It was quite the April for me, and I’m resting up today before getting on with a bunch of tasks I’ve put off while working on the accelerated posting schedule for National Poetry Month. Readership was up substantially, busiest month ever for visitors at this blog, and page views blew past the old record by over a thousand. I should be better at replying to your comments and encouragement, but besides being focused on the work I have a mental Catch 22 where I often can’t decide the best way to respond, and in that indecision put off responding.
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I didn’t put anything new for International Workers Day today, but I’ll repost this piece with Carl Sandburg’s words from his longer poem “The Windy City” that I created for last autumn’s U. S. Labor Day. In posting it last year I suggested something I had bounced off my old compatriots in The Lake Street Writer’s Group, something I call “The Sandburg Test.”
Let me suggest a rough analog of the Bechtel Test. Let me call it The Sandburg Test. To be clear, it’s not my suggestion that every poem has to be about work, about the things we do for our daily bread. But, if we are viewing an anthology or substantial poetry collection from a poet, to pass The Sandburg Test it has to have poems that deal with work in some substantial way. How does the speaker or characters in the poem relate to work? What are they doing that work for? What is it in presenting them that portrays something about life? What are the mysteries, sensations, and systems of that work?
Here’s that musical performance of Sandburg’s words from “The Windy City” accessible with the graphical audio player you should see below. No player to been seen? This highlighted link is an alternative.
It’s been too long since I’ve presented a poem by Carl Sandburg here, and awhile since I had the time to make one of my “punk orchestral” pieces accompanying one of the poems.
Carl first. Unlike Frost (birthday boy today, happy birthday Robert!) I appreciated Carl Sandburg as a young person. A poem like today’s “Cool Tombs” doesn’t appear to truck with irony or express its perceptions subtly. It appears to say what it means to say. Those schoolchildren sure that poets and their literature teacher accomplices are seeking to make fools of us dense and under-lived students can rest easy with what this poem seems to be. Here’s a link to the full text of the poem, if you’d like to follow along.
I’ve made my point elsewhere in this Project that Sandburg, likely with intent, had other poetic modes. Like Frost (which Sandburg was once considered a peer to in literary merit) he’s always plain enough speaking that one can be fooled into thinking his thoughts are always straightforward. Read quickly enough, seeing only the plain-talking, “Cool Tombs” has just one thing to establish: that our selves lose and are left-loose from our deaths. Great accomplishments, great enemies, great failures — eventually, nothing.
Where’s the ambiguity? Where’s the deep reading that great poems reward?
My answer, my reading of Sandburg here, is that is to be found in American history — that history a denser poem full of every Empsonian ambiguity — and Sandburg clearly is roping in American history here. Are his choices incidental/accidental? Well, they do include things that disappear, even if like love they remain inescapable, returning things.
Other than American historians, few readers today will understand what a “copperhead” is referring to when Sandburg speaks of Lincoln, other than perhaps knowing it as a species of poisonous snake. That it was, and is — but in the American Civil War those in the North opposed to fighting the secessionist slave-holding rebels took to using an incised liberty head carved out of the mid-19th century American penny coin as an emblem of their sentiments. If you reach into your pocket now and note who’s on the current copper penny, you’ll see the head of Lincoln.* Did history write some irony there?
Civil War hero and post-war President Grant suffered from corruption among businessmen in and surrounding his administration, details now lesser-known outside of historians today. The Sandburg that wrote this poem, ex-political operative and then still daily newspaperman, knew that government corruption hadn’t disappeared conceptually. Perhaps he also knew that Grant intended to — to some degree did — try to set up a fairer settlement to those newly emancipated from slavery. In the cool tombs of history, perhaps we remember Lincoln and Grant for those efforts, even if imperfect and eventually abandoned, they were.
Pocahontas’ story, as much as can be deduced from records and oral histories, is complex, and subject from the beginning to substantial romanticization by English settlers.** An indigenous American, she married an early English-American settler, and legends of this marriage and other friendliness of Pocahontas to the English settlers are the prime reason she became a historical character to the eventual conquerors. From the First Nations standpoint, one can easily see this story rests on a vibrating matrix of love, coercion, or treason. As her story leads into Sandburg’s voice claiming for the lovers in the concluding section, perhaps Sandburg holds primarily for the first of that trio — but he and I were not there, we cannot really tell. I also don’t know Sandburg’s intent, but the previous two situations are suffused with crimes and evil: slavery, murder, corruption, and greed. Is Pocahontas’ story contrast or continuance? The poem’s text allows either reading. Perhaps the fairest reading, the one that was in my sense as I read it, is that Pocahontas’ love was tragic given how the conquest continued with so much killing and subjugation. Note too that Sandburg says a hail-the-conquering-hero parade (perhaps to the tomb?) should be examined as a vainglorious exercise.
Lincoln’s tomb in Illinois, Grant’s tomb in New York, and Pocahontas’ burial site in England.
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Is all this external exegesis based on unintended things that I’m artificially assigning to a simple or at least single-minded poem? Most modern academic readers of Frost understand him to be a poet comfortable with intentionally invoking subtext. Certainly, if this were a set of incidents in a T. S. Eliot poem with reference to metaphysical poetry, with passages in Latin and Greek referencing classical history and legend, we’d know he wanted us to consider those connections.***
But Sandburg? I’d caricaturize my sense of how Sandburg’s viewed today like this: he’s written off as a superficial popularizer of unremarkable intellect and talents. He fooled some folks earlier in the 20th century into thinking there was something there, but now we have a better vantage point.
I obviously don’t see it that way. I could be mistaken — in which case it’ll be forgotten in the cool tombs.
Carl Sandburg’s grave in Illinois. Not so grand, but it also asks us to add history to the grave. There’s a little plaque on the footing bearing the legend “For it could be a place to come and remember.”
