Posts Tagged Sandburg

A bit of winter has finally come to the North Country… a dusting of snow that has stayed a few days. The lawns are, for the most part, white – at least those with not too much southern exposure.

Snow is part of winter. Here in the North Country it is its very essence. A winter without snow is like an autumn without gold… discombobulating to say the least. We enjoy the lack of cold and shovelable snow, yet still acutely feel their absence. We live conflicted. But conflicted living is, it seems, the essence of modern life.

Today’s crow poem comes from Sandburg’s third volume of poems, Smoke and Steel (1920). It is pure Sandburg… in tone, in language, in theme, and in subject.

Sandburg does the small poem well. His most well-known (and loved) poems tend to be his smaller ones: “Grass,” “Fog,” “Happiness.” This is because of Sandburg’s great ability to find the emotive heart of a thing. Clarity of vision leads to efficiency of language and meaning.

Sandburg’s depth continues to surprise and delight me. Over and over I ask myself, why did I wait so long to read Sandburg seriously?

Enjoy!

Evening Waterfall
What was the name you called me?—
And why did you go so soon?

The crows lift their caw on the wind,
And the wind changed and was lonely.

The warblers cry their sleepy-songs
Across the valley gloaming,
Across the cattle-horns of early stars.

Feathers and people in the crotch of a treetop
Throw an evening waterfall of sleepy-songs.

What was the name you called me?—
And why did you go so soon?

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

The crows lift their caw on the wind,
And the wind changed and was lonely.

and

Across the cattle-horns of early stars

I love the image of “the cattle-horns of early stars.” Only someone who had spent time on the great prairies, far from the ambient urban-glow of cities, could have come up with such a descriptive line.

Note: As I finish typing this, a family of four crows has just landed in the yard across the street. I fancy they have come to hear me reading Sandburg out loud….

____

I have been thinking lately of poems about stars… or poems where lines about stars figure prominently. There are many. For the month of November, MontanaWriter will be featuring a few old and new favorite-poems about stars (“old” and “new” favorites for me anyway).

Today’s poem is “Flat Land” by Carl Sandburg. It comes from his second volume of poetry, Cornhuskers. The poems in Cornhuskers are certainly not as well-known as those from Sandburg’s first volume, Chicago Poems. Indeed most, if not all, of Sandburg’s usually anthologized –and hence recognizable – poetry comes from that first volume of published poems. Cornhuskers though should not be overlooked. There are many, many fine poems in it.

As I continue to work my way through Carl Sandburg’s Collected Poems, Sandburg’s stature for me continues to grow. I wonder again and again why I neglected taking him seriously until I was in my 50s.

I invite readers of MontanaWriter, those aged 50 or better, but mostly those under the half-centurion mark, to “get about the business” of reading Sandburg as soon as possible. I can promise you that you will be glad you did.

On the first Friday in November, a Sandburg poems seems like just the thing.

Enjoy!

Flat Lands
Flat lands on the end of town where real estate men are crying new subdivisions,
The sunsets pour blood and fire over you hundreds and hundreds of nights, flat lands—blood and fire of sunsets thousands of years have been pouring over you.
And the stars follow the sunsets. One gold star. A shower of blue stars. Blurs of white and gray stars. Vast marching processions of stars arching over you flat lands where frogs sob this April night.
“Lots for Sale—Easy Terms” run letters painted on a board—and the stars wheel onward, the frogs sob this April night.

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

The sunsets pour blood and fire over you hundreds and hundreds of nights, flat lands—blood and fire of sunsets thousands of years have been pouring over you.
And the stars follow the sunsets. One gold star. A shower of blue stars. Blurs of white and gray stars. Vast marching processions of stars arching over you flat lands where frogs sob this April night.

One of the things I have come to appreciate most about Sandburg is the way he uses repetition of words and repetition of phrases: musically, structurally, and for thematic emphasis. In these lines we see a master at work.

____

Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty

The Occupy Wall Street movement has been much in the news, and much on my mind. A life-time mistrust of a system where some can drive Mercedes while others struggle to pay the rent or put food on the table, where the children of some people get a new car when they turn 16 while the children of other people have to get a job to help with family expenses when they turn 16, where people born in North America fight obesity while most of the world goes hungry makes me naturally sympathetic to the cause, as unfocused as it appears to be.

I believe there is a reckoning coming… in the end, justice will have its day.

