can learn from a farmer is the opposite of that.”
Offerman says turning back to the earth is a way to connect to something deeper. That could mean growing herbs on your windowsill, or reading a poem in a park.
Not everyone, he said, needs to launch a hand-carved canoe into the East River.
Offerman’s poetry series, "A Wonder Is What It Is," will relaunch as an ongoing segment. You can find it weekly on All Of It with Alison Stewart, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