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Alas, now again I spent more time spent writing on the words, leaving less time for the music. I recently had enough energy and assured time to try to do something with a larger group of orchestral instruments. Let me be brief. I wrote this originally as a non-harmonized melody, but transformed it into a harmonized piano part via some software that extracts harmonic ideas from a monophonic line, choosing the one that interested me the most, and tweaking it from there. The piano part then became the orchestration by another translational process of placing the piano’s range of notes with various other instruments.
If I had the focused energy or assured time, this could be a movement of a larger piece with other themes, variations, contrasts in color — but that doesn’t fit my life. I’ve come to call these short pieces, often expressing a simple musical idea by whatever means I can bring to hand “punk orchestral.” You can hear the recording of my performance of Sandburg’s words with this orchestral music using the audio player gadget you see below. No player? This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*That liberty head cent had been replaced with a new design just as Lincoln was elected, though still in circulation. The new 1859 design replaced the classical liberty head profile with what? An American Indian in native feathered headdress. The current Lincoln profile penny was adopted in 1909, less than a decade before Sandburg wrote his poem.
**A couple of obscure horticultural details occur in the Pocahontas section. “red haw” is a tree that produces a crab-apple in Autumn. So too is the pawpaw, a fruit widely raised and eaten by native Americans. Sandburg oddly refers to the “pawpaw in May” which would not be a sweet, edible fruiting time for the plant in North America. Is there intentional metaphor there, or a mistake?
***I don’t know if Sandburg had this poem by Thomas Campion, which in turn was a loose translation of Catullus — but the lovers getting as much as they can while tomb-wise element was brought to mind as I newly considered Sandburg’s tomb poem.
This Monday, Labor Day in the U. S., is a legal holiday which arose from the idea of a day to celebrate workers. Some see this holiday as being in conflict with May 1st, International Workers Day, but I myself have no beef with having two days to celebrate work and those that do it.
Poets and poetry are not, as a rule, oversaturated with attention to labor. Creative work such as writing is, in itself, labor — but the wages are so scant for poetry that it’s hard to see it as allied with such. Currently television and movie writers are on strike, but poets have little in the way of wages and rights to negotiate. If the weekend and the 8-hour workday were obtained through labor struggle, it’s hard to imagine poets picketing for a full honorarium for the 12-line sonnet, or chapbooks for sale on every bookstore shelf that stocks James Patterson books.
What I find less forgivable is that poets don’t write about labor as much as I think is due. Poetry’s Greatest Hits will tell us about mystery, death, love, war, dreams, desire, loneliness, family, friendships, every facet of our non-commercial relationship with nature, all the panoply of pain and joy. What poetry won’t speak of much is the third or so of our lives spent making or getting a paycheck.* And I don’t think the situation for the subject of labor is getting better. Farm work, even if romanticized into shepherd tropes or the like, supplies many of the poems in the canon that speak of work. As the percentage of Americans engaged in, or even living among others engaged in that line of work decreases, we see fewer of those poems.
Around Labor Day or May Day, I often find myself dipping into the work of Carl Sandburg. Despite his less than illustrious education, not of the Ivy League but more a Row-Crop League college with hobo semesters, and attendance in The Front Page era of journalism, rather than sessions abroad and drawing room soirees. Sandburg was by intent a thoroughgoing Modernist artist, making it new as much as any of the early 20th century Americans, but his Modernist solutions and prosody get little respect currently. Maybe they’re right, though I find Sandburg can be effective for my purposes. Judge those things as you might, he does pay attention to labor and laborers as colleagues. He can portray all kinds of struggle in doing so, but also endurance, achievement, and harbored joy.
Before I get on to the piece I found in Sandburg to celebrate Labor Day, let me suggest a rough analog of the Bechtel Test. Let me call it the Sandburg Test. To be clear, it’s not my suggestion that every poem has to be about work, about the things we do for our daily bread. But, if we are viewing an anthology or substantial poetry collection from a poet, to pass the Sandburg Test it has to have poems that deal with work in some substantial way. How does the speaker or characters in the poem relate to work? What are they doing that work for? What is it in presenting them that portrays something about life? What are the mysteries, sensations, and systems of that work?
What Sandburg poem did I choose? I picked a selection from the 6th part of a longer, multipart poem, “The Windy City.” This one is sort of an extended revisiting of Sandburg’s Greatest Hit “Chicago,” sometimes remembered as a boosterish paean to the great Midwestern American city, which it’s not — “Chicago” is a poem about a city and a workforce in struggle. “The Windy City” on the other hand is more mystic, and the section I chose is essentially a labor hymn. Physicists tell us that the things we see about us, solid things apparently, are in fact full of moving atoms and vibrating particles, their close motion making solidity. Sandburg’s windy city is such. The labor we celebrate on Monday, and do most every other Monday, is the gusty current that makes our world.
Looks solid enough, but it’s made of something as transitory as work. Carl Sandburg looks out on mid-century Chicago.
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My music for today’s piece is in my punk orchestral mode: simple musical structures making use of orchestra instruments and a few interlopers. You can hear it along with Sandburg’s words with a player gadget below. No gadget? Here’s a highlighted link, that’ll open even on Labor Day to present you with an alternative audio player. Want to read more of from the poem from which I selected today’s passage? Here’s a link to that.
Thank you for reading and listening. Thank you for the work you do when you’re not doing that. Yes, you may be paid for that, well or not, but our lives and communities are made out of that work. How can that not be mystical?
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*My diagnosis of this avoidance is that poets may still feel an expectation that they should either be full-time poets earning a living from their poems, or if not that, rich enough to not need a “day job.” Their day jobs then are not poetic, and so don’t appear in their poems. Poets with academic jobs are a considerable middle case however. I suspect administrative policies and faculty politics still don’t seem poetic. Perhaps office-based work in bureaucracies is harder to press into non-humorous verse than the village smithy or a steel-drivin’ man?