While the Occupy Wall Street protesters are an unorganized bunch, if they could organize enough to have an “official” poet and poem, I would suggest Sandburg and this one poem as the obvious choices.

Enjoy!

I am the People, the Mob
I am the people–the mob–the crowd–the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is
done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the
world’s food and clothes.
I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons
come from me and the Lincolns. They die. And
then I send forth more Napoleons and Lincolns.
I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand
for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me.
I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted.
I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and
makes me work and give up what I have. And I
forget.
Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red
drops for history to remember. Then–I forget.
When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the
People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer
forget who robbed me last year, who played me for
a fool–then there will be no speaker in all the world
say the name: “The People,” with any fleck of a
sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision.
The mob–the crowd–the mass–will arrive then.

____

(copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

Here in the North Country, October means change: leaves changing from shades of green to shades of gold and red; nights changing from warm to cool and then changing at last to cold. And behind all the change is a waiting… an anticipation for what we know is to come. What comes, of course, every year and yet every year seems to take us by surprise. In this little poem Sandburg captures so well the many complex emotions surrounding the changes inherent in October.

“Falltime” comes from Sandburg’s second collection of poems, Cornhuskers. In it he makes interesting use of repetition: Gold and gold, thistle blue and larkspur blue, shining and shining, and, of course, birds, bird, and birds. It is an interesting way to make sure the emphasis is where he wants it to be.

The more time I spend with Sandburg, the more I appreciate his work, even his lesser known and smaller poems… maybe especially his lesser known and smaller poems.

A poet’s reputation is made on their best work. We know Frost for “Road Not Taken” and “Death of the Hired Man” and we know Eliot for “Prufrock” and “Wasteland.” Yet the more time you spend with poetry the sooner you realize that ultimately you truly love and admire a poet, not for their great works, but for the character and direction of their small and eloquent gestures.

On a transitional October morning, “Falltime” seems like just the right poem.

Enjoy!

Falltime
Gold of a ripe oat straw, gold of a southwest moon,
Canada thistle blue and flimmering larkspur blue,
Tomatoes shining in the October sun with red hearts,
Shining five and six in a row on a wooden fence,
Why do you keep wishes on your faces all day long,
Wishes like women with half-forgotten lovers going to new cities?
What is there for you in the birds, the birds, the birds, crying down on the north wind in September, acres of birds spotting the air going south?
Is there something finished? And some new beginning on the way?

____

Walt Whitman’s 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass is the most spiritual work ever created by an American writer. Reading it remains the single greatest pleasure that any reader of American Literature can ever have.

Carl Sandburg more than any other American poet is Whitman’s spiritual heir. In vision and scope he shares the same transcendent  perspective, the same sense of the sacredness of land and people. The only true comparisons for the kind of vision that Whitman and Sandburg bring to their poetry is to the writers of the Psalms and of the Book of the Prophet Isaiah.

The 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass is not merely a book of poetry… or even a book of poetry that forever changed the way poetry is thought about and written… it is sacred literature. I am beginning to think that the same can be said for some of Sandburg’s poems. They come as close to sacred literature as anything written since Whitman.

Today’s poem is admittedly a long poem… but by necessity it must be. It is the poem of one who can see a bit with the mind of God. I promise you that it is worth your time in the same way that Whitman is worth your time… in the same way that reading the Psalms and Isaiah are worth your time.

Enjoy!

I. Prairie

I was born on the prairie and the milk of its wheat, the red of its clover, the eyes of its women, gave me a song and a slogan.

Here the water went down, the icebergs slid with gravel, the gaps and the valleys hissed, and the black loam came, and the yellow sandy loam.
Here between the sheds of the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians, here now a morning star fixes a fire sign over the timber claims and cow pastures, the corn belt, the cotton belt, the cattle ranches.
Here the gray geese go five hundred miles and back with a wind under their wings honking the cry for a new home.
Here I know I will hanker after nothing so much as one more sunrise or a sky moon of fire doubled to a river moon of water.

The prairie sings to me in the forenoon and I know in the night I rest easy in the prairie arms, on the prairie heart.. . .
After the sunburn of the day
handling a pitchfork at a hayrack,
after the eggs and biscuit and coffee,
the pearl-gray haystacks
in the gloaming
are cool prayers
to the harvest hands.

In the city among the walls the overland passenger train is choked and the pistons hiss and the wheels curse.
On the prairie the overland flits on phantom wheels and the sky and the soil between them muffle the pistons and cheer the wheels.. . .
I am here when the cities are gone.
I am here before the cities come.
I nourished the lonely men on horses.
I will keep the laughing men who ride iron.
I am dust of men.

The running water babbled to the deer, the cottontail, the gopher.
You came in wagons, making streets and schools,
Kin of the ax and rifle, kin of the plow and horse,
Singing Yankee Doodle, Old Dan Tucker, Turkey in the Straw,
You in the coonskin cap at a log house door hearing a lone wolf howl,
You at a sod house door reading the blizzards and chinooks let loose from Medicine Hat,
I am dust of your dust, as I am brother and mother
To the copper faces, the worker in flint and clay,
The singing women and their sons a thousand years ago
Marching single file the timber and the plain.

I hold the dust of these amid changing stars.
I last while old wars are fought, while peace broods mother-like,
While new wars arise and the fresh killings of young men.
I fed the boys who went to France in great dark days.
Appomattox is a beautiful word to me and so is Valley Forge and the Marne and Verdun,
I who have seen the red births and the red deaths
Of sons and daughters, I take peace or war, I say nothing and wait.

Have you seen a red sunset drip over one of my cornfields, the shore of night stars, the wave lines of dawn up a wheat valley?
Have you heard my threshing crews yelling in the chaff of a strawpile and the running wheat of the wagonboards, my cornhuskers, my harvest hands hauling crops, singing dreams of women, worlds, horizons?. . .
Rivers cut a path on flat lands.
The mountains stand up.
The salt oceans press in
And push on the coast lines.
The sun, the wind, bring rain
And I know what the rainbow writes across the east or west in a half-circle:
A love-letter pledge to come again.. . .
Towns on the Soo Line,
Towns on the Big Muddy,
Laugh at each other for cubs
And tease as children.

Omaha and Kansas City, Minneapolis and St. Paul, sisters in a house together, throwing slang, growing up.
Towns in the Ozarks, Dakota wheat towns, Wichita, Peoria, Buffalo, sisters throwing slang, growing up.. . .
Out of prairie-brown grass crossed with a streamer of wigwam smoke—out of a smoke pillar, a blue promise—out of wild ducks woven in greens and purples—
Here I saw a city rise and say to the peoples round world: Listen, I am strong, I know what I want.
Out of log houses and stumps—canoes stripped from tree-sides—flatboats coaxed with an ax from the timber claims—in the years when the red and the white men met—the houses and streets rose.

A thousand red men cried and went away to new places for corn and women: a million white men came and put up skyscrapers, threw out rails and wires, feelers to the salt sea: now the smokestacks bite the skyline with stub teeth.

In an early year the call of a wild duck woven in greens and purples: now the riveter’s chatter, the police patrol, the song-whistle of the steamboat.

To a man across a thousand years I offer a handshake.
I say to him: Brother, make the story short, for the stretch of a thousand years is short.. . .
What brothers these in the dark?
What eaves of skyscrapers against a smoke moon?
These chimneys shaking on the lumber shanties
When the coal boats plow by on the river—
The hunched shoulders of the grain elevators—
The flame sprockets of the sheet steel mills
And the men in the rolling mills with their shirts off
Playing their flesh arms against the twisting wrists of steel:
what brothers these
in the dark
of a thousand years?. . .
A headlight searches a snowstorm.
A funnel of white light shoots from over the pilot of the Pioneer Limited crossing Wisconsin.

In the morning hours, in the dawn,
The sun puts out the stars of the sky
And the headlight of the Limited train.

The fireman waves his hand to a country school teacher on a bobsled.
A boy, yellow hair, red scarf and mittens, on the bobsled, in his lunch box a pork chop sandwich and a V of gooseberry pie.