You might know this pedant’s complaint: something can’t be “more unique” — because the word unique means the only, singular. If so, what the Parlando Project does then is quasi-unique. I well know that setting literary poems to music isn’t unprecedented, but the way I do it is a smaller grouping. For reasons (some practical) I’ve taken to using my rough and not always reliable singing voice more often,* and more pieces have simpler arrangements featuring acoustic guitar. In the past couple of months I’ve become aware of four other people, singers and guitarists not totally unlike myself, who have being doing things related to this presentation of music combined with literary poetry.
I ran into Evan Gordon on a guitar-related online forum this year where he introduced himself as working on combining poems with acoustic guitar-centered music, including his version of a passage from Jack Kerouac that I too admire, and which supplied the name to his collection “The Long Long Skies Over New Jersey,” a short album released this year. Kerouac’s words are there along with Houseman and Yeats and a couple of covers of well-known songs. I rather like Gordon’s poetry settings, and though there’s only three songs taken from literature, the range of the poetic sources he chose to set echoes what this Project does. So, you might well like this too. My favorite in this collection is his setting of Yeats’ “When You Are Old,”a poem which I too have done. I (and some other listeners) like my expression of that poem, but Gordon’s is exquisite. You can find Evan Gordon’s “The Long Long Skies Over New Jersey” on streaming services such as Spotify or Apple Music.
Andrew Merritt introduced himself to me via a comment here at this blog regarding my versions of the classical Chinese Tang Dynasty poets, telling us he’s looked to them for inspiration too. Merritt has a collection that he calls “Twang Dynasty” where he combines influences from Tang poems with classic American country music. Does that seem far-fetched to you? Well, I can imagine a translated scroll stroked in traditional Chinese calligraphy of Hank Williams lyrics sitting beside those of the Tang classical masters, so I like Merritt’s imagination. His lead-off cut, “Drinking with the Moon” is Merritt’s version of a Li Bai poem I performed here.You can hear his work at this link.
In a recent post on Carl Sandburg I tried to make the case that this somewhat deemphasized Modernist poet’s footpaths can be seen all over music in folk and Americana genres. I wrote that Sandburg blazed a path and model for Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Bob Dylan; and as an early American folk music revivalist, he personally allowed a connection between folk songs presented in the raw (not as motifs in fuller orchestrations) with progressive/populist politics and high poetic culture. Sandburg did this not only by performing those songs publicly at his free-verse poetry readings (with a voice and level of guitar skills roughly like my own, not as a concert artiste) but by publishing a pioneering general anthology of American folk song purposely mashed together from around our whole immigrant country and its various sub-cultures with his 1927 The American Songbag.
One problem with The American Songbag as published is that it appears to be aimed at the musically literate owners of parlor pianos more than guitarists, many of whom are allergic to sheet music.** So it was with great joy that I heard just this month of a project undertaken during the heights of the Covid pandemic by Stephen Griffith. He sought to record the entire Songbag, all 315 songs, and to present them, as Sandburg might have sung them himself with just simple voice and acoustic guitar. I eagerly went to his web site to thank him last week, only to find that it had fallen off the web. Given his apparent age in the videos, I hope Griffith is well and still with us, that he’s perhaps just engaged with other things. Luckily, his performances are still available on YouTube at this link — and their unadorned presentation is a treasure chest. Some of the songs in Sandburg’s Songbag became folk music “standards,” but the versions Sandburg and his collaborators collected ending in 1927 sometimes differ, not just in the folk-process of a few floating or varied verses and lines, but occasionally in entire melodies. I’ve listened to a lot of folk revivalist music over the years, but even though I haven’t made it through all of Griffith’s Songbag versions, some of the songs I’ve heard there, taken from Sanburg’s anthology, seem new to me. Anyone interested in The Old Weird America owes Stephen Griffith a debt of thanks (well, and Sandburg too).
There’s a fourth example I want to draw your attention to: Joseph Fasano, a man who is doing some other things while also being a poetry-aware person wielding an acoustic guitar. Because of that range of things he’s doing, I’m going to leave him for an additional post to follow.
*Earlier in the Project I was more likely to use spoken or chanted vocals. I still do this sometimes, depending on the text and what I feel is most effective.
**There are piano lead-sheets for the songs in The American Songbag, but no guitar chords or parts. Many/most folk music associated guitarists and singers learned their repertoire “by ear” from hearing others sing the songs, and those who wanted to notate guitar parts beyond chord sheets were likely to use guitar tablature not treble staff notation. There’s an old joke regarding guitarists as musicians: “Q: How do you make an electric guitarist turn down? A: Put sheet music in front of them.”
While technically possible in a narrow sense, it would have been an impractical task to try to present all 315 American Songbag songs as recordings in 1927. Decades later, after WWII, record collectors created anthology record albums such as the Folkways, Library of Congress, or Harry Smith’s LPs which “taught” old folk songs to new, young players. Sandburg’s existing work helped make this later work interesting — but those recording anthologies relied on dubs from 78 RPM records made a decade or so later than the era Sandburg and his collaborators were working in collecting songs from unrecorded singers.
While visiting western North Carolina this month I toured two houses built in the 19th century, each high on hilltops overlooking the mountains surrounding them. My mind likes to link things, I couldn’t help but look at them as a pair.
The first house was named Connemara by an owner that lived there in between the man who had it built and the man whose shade I’d come to visit. The man who had it built was Christopher Memminger who had enslaved workers to build it. Memminger eventually became the Confederacy’s Secretary of the Treasury, so he must have known something about money and the slavery that helped accumulate it.* The later owner was a poet and writer who somehow found his own words remunerative enough to afford it, Carl Sandburg. Sandburg was said to have found the place a bit baronial for a socialist poet, at least on first sight — but his beloved wife wanted temperate pastureland for her dairy goat herd, and this place had that. She’d helped and stood by Carl through his unlikely rise from hoboing between short-lived work, to being an aide to a mayor of Milwaukee, to daily journalism in Chicago, to becoming a prize-winning poet and multi-volume biographer of Lincoln.