The horses fathom a snow to their knees.
Snow hats are on the rolling prairie hills.
The Mississippi bluffs wear snow hats.. . .
Keep your hogs on changing corn and mashes of grain,
O farmerman.
Cram their insides till they waddle on short legs
Under the drums of bellies, hams of fat.
Kill your hogs with a knife slit under the ear.
Hack them with cleavers.
Hang them with hooks in the hind legs.. . .
A wagonload of radishes on a summer morning.
Sprinkles of dew on the crimson-purple balls.
The farmer on the seat dangles the reins on the rumps of dapple-gray horses.
The farmer’s daughter with a basket of eggs dreams of a new hat to wear to the county fair.. . .
On the left-and right-hand side of the road,
Marching corn—
I saw it knee high weeks ago—now it is head high—tassels of red silk creep at the ends of the ears.. . .
I am the prairie, mother of men, waiting.
They are mine, the threshing crews eating beefsteak, the farmboys driving steers to the railroad cattle pens.
They are mine, the crowds of people at a Fourth of July basket picnic, listening to a lawyer read the Declaration of Independence, watching the pinwheels and Roman candles at night, the young men and women two by two hunting the bypaths and kissing bridges.
They are mine, the horses looking over a fence in the frost of late October saying good-morning to the horses hauling wagons of rutabaga to market.
They are mine, the old zigzag rail fences, the new barb wire.. . .
The cornhuskers wear leather on their hands.
There is no let-up to the wind.
Blue bandannas are knotted at the ruddy chins.

Falltime and winter apples take on the smolder of the five-o’clock November sunset: falltime, leaves, bonfires, stubble, the old things go, and the earth is grizzled.
The land and the people hold memories, even among the anthills and the angleworms, among the toads and woodroaches—among gravestone writings rubbed out by the rain—they keep old things that never grow old.

The frost loosens corn husks.
The Sun, the rain, the wind
loosen corn husks.
The men and women are helpers.
They are all cornhuskers together.
I see them late in the western evening
in a smoke-red dust.. . .
The phantom of a yellow rooster flaunting a scarlet comb, on top of a dung pile crying hallelujah to the streaks of daylight,
The phantom of an old hunting dog nosing in the underbrush for muskrats, barking at a coon in a treetop at midnight, chewing a bone, chasing his tail round a corncrib,
The phantom of an old workhorse taking the steel point of a plow across a forty-acre field in spring, hitched to a harrow in summer, hitched to a wagon among cornshocks in fall,
These phantoms come into the talk and wonder of people on the front porch of a farmhouse late summer nights.
“The shapes that are gone are here,” said an old man with a cob pipe in his teeth one night in Kansas with a hot wind on the alfalfa.. . .
Look at six eggs
In a mockingbird’s nest.

Listen to six mockingbirds
Flinging follies of O-be-joyful
Over the marshes and uplands.

Look at songs
Hidden in eggs.. . .
When the morning sun is on the trumpet-vine blossoms, sing at the kitchen pans: Shout All Over God’s Heaven.
When the rain slants on the potato hills and the sun plays a silver shaft on the last shower, sing to the bush at the backyard fence: Mighty Lak a Rose.
When the icy sleet pounds on the storm windows and the house lifts to a great breath, sing for the outside hills: The Ole Sheep Done Know the Road, the Young Lambs Must Find the Way.. . .
Spring slips back with a girl face calling always: “Any new songs for me? Any new songs?”

O prairie girl, be lonely, singing, dreaming, waiting—your lover comes—your child comes—the years creep with toes of April rain on new-turned sod.
O prairie girl, whoever leaves you only crimson poppies to talk with, whoever puts a good-by kiss on your lips and never comes back—
There is a song deep as the falltime redhaws, long as the layer of black loam we go to, the shine of the morning star over the corn belt, the wave line of dawn up a wheat valley.. . .
O prairie mother, I am one of your boys.
I have loved the prairie as a man with a heart shot full of pain over love.
Here I know I will hanker after nothing so much as one more sunrise or a sky moon of fire doubled to a river moon of water.. . .
I speak of new cities and new people.
I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.
I tell you yesterday is a wind gone down,
a sun dropped in the west.
I tell you there is nothing in the world
only an ocean of to-morrows,
a sky of to-morrows.

I am a brother of the cornhuskers who say
at sundown:
To-morrow is a day.

____

Regular readers of MontanaWriter know that inspired by a visit this summer to Galesburg, Illinois, and Carl Sandburg’s birthplace and burial site I have been reading my way through Sandburg’s Collected Poems. (Reading a poet’s collected work cover-to-cover remains after all the best –the only– way to ultimately understand a poet.) The process has been… a creative reawakening and a true joy. So often have I found myself saying, “why did it take me so long to return to Sandburg?”

Tomorrow I take my eldest daughter to Iowa to begin her college career. I am feeling the thousand things that all parents feel at such times: nostalgic and sad and proud. Most of all I think I find myself feeling baffled by the way time moves so quickly and steadily towards… dust and mist.

With thoughts of time and my own finitude swirling through my head, “Last Answers” came quickly to my mind this morning. It comes from Sandburg’s first, and best known book Chicago Poems.

On the day before I take Dylan to college, “Last Answers” seems like just the thing.

Enjoy!

Last Answers
I wrote a poem on the mist
And a woman asked me what I meant by it.
I had thought till then only of the beauty of the mist,
how pearl and gray of it mix and reel,
And change the drab shanties with lighted lamps at evening
into points of mystery quivering with color.

I answered:
The whole world was mist once long ago and some day
it will all go back to mist,
Our skulls and lungs are more water than bone and
tissue
And all poets love dust and mist because all the last
answers
Go running back to dust and mist.

____

A regular reader of MontanaWriter recently emailed me asking me what I was reading these days. Since it is in my nature to read more books at one time than I can quickly recall, and since it is also in my nature to never  get around to reviewing most of those book, I hope I have hit upon something that may become a semi-regular feature here: highlighting books I am currently reading.

So on the first weekend of August, 2011, here are the physical books that are piled next to my reading chair and on my nightstand, some time down the road I may post the ebooks I am reading:

The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, Carl Sandburg
Details: 770 pages, hardbound
Purchased: Half-Price Books
Price: $7.98
Regular readers of MontanaWriter know that my recent visit to Sandburg’s birthplace and burial-site in Galesburg, Illinois, inspired me to want to look at Sandburg poetry again in a more thorough way. Complete Poems includes a wonderful introduction by Archibald MacLeish. Reading 770 pages of poetry, when you read each poem twice, means that I anticipate this volume sitting next to my chair for sometime to come.
Favorite line so far: too many to pick, but from MacLeish’s introduction comes this, “Poets, when they are poets, are as unique as poems are when they are actually poems: which is to say incomparably unique, essentially themselves.”

* * * * *

Outlaw Tales of Montana, Gary A. Wilson
Details: 212 pages, softcover
Purchased: Half Price Books
Price: $7.99
Though I would like to have some book about Montana sitting somewhere near at hand all the time, I cannot. The reality is that though the state is large and the sky big, there are surprisingly few books about Montana… and very few good ones. Wilson’s book is not in the category of a good one but it is at least an interesting history of lesser known outlaws who lived or operated at times in Montana. In rather ordinary prose, Wilson profiles six outlaws who have for the most part flown under the radar of outlaw lore. One, Con Murphy, operated in the area where I grew up.
Favorite line so far: A quote in the front of the book by Charles M. Russell, “They cashed in their chips under the smoke of the same weapon that let them live, and took their medicine without whining.”

* * * * *

The Clash: The Complete Guide to Their Music, Tony Fletcher
Details: 120 pages, softcover
Purchased: Half Price Books
Price: $3.99
The Clash remain “The Only Band that Matters.” In five short years Strummer, Jones, and the boys saved rock music from itself and changed the way a generation… my generation… would think about music forever. This small book provides brief  background notes and information on all five original Clash albums and every song,  as well as a few pages of pictures that will be already be familiar to most Clash fans. Fletcher is a dedicated fan of Strummer and the Clash and obviously a knowledgeable student of rock music in general and punk music in specific. It seems like a must have for a Clash fan.
Favorite line so far: “ [Their debut album] The Clash, from violent sleeve imagery through provocative song titles, presented itself as nothing less than a call to musical and class warfare.”

* * * * *

The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to the Sports Guy, Bill Simmons
Details: 697 pages, hardcover
Purchased: Barnes and Noble
Price: $4.99 (clearance)
For sports junkies in general, and NBA junkies in particular, Bill Simmons and his work at ESPN.com and Grantland.com are legendary. This is the basketball equivalent of Bill James original Historical Baseball Abstract. It is quite simply the best book about the NBA ever written. It is one I am reading as slowly as possible. Trying to make it last. Because like the original Bill James baseball classic, there will never be another book like it, ever.
Favorite line so far: There are so many… here is just one from one of his famous footnotes: “All you need to know about NBA coaches: during every timeout, they huddle with their staff about 15 feet from the bench, allow the players to ‘think,’ then come back about a minute later with some miraculous play or piece of advice… I want to see an owner forgo the coach, put the players in charge of themselves and see if there is a difference.”