The second house is Biltmore, built for George Vanderbilt II. If you know your Gilded Age, the Vanderbilts were likely the first great fortune family of enormous wealth in 19th century America. Brief accounts I’ve read of him don’t make him sound like someone all that interested in business or growing wealth. He was bookish, a bit shy — but also very rich and looking to use that wealth to put his mark on things, to enclose his life in the best as he saw it. If one wonders at the two socialist second-generation immigrants living in the large farmhouse of Connemara, Vanderbilt’s house makes that place look like an outbuilding. Biltmore’s not just bigger, it’s thought to be the biggest residence ever built in the United States, with around 4 acres of floor space beneath huge high-vaulted common rooms. The estate surrounding it was over 100,000 acres, and Vanderbilt had it landscaped by Frederick Law Olmsted, the man who had worked on a much smaller canvas with the 800 acres of New York City’s Central Park.
The mix of manicured and wild seeming landscape is beautiful in the Olmsted manner. We biked along a trail through 8 miles of it, past lagoons and along the banks of the French Broad river —and as we rolled over a wood-rimed rise down past a pasture I was delighted to see three hawks at tree-top level swooping over us, so low that the shadows of one passed over me rolling beneath them.
The two houses have similarities, if not in scale. Both Carl and George were packrats, though at the wealth level of a Vanderbilt, it’s called being an art collector. The Sandburg house was donated to the US government just after Carl’s death. His wife and two live-in adult children packed up as if going on vacation and left the house for residence in Asheville. The Park Service has maintained it ever since in Marie Celeste ghost-ship-shape. One of Carl’s cigar butts sits in an ashtray on the set-for-a-meal dinner table. Piles of books and magazines cover many surfaces as if they were just set down this week. Sandburg has thousands of books in bookcases everywhere around the house, and there are busts of Carl and his long-term subject Lincoln, art photographs by his wife’s brother Edward Steichen, and scattered knickknacks. Vanderbilt had even more thousands of books, all stored in a large floor-to-two-story-high ceiling library room, all arranged with leather and gilt bindings a-plenty. Life-size John Singer Sargent portraits abound and above giant elaborately surrounded fireplaces. Hallways are hung their entire length with framed etchings. Large Flemish tapestries showing Biblical virtues completely cover walls of a big room. Servants kept it all clean and ordered then, and that’s how it’s displayed now.
Vanderbilt Biltmore Library and a Sandburg bookshelf. Some Sandburg clutter.
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The mood of the two places, as I sensed it, was very different however. Biltmore seemed dark, and though some of that was likely due to preservation of valued pieces from bright lights, both my wife and I had simultaneous Citizen Kane thoughts by the large tables and giant fireplaces. She nudged me and asked if I’d like to put together a jigsaw puzzle. In contrast, the Sandburg house seemed domestic in a familiar way to me. The metal handles on the hand-touch-patinaed Sandburg kitchen cabinets — chrome ones fluted like a Pontiac’s hood — were the same that were in my childhood’s kitchen. The clutter there, like my clutter.
The Sandburg house kitchen
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In the lengthy tour of the Vanderbilt house, the highlight was when we detoured outside onto a long stone veranda with splendid views of the Blue Ridge Mountains. We sat on deck chairs, as we might sit on our own home’s rickety screen-porch, and gazed not at a multicultural Midwestern neighborhood, but on the far hazy peaks as swallows darted to and fro just over the railing as they likely did when the Cherokee could not dream of steamboat millionaires or multi-volume biographies.
There’s a wicker chair out on a large flat granite rock, yards from the Sandburg house. It too offers a view of the tree-covered mountains, but with no roof over one’s head or seats for others. Carl Sandburg would go to that chair and sit to write first drafts. That unkempt shock of white hair of his would blow like leaves in the breeze, and the sun would remind him how blank the new page was.
Sandburg lived at his hilltop house bought with the proceeds from his own literary labors for two decades. Though George Vanderbilt was rich the day he was born, he had only about the same number of years to enjoy the extraordinary elaborate one he had built to his desires. Some of us still read Sandburg’s work in our homes — only tourists will now see Vanderbilt’s commissioned magnum opus.
I told you I like to connect things — and these two houses around Asheville are a natural pair — but I also look for the more tenuous connections. Last time I said that Sandburg’s most lasting influence, obscured by time and the others influenced by him, was being an original “roots” or “Americana” popularizer, the man with poems, a guitar, and songs from all corners and sub-cultures of America. What is perhaps the greatest lasting fruit of the extended Vanderbilt family tree? Not steamboats. Not gilded age mansions. Not art collections. Maybe not even philanthropic donations to long-lasting institutions. In 1910, Emily Vanderbilt Sloane, descended matrilineally from the Vanderbilts, gave birth to John H. Hammond. There’s no room to tell you all John Hammond gave us, so here his Wikipedia entry is linked. Why would you want to click that link? Here are names you’ll see linked to John Hammond there: Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Benny Goodman, Robert Johnson, Harry James, Charlie Christian, Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Teddy Wilson, Big Joe Turner, Pete Seeger, Babatunde Olatunji, Aretha Franklin, George Benson, Freddie Green, Leonard Cohen, Arthur Russell, Jim Copp, Asha Puthli, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Mike Bloomfield, and John H. Hammond’s own son John P. Hammond.
Today’s post is dedicated to my life partner of two decades today, Heidi. For a musical piece here’s one of Sandburg’s chief influences whose birthday also happens to fall today, Walt Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing.” In his song Whitman reminds us of our labors, and as the son of a house carpenter, he knew directly who built the houses. Graphical audio player below for some,backup link here if you don’t see it.