* * * * *

Far Bright Star, Robert Olmstead
Details: 218 pages, softcover
Purchased: Magers & Quinn
Price: $7.99
I always have a couple of westerns in play. This highly-acclaimed novel by the writer of Coal Black Horse gets more critcal attention and praise than most western’s do… and probably for good reason. Olmstead is a very a fine writer and stylist. Though at times I feel like he is trying to be like Cormac McCarthy… in the early going it has something of the feeling of Blood Meridian or All the Pretty Horses. (I gather from the cover comments and reviews that Far Bright Star may follow McCarthy down the road of unrelenting violence.) Be that as it may, if you are going to emulate a writer, or a pair of western books,  McCarthy and those two novels seems like a good choice.
Favorite line so far: The opening paragraph sets the mood of the book well, “Thus far the summer of 1916 had been a siege of wrathy wind and heated air. Dust and light. Sand and light. Wind and light.”

* * * * *

St Athanasius on the Incarnation, with an introduction by C.S. Lewis
Details: 120pages, softcover
Purchased: gift/hand-me down from friend
Price: n/a
There are as they say, no new heresies… just old heresies dressed up in new clothes. St. Athanasius defended the church after Nicaea from Arianism. It was a battle for the soul of the church as all heresies are. 1,700 years later the battle is being fought again between those who rightly understand the Trinity (in as much, of course, as the Trinity can be understood) and those who want to make Christ into something less than fully God and fully human. This is one of the great works of Christian literature. C.S. Lewis introduction makes it even more wonderful to read.
Favorite line so far: From C.S. Lewis’s introduction, “When I first opened [Anthanasius] I soon discovered… that I was reading a masterpiece.”

 * * * * *

The Dynamic English, Tony Kosten
Details: 144 pages, softcover
Purchased: Amazon.com
Price: $12.99
For chess players, the title describes the book perfectly. The traditional English Opening in chess is considered to be a very conservative approach for white to take. Kosten presents ways to make it a more aggressive, hence more “dynamic,” opening…  full of surprises for your opponent. Over the years I have acquired a number of chess books that focus on the English Opening. This is the latest.
Favorite line so far: “For me, the English Opening is a fight for control of d5.” (Hey, it is a chess book… what did you expect?! But take my word for it, this is a good reminder about the basics of the only opening I ever play.)

* * * * *

Donovan, Elmer Kelton
Details: 170 pages, paperback
Purchased: Book’em Book Sale fundraiser
Price: $0.50
In his long writing career, Kelton won critical praise from western fans and critics alike as well as multiple Spur Awards (given by the Western Writers of America). The marketing people who design covers for westerns quite often include the eye catching blurb, “the successor of Louis L’Amour.” Kelton, more than any other writer that has been said about, truly deserves that moniker. His work has always seemed closer to L’Amour in tone and intent. Donovan is one one of Kelton’s earlier novels, originally published in 1961. For the most part, I enjoy his earlier Westerns more than his later… more historically researched trilogies. So far, a great read.
Favorite line so far: The opening line sets the tone, “Even before his horse’s ears suddenly pointed forward, Webb Matlock was becoming uneasy.”

* * * * *

Hammer of the Empire, Steve Parker, Steve Lyons, and Lucien Soulban
Details: 762 pages, softcover
Purchased: Uncle Hugo’s Bookstore
Price: $4.50
Warhhammer books are a staple on my kindle and iPod. They are like crack: hard-hitting, dis-orienting, and above all addictive. This is hardcore, military sci-fi. And I love to read it. The Warhammer series of writers are surprisingly good, espeically Dan Abnett and his Gaunt’s Ghost series… probably my favorite Sci.Fi. series of all time. But they are all very bloody… extremely so.. and dark.
Favorite line so far: A random line picked to show the tone and temperament of a Warhammer book: “The ground was a carpet ot smoking metal, big brown bodies and raw red meat. Ork carcasses covered every inch of sand and rock.”

_____

Rememberance Rock (copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

Good and great poems, though occasioned by particular moments in time, ultimately transcend their historicity, their parochial context. Bad poems cannot do this. They remain forever bound to and by their particular time, place, and occasion.

Regular readers of MontanaWriter know that I am currently in the process of working through Carl Sandburg’s Collected Poems. Since my way of reading poetry is to read each poem through twice, reading a large volume of poetry takes me much time. When I was young and had time to spare and space enough in my life to sit and reflect, this was a much quicker process.