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*Carl Sandburg, Lincoln biographer, was not a Confederate, and was a proud “Civil Rights” supporter. When the tour guide noted the incongruence of this, I put on my village explainer hat and told the tour group that poet Longfellow, he of patriot poems like “The Ride of Paul Revere,”lived in a house built by a Tory who fled the American Revolution.
I’m in Asheville North Carolina this weekend, and I visited the Carl Sandburg home national site not far from here. Longtime readers will know that Sandburg is a touchstone for me and this project, and so I thought it’d be worthwhile to put down a few observations and questions that have arisen from my visit in consideration of Sandburg.
I think Sandburg has suffered from succeeding in doing something we no longer expect poets to do. He achieved a certain level of fame during his lifetime — and that alone is problematic. If poetry has lost sufficient cultural interest, as some critics and some poets believe, then a poet too famous has presented a case that they aren’t really writing true poetry. It doesn’t help that Sandburg wasn’t known as a critic himself, and didn’t present an explicit theory of how poetry works. This led to an assumption that there’s no depth, originality, or vision in his work. From this perceived lack, his fame — and one might assume his influence — died off quickly with the celebrity poet character he became in his long lifetime.
Yet there’s one line of influence that I say is underappreciated, one that flows from his writings and public persona, a path of influence that mixed with others who had complementary urges. That line of influence runs through Sandburg’s work with American folk music. He seems to have been working roughly contemporaneously with John Lomax and Charles Seeger* in popularizing folk music at a time early enough that one couldn’t yet term their actions a revival. And he was mixing these folk tunes collected from various subcultures in America’s regions and mixing them within a project that included outreach of high culture poetry and a lefty political slant from the presenter, as if it was all one thing. There was no natural reason these things were required to be combined, and so a successful poet and author combining them, as Sandburg did, helped set the format for the progress of the folk music revival from the WWI era through to the eventual “folk scare” of the Fifties which launched Bob Dylan and many others who would be called song poets.
Sandburg singing with his grandkids. Note the classical guitar position, a way of holding acoustic guitars I adopted too. Guitar and piano currently in the Sandburg home. I couldn’t get an angle to read the headstock. Anyone got knowledge or a guess what make and model is is?
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Critical intermediaries in this half-century progression were Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, and I’m often struck by how similar their presentations were to Sandburg’s. If you mix Sandburg and Will Rogers** into a cloning machine you wouldn’t get an exact Woody Guthrie, but you’d likely get something like him. Guthrie familiarly called Sandburg’s pioneering 1927 folk song collection The American Songbag “Carl Songbird’s American Sandbag.” And like this project, Guthrie played and composed music to accompany Sandburg poems for public performance. Pete Seeger’s Chautauqua-ish concerts presented to and aligned with a Sandburgian “The People, Yes” outlook. Seeger’s breakout group The Weavers made much of this blurb given them by Sandburg “When I hear America Singing, I hear the Weavers.” Before that, when he was beginning, Pete claimed he got ahold of American Songbag when it came out. Again, like Woody, Pete was Pete. They added themselves.
I admire Langston Hughes, and while not single-handedly, he’s seminal in the development of Afro-American poetry. In reading his early work, some of which remains in the forefront of his legacy, I hear strong echoes of Sandburg’s word-music. Are they both hearing Walt Whitman in their ears? Likely, but the concision of many of Sandburg’s early poems is not Whitmanesque, and Hughes’ poetry likewise could be concise. Langston Hughes was too, himself, but a poet like Sandburg at least ran interference for his work.
Hughes was an early proponent of Jazz Poetry, yet Sandburg’s “Jazz Fantasia” was there to serve as an example when Hughes’ first poems were published. Later on, I was often hearing elements of Langston Hughes in Gil Scott Heron, and if we continue that line, perhaps there are reflected elements of Sandburg is some down-tempo, socially conscious rap.
One of the things a tour of Sandburg’s home offers is the ability to peak at his many bookshelves and scattered magazines. They show a man with wide interests in politics and human rights alongside poetry. Here’s one little something I didn’t expect to find, wedged in between The Roots of American Communism on its left and McCarthy: The Man, The Senator, The Ism on the right: a copy of a science fiction magazine. Did Sandburg read or at least casually follow mid-century SF? Has anyone even asked this question? Is there any way to answer it? Was this one issue or are there many in the house?
The magazine is right next to the McCarthy study. Hard to read the spine, but it may be this issue.
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Here’s an oddity that I thought of while sitting in Asheville thinking also of the Black Mountain College that existed nearby. From 1945 when Sandburg moved to North Carolina until the college closed in 1957, it existed in the same part of the Blue Ridge mountains with Sandburg. In the 1950s it became the locus of a group of poets*** who eventually were called The Black Mountain Poets after the school. You might wonder (well, I did) did any of them seek out Sandburg, or did Sandburg make any note of them? So far, I can find not a trace of an answer to that question. Was Sandburg either too busy or too retired to mix with them? Was he considered too mainstream and successful to be of interest to insurgent “post modernists?” Many Black Mountain Poets admired and communicated with William Carlos Williams, Sandburg’s contemporary — but Sandburg too had championed a more American and less European-culture-centric style of free verse continued by the Black Mountain Poets. There’s a dog not barking there.
In the end, I suspect Sandburg might be comfortable with his diminished reputation in the 21st century — even if I’m not. Sandburg often spoke of the work of the people as being continuous, of that factor being part of the peoples’ power. In that way he might be satisfied. Things he helped build, put in motion, continue to move forward, change, and develop.
For an audio piece today, here’s a short poem by one of the foundational Black Mountain Poets Charles Olson titled “These Days.” I performed it acapella this morning, recording this very short piece on my phone in a less than quiet room I’m staying at. It speaks of something Olson and Sandburg might have agreed on. You can hear it with the audio player below, or if you don’t see that, with this backup link.
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*Father of Pete, Mike, and Peggy Seeger. Husband of Ruth Crawford Seeger.
**Will Rogers arose in a very similar time-frame to Sandburg. The amateur guitar player/author/speaker Mark Twain had died just a few years previous. The clever yet folksy artist observing the entire range human behavior from a loving/skeptical non-East-coast/high-culture place was a needed character in American life, and while Sandburg isn’t a Twain clone, the role he played was somewhat successive.
***The list of other famous students and teachers of Black Mountain College included Buckminster Fuller, John Cage, Charles Olson, Walter Gropius, Joseph Albers, Robert Motherwell, Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Paul Goodman, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan.
A great many countries have holidays honoring their nation’s soldiers, often with an emphasis on memorializing the dead of past wars. The United States has two such holidays, a Veteran’s Day on the date of the WWI Armistice and the one that arrives this weekend, Memorial Day.
Long time readers here will know I’ve presented a lot of soldier’s poems in this Project, and poems otherwise about wars. This is fitting, war as a poetic subject matter goes back to Homer and further.
Many soldiers’ poems are at least ambiguous about the worth of war, some are outright harrowing. But that’s poets. Outside of poetry, many in the US have developed a particular carefulness in speaking of our wars, a hesitancy to speak honestly about those ambiguities mixed with a deadened obligatory reverence for veterans — a reverence with no other required obligation or attention. Yet we have these two holidays.
Well, do we have such an obligation to remember the horrors of war and the hard-won realities the warriors helped enforce? Asked this way the answer is suggested: yes, we do. For this year’s Memorial Day, I’m going to present two poems that suggest something else in addition.
The first one is by poet Kevin FitzPatrick, who I’ve been memorializing since his death in late 2021. Kevin was not a vet, but he helped with the arrangements that led to his father Bernard FitzPatrick’s memoir, A Hike Into the Sun, about his WWII experience as a prisoner of war in the Bataan Death March. Let me briefly summarize that, for those for whom this is ancient or foreign history: In the early days after Japan declared war on the US, the Philippines came under attack. The fighting was fierce, with Americans and Filipinos resisting without anything like sufficient logistical support to hold out very long.
After they surrendered the near 70 mile march began, with brutal mistreatment and wanton execution of captives adding to the suffering of the weakened and injured soldiers. Forced labor for the duration of the war followed for those who survived the early days. Death counts vary, ranging from 5600 to over 10,000, continental American soldiers and their Filipino comrades. WWII had many accounts of human depravity. This was one of them.
Kevin’s father survived the march, survived the years as a POW doing forced labor, and then wrote his book about it in the 1990s. That’s only background, this isn’t what today’s poem is about. “Survivor” is about his son Kevin visiting his dad in the 21st century while the infirm father in his late 80s was in a care home. How much can someone like myself know about Bernard FitzPatrick’s experience?
It just happens that one of the Parlando Project’s mottos is “Other Peoples’ Stories.” That motto also admits, understands that I (and you) can only partially understand others’ experiences, even if poems and performances might inform us somewhat.
I’m not going to spoil the ending of the poem, you’ll need to listen to my performance in order to hear it. Without spoilers I can say that when I first heard Kevin’s poem, when he read it in draft form, his tale of a chair transfer reminded me of my time working in nursing homes and like Ray was performing those kinds of tasks, but the ending took it another place I didn’t expect the poem to go. You can hear my performance with the audio player below. If you don’t see that player (some ways of reading this blog hide it), this highlighted link will open a new tab to play it.
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Knowing how Filipinos and US troops suffered in the hands of the Japanese, what does the ending say? There’s no secret right answer, this isn’t a pop quiz. Instead of defining a clear answer, let me supply another poem in a performance I shared here many years ago before some of you followed this Project. I think of it as a great Memorial Day poem because for it to achieve its greatness you need to think about it, think about what it implies in the compressed story it tells. The poem is Carl Sandburg’s “Grass.” Coincidentally, Sandburg was a veteran of the Spanish-American war, the conflict that made the Philippines an American Commonwealth up until independence just after the ending of WWII around 50 years later. Sandburg as a soldier wore Civil War era heavy woolen uniforms while stationed in tropical Puerto Rico, and his commander was a Civil War officer. That’s how close his time was to the bloody American Civil war whose battles are mentioned. “Grass” was written when the bloody battles of WWI, also mentioned, were contemporary events.
Kevin FitzPatrick and Carl Sandburg. A couple of poets imply some things you’re not likely to hear elsewhere this Memorial Day
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Sandburg’s poem in its short duration reminds of the costs of war — but what does his ending mean? Does it mean it will be best all-tolled when we have the option to forget their sacrifice? Does it simply observe that time passes, and we will forget, eventually? Is he saying that more wars, more bloody battles, obscure the dead of past wars? Chances are you won’t hear any of those statements in any Memorial Day commentary or post — but you will hear about Memorial Day discount savings, and rote uncomplicated praise for service.
Here’s the audio player for The LYL Band performing Carl Sandburg’s poem “Grass” live several years back. And here’s the backup link for it.
A break in the influences as memoir series here, that theme that I’ve fallen into doing for National Poetry Month? Maybe. I’m going to present a new performance of a Carl Sandburg poem — but before that I’m going to talk about another writer, Rod Serling. Serling wrote a variety of things, but he’s best known for creating and hosting, often presenting his own scripts, the mid-century TV show The Twilight Zone.
I’m doubtful young people watch the old gray half-hour Twilight Zone episodes anymore, though they are still available in various ways — but people younger than me certainly did, and to some degree still do. That generation between today’s youth and my old age has sought to revive it under its original title or in spirit, and they still talk between themselves about the original episodes and their hard to reproduce sensibility. I remember being in a creative writing class back in The Seventies, with folks maybe five years younger than me, and I was surprised at how often they might refer to some TZ episode instead of a Greek myth or some piece of literary poetry. SF/Fantasy fandom has grown a hundredfold since, it’s the backbone of popular narrative culture now. The SF/Fantasy memory-hole village that was Twilight Zone’s once, has become a crowded inner-ring suburb, neither new-hot nor charmingly old-fashioned.