But I cannot change the way I read poetry. I like to spend time with the poems I am taking the time to read. I like to try to give them my full attention… or as much of my attention as I can. Reading each poem twice, and aloud at least once, gives me my best chance of doing this. And so I continue my work through Sandburg. Savoring each moment. Wondering again and again why I did not do this with his work earlier.

Today’s featured Sandburg poem is not one of his better known ones but is not wholly unfamiliar either. It is an earlier one, from Chicago Poems. “To a Contemporary Bunkshooter” is a poem with a very specific historical context: A poem obviously occasioned by a particular historical personage and experience… some hell-fire-and-brimstone preacher of Sandburg’s time. When approaching a poem such as this, the question naturally occurs: What specifics, if any, do we as readers need to know about the person(s) and the occasion to read/appreciate the poem?

For me… the answer to this question is always the same: we do not need to know anything beyond what is in the poem. Nothing else.

Can reading about a poet, learning the nuances of their life and time, their experiences and ways of looking at poetry and the world help us appreciate individual poems more? Of course. Is such background necessary? Of course not.

One of the many things that I think makes reading poetry so daunting to so many people is the mistaken belief that there is a library of hidden meanings and references in every poem that readers need to tease out of and tease into each word, line, and stanza. If you are looking at poetry that way, who would ever want to read a poem like “To a Contemporary Bunkshooter.” You would need to spend hours googling references and chasing down footnotes for just one poem. And to what end?

I know little about music. I cannot read notes or play an instrument. But I can close my eyes and listen to Coltrane and feel delight. My ignorance of musical modality and composition does not exclude my enjoyment in any way. Would I enjoy Coltrane more if I did know and understand all those things? Probably. But it is not necessary. In the same way, I can enjoy “To a Contemporary Bunkshooter” without knowing anything beyond the poem itself. And so can any reader.

Enjoy!

To a Contemporary Bunkshooter
You come along. . . tearing your shirt. . . yelling about
Jesus.
Where do you get that stuff?
What do you know about Jesus?
Jesus had a way of talking soft and outside of a few
bankers and higher-ups among the con men of Jerusalem
everybody liked to have this Jesus around because
he never made any fake passes and everything
he said went and he helped the sick and gave the
people hope.

You come along squirting words at us, shaking your fist
and calling us all damn fools so fierce the froth slobbers
over your lips. . . always blabbing we’re all
going to hell straight off and you know all about it.

I’ve read Jesus’ words. I know what he said. You don’t
throw any scare into me. I’ve got your number. I
know how much you know about Jesus.
He never came near clean people or dirty people but
they felt cleaner because he came along. It was your
crowd of bankers and business men and lawyers
hired the sluggers and murderers who put Jesus out
of the running.

I say the same bunch backing you nailed the nails into
the hands of this Jesus of Nazareth. He had lined
up against him the same crooks and strong-arm men
now lined up with you paying your way.

This Jesus was good to look at, smelled good, listened
good. He threw out something fresh and beautiful
from the skin of his body and the touch of his hands
wherever he passed along.
You slimy bunkshooter, you put a smut on every human
blossom in reach of your rotten breath belching
about hell-fire and hiccupping about this Man who
lived a clean life in Galilee.

When are you going to quit making the carpenters build
emergency hospitals for women and girls driven
crazy with wrecked nerves from your gibberish about
Jesus–I put it to you again: Where do you get that
stuff; what do you know about Jesus?

Go ahead and bust all the chairs you want to. Smash
a whole wagon load of furniture at every performance.
Turn sixty somersaults and stand on your
nutty head. If it wasn’t for the way you scare the
women and kids I’d feel sorry for you and pass the hat.
I like to watch a good four-flusher work, but not when
he starts people puking and calling for the doctors.
I like a man that’s got nerve and can pull off a great
original performance, but you–you’re only a bug-
house peddler of second-hand gospel–you’re only
shoving out a phoney imitation of the goods this
Jesus wanted free as air and sunlight.

You tell people living in shanties Jesus is going to fix it
up all right with them by giving them mansions in
the skies after they’re dead and the worms have
eaten ‘em.
You tell $6 a week department store girls all they need
is Jesus; you take a steel trust wop, dead without
having lived, gray and shrunken at forty years of
age, and you tell him to look at Jesus on the cross
and he’ll be all right.
You tell poor people they don’t need any more money
on pay day and even if it’s fierce to be out of a job,
Jesus’ll fix that up all right, all right–all they gotta
do is take Jesus the way you say.
I’m telling you Jesus wouldn’t stand for the stuff you’re
handing out. Jesus played it different. The bankers
and lawyers of Jerusalem got their sluggers and
murderers to go after Jesus just because Jesus
wouldn’t play their game. He didn’t sit in with
the big thieves.