One episode of that series, one that came early in the show’s 156 episode run from 1959 to 1964, appears on some of the middle-generation’s “best of” lists, though I think there’s a strangeness that it does. Titled “Walking Distance” it’s tied very clearly to Serling’s own Greatest Generation memories, not as much to my generation who might have watched it on its first run, and I’d expect not-at-all to those younger than me. To summarize the plot without spoilers I’ll say the story is that an overworked and worried 1960 advertising man ends up walking in the countryside and enters his old hometown, the allegorically named “Homewood,” where he grew up before he left for New York City. He finds it not the present town in 1960, but the town of the 1920s.Given the number of time-fantasy stories written since then, not that unique a setup.*
Well, is a poem about a poet hearing a bird sing, or mourning a dead intimate, or finding themselves awash in desire all that unique? “Walking Distance” works, if it works, on performance and from the strength of the slightly wordy** but emotionally resonant script. A feeling of nostalgia — more than that, the feeling of wanting to be able to walk one’s childhood places in dimensions more palpable than memory is something easy to evoke in us. Serling’s script wants to draw a bit more than just all the feels in this situation — but let’s face it, all the feels, the range of edges soft and sharp of them, is the powerful engine here. That engine is strong and universal enough that I can feel the lost 1920s that Serling evokes, even if I never lived them.
Which brings me to Carl Sandburg and today’s poem for performance, “Band Concert.” Published in 1918, it presents itself in a poetic collection of contemporary portraits of American places and people that Sandburg has observed in his travels. The night of the band concert in this poem — while in Nebraska instead of upstate New York — is closely contemporary to Serling’s Homewood. Poet Sandburg is roughly 40, so while the scene in his poem is set in the now, the poem views the kids half his age re-enacting things that are already past for our storyteller.
If one knows the history of American music, Sandburg can be decoded as knowing that the Nebraska city is a few decades behind Chicago or New York. The band seems to be playing rags, the craze of the turn of the century, not of 1918. A small-town kid who had long left for the biggest cities in America, Sandburg can compare the giggles of the kids to the “Livery Stable Blues,” a landmark early Jazz recording where white musicians produced outrageous instrumental sounds imitating farm animals. “Livery Stable Blues” was released in 1917, and Sandburg was an early Jazz-bug — but he’s not knocking the Nebraskans for their music. He’s celebrating it, and them. And after all, cowboy rags and Negro*** rags, would be in the repertoire of Carl Sandburg the folk musician who would be including a set of guitar-accompanied songs in his poetry readings.
Homewood’s park and our 1960 visitor, dressed much as script writer & host Serling would be. Town square park and bandstand from my grandmother’s town. Bandstands in towns were common enough in my Midwest, so I forgot this elegant one, but I did remember the alligator.
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In time-space, I’ve never visited Serling’s Homewood, nor the Nebraska place Sandburg is reporting from. Those are my grandparents’ times. In my own midcentury I’ve been to their outskirts close enough to see the band pavilion in the park or square, the full summer dresses, farm boys when that was a common occupation rather than employees of feed lots, and I’ve walked the sidewalks past the lattice shadows decorating porches. I can translate some from their writing. Serling, Sandburg, my grandparents, they know “more of the story.” Which is us — time, space, placental barriers away.
You can hear me perform Carl Sandburg’s “Band Concert” with a rock quintet which has no tubas nor cornets in this concert. Audio player gadget below, alternative link here for those who don’t see a graphical gadget.
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*Twilight Zone itself did another well-loved episode later with a very similar setup: “Next Stop Willoughby.”
**As if poets have standing to complain about the use of words to portray things, rather than filming a chase, fight scenes, or calling in a CGI render farm.
***Those who go to the original text linked here will note that Sandburg uses the n-word in this poem as he does elsewhere in his early poetry. I’ve “translated” it. Sandburg also uses the general range of derogatory ethnic names of an era where “white” by the conventions of today wasn’t then a monolithic block, but instead was segmented into many othered creatures to be devalued with rude names and determinatory stereotypes. I’m not a Sandburg expert, nor am I the one to rule on what’s racist and what’s documentary, but what I’ve read of Sandburg says to me that he was intentionally anti-racist.
I’ll admit I rushed to complete today’s audio piece because I wanted to make note of a birthday anniversary of an important contributor to the American wing of the Modernist movement of the early 20th century. I’m going to get to it in a roundabout way. Have patience, valued reader, I think this abbreviated story is worth your time if you care about the everyday accidents and personal connections that you might find scattered about behind what become large changes.
This story starts with two 19th century American immigrant families. I know a few details, and though I probably don’t know a lot more, but I think I know enough for a story. One family’s breadwinner was a laborer from Sweden. I read today he signed his name with an X, and he worked at various jobs including blacksmith’s assistant in Illinois after arriving. His wife was resourceful and was able to keep the underfunded household going. The other was described as a “peasant family” from the tiny country of Luxembourg. “Peasant” sounds so Bruegel, I don’t know if things were that feudal in Luxembourg in the middle of the 19th century, but that second family emigrated to the midwestern United States like the first one. The husband started out working in a mine until ill health forced him out. Luckily his wife found some income working as a milliner.
What’s important about these two families? Well, so far, nothing — though they raised families, that’s something. The second family already had kids when they arrived, the first one soon had seven kids. We’re going to concentrate on some of the kids. Our first family was the Sandburgs, the second the Steichens. One of the Sandburg children in Illinois called himself Charlie, and over at the Steichens in Wisconsin we had Edward and Lillian who were born in Luxembourg but were now growing up in the US. Charlie, the son of the man who signed his name with an X was passionate about writing. Edward, the son of the miner, was interested in art.