I don’t want a lot of gab from a bunkshooter in my religion.
I won’t take my religion from any man who never works
except with his mouth and never cherishes any memory
except the face of the woman on the American
silver dollar.

I ask you to come through and show me where you’re
pouring out the blood of your life.

I’ve been to this suburb of Jerusalem they call Golgotha,
where they nailed Him, and I know if the story is
straight it was real blood ran from His hands and
the nail-holes, and it was real blood spurted in red
drops where the spear of the Roman soldier rammed
in between the ribs of this Jesus of Nazareth.

____

Carl Sandburg's birthplace (copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

My recent visit to Galesburg, Illinois, and Carl Sandburg’s birthplace and burial site has led me to purchase and begin working through The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg. Because I will be living for the next little while with Sandburg, readers of MontanaWriter can expect a number of posts about Sandburg in the foreseeable future.

Reading Sandburg again… and for the first time seriously… I am struck by the fact that I, like most Americans, have taken him so thoroughly for granted. With the exception of his few famous poems that everyone knows, Sandburg seems afforded only a secondary place among American poets of the 20th Century… almost forgotten, but not quite.

The reason for this is two-fold. First, Sandburg’s poetry (for the most part) is uncomplicated and straightforward. Teachers of poetry prefer to show-off their exegetical skills and erudition with difficult poets like Eliot or MacLeish. Your typical Sandburg poem needs no footnotes. Poems without footnotes are boring. How can you discuss the nuances of uncomplicated language, of self-evident references, of plain English.

Second, Sandburg’s poetry is rooted in the working class. With each successive generation of academics, poets, and (abomination of abominations) the ubiquitous academic-poet, those who read and write poetry in America move further and further away from the world Sandburg set his poetical flag in… the true third-rail of American intelligentsia: class. Its easy to identify and battle racism, sexism, homophobia… but classicism cuts across too many grains, leads down roads too terrifyingly close to home to tread.

Contrast Sandburg and Frost. Frost’s language is simple. Something that is anathema to those teachers who want to appear particularly “gifted” in their abilities to analyze a poem. Yet politically/socio-economically he lives outside. He is a rustic… a poet of nature. Sandburg, though also a poet with an eye for the world, is above all a poet not of nature but of the common people. And for the intelligentsia there is nothing more contemptible than the common people and their common values and common ways of seeing the world.

Sandburg’s poem “Happiness” show’s this as well as any of his poems.

Enjoy!

Happiness
I asked the professors who teach the meaning of life to tell
me what is happiness.
And I went to famous executives who boss the work of
thousands of men.
They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though
I was trying to fool with them
And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along
the Desplaines river
And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with
their women and children and a keg of beer and an
accordion.

_____

When will man know what birds know?

There are poets I love because they represent elusive/ideal/transcendent/otherworldly beauty: Yeats, Keats, Shelley, Milton, Blake, Byron. There are other poets I love because they represent familiar/democratic (small “d”)/transubstatiated/ thisworldly beauty: Kooser, Heaney, Whitman, Frost, and Sandburg.

I still have my first volume of Carl Sandburg that I ever purchased, Honey and Salt. I bought it for $1.50 new in September 1976, according to a note I made in my 16-year-old hand on the inside front cover. Thirty-five years later it still sits on my shelf… one of only a few books that remain from my pre-college days.

This weekend while driving back from the Great Smoky Mountains, Sue and I decided at the last minute to stop by Galesburg, Illinois, to see Carl Sandburg’s birthplace. Since I had a long record for finding writer’s museums/homes closed at the times I tried visiting, and since it was late Sunday morning, we did not expect it to be open. But we thought it was worth seeing anyway.

It was open and a wonderful tribute to wonderful poet.

“Wingtip” comes from the volume Honey and Salt. It is a simple poem, but one that I have always loved. At once elegant and democratic, easy and complex… it is the work of a poet in love with the world and with the things of this world. In a word, it is pure Sandburg.

Enjoy!

Wingtip
The birds – are they worth remembering?
Is flight a wonder and one wingtip a
space marvel?
When will man know what birds know?

_____