Charlie, our writer, had to leave school to help earn money for the struggling family at age 13. Eventually he volunteered for the army and served in the Spanish American War. Edward worked at the commercial end of art while having ambitions to move into the fine art world. Given those ambitions he took a wild chance by moving over to photography, which in the late 19th century wasn’t yet considered a fine art. How could that acceptance happen?
Edward started taking pictures and working on various ways the composition, lighting and film developing process could alter the images in artistic ways. One of his models for the photographs as he worked on his craft was his younger sister Lillian (see below).
Charlie got a break after the short-run war he was in. A local college gave him a scholarship* as a returning war veteran, and one of his sisters, Mary, was big on education and helped support him. Charlie rushed into doing everything writing he could do there — and while he didn’t graduate, when he left it was to pursue writing and to give talks on the midwestern Chautauqua circuit. Looking to network, he found himself in Wisconsin attending a Socialist party meeting.** It’s there that he met Lillian Steichen. Bam! Charlie fell hard and fast for Lillian. Lillian was perhaps a bit more careful. Charlie told her he was a poet, an artist, and he asked for her address (she was visiting her family, but was teaching in another state). She obliged. That was it, one accidental meeting.
For the next six months Charlie Sandburg wooed Lillian Steichen with letters. Lots of letters. Letters with poetry. Lillian’s letters easily showed her intelligence and wide interests, and she may have felt freer to discuss those things with native-born Charlie in writing because English was her second language and she may not have been as fluent in it speaking casually. And despite Charlie not being a good provider catch, the two fell deeply in sealed-with-a-kiss love. How much did Lillian rev Charlie Sandburg’s poetry engine? We’ll see at the end of this story today.
What about Lillian’s big brother Edward? His art photographs were getting some interest, and he had crossed paths with Alfred Stieglitz, another man who was interested in the Modernist movement to make photography into art. In 1905 the two go in to showing not just their fine art photographs but all kinds of Modernist art in New York City. Edward’s photographs filled Stieglitz’s journal Camera Work. A gallery they set up, the 291 Gallery, shows much new modern art work — not just photographs— and this work is often shown there publicly for the first time in America. How important and primary were Stieglitz and Edward Steichen in Modern art? Even a person who’s not primarily interested in visual arts like me has heard of the famous 1913 Armory Show in NYC, often considered the pioneering event in America’s exposure to Modernism. Well, Stieglitz and Steichen were showing that kind of work and laying the groundwork for that show for a decade before.
Back to Lillian Steichen and Charlie Sandburg. They married in 1908, job prospects for free-verse poets not overly concerning them. Charlie started to go by his birth name Carl, which he’d previously ditched because it seemed too ethnic. He worked for awhile as the PR/Press Secretary for the Socialist mayor of Milwaukee.*** And then he moves on to daily journalism as his day gig in Chicago. Carl, Lillian, and the brother-in-law exchange Modernisms. Carl’s poetry becomes more tightly visual, more show not tell. Later, if by extension photography can be an art, how about movies? Carl Sandburg’s daily journalism includes becoming an early movie critic.
Edward & Lillian Steichen. “My Younger Sister with a Rose Covered Hat.” Carl and Lillian Sandburg. “My Little Sister.” All photos by Edward Steichen. Check out the hats. Was it another happy accident that Steichen’s mom was a milliner?
On the anniversary of Edward Steichen’s birth, here’s one of Carl Sandburg’s poems wooing Lillian Steichen, “A Dream Girl,” performed as a song. You can think of it as Sandburg’s “Love Minus Zero/No Limit.” But knowing the art-photography Steichen side, consider the poems final line when you listen below, or read it here. I recorded the song quickly, with just my voice and an acoustic guitar, something that Carl Sandburg would have had handy to him, because Carl Sandburg was also a pioneering folksong revivalist, often dropping a set of acoustic guitar songs into his readings at a time when Pete Seeger wasn’t out of diapers. Oh, and Bob Dylan? Did you know that when Dylan’s poetic songwriting was just taking off that he took it upon himself to seek out Carl Sandburg? Oh, so many stories, let’s get onto the song. Graphical player below, and an alternative highlighted link for those that can’t see that player.
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*Charlie, Mary, or someone must have talked Charlie up a bit. Colleges, even then, didn’t usually admit folks who hadn’t attended high school.
**By the turn of the century, democratic socialism was an emergent movement in the US. Despite its suppression in the WWI years there was some chance that it could have developed into a European style mass political party. Even with the Palmer raids and fears of a Soviet style revolution after WWI, US Socialists were able to win governorships, congressional seats, and mayoral races in places in the American Midwest in the first half of the 20th century.
****My own dedication: I found out about the 291 Gallery in a book Strange Bedfellows about the intertangled networks of American Modernism that was given to me by Dave Moore and Linnea Hadaway. Thanks!
I wrote a short piece a few years ago, which goes like this:
The Temple of Summer is guarded by two pillars:
Memorial Day for those who gave up their lives in war,
And Labor Day for those who gave up their lives in peacetime.
This Monday is American Labor Day.* What constitutes a laborer, a worker? Someone who works for someone else, who doesn’t own their own business? Are poets and musicians workers, or small businesspersons? These things are not simple — after all, that musician-derived term “the gig economy” shows that grants of independence can be superficial. Anyway, let me defer that discussion and say that poet and musician Carl Sandburg was a worker, knew he was a worker, and understood work. It should be no surprise that I’ve chosen to present three poems from his 1916 breakthrough collection, Chicago Poems for Labor Day — or for any working day if you read this later. They’re observed and written in the situation of their time, but let’s not dismiss their concerns and experiences as outdated this Labor Day — at least, not without hearing Sandburg out.
How many times, even today, when someone seeks to portray the working class, is a white male presupposed? Sandburg doesn’t make that mistake as his “Working Girls” will show. My wife, a nurse, came home this week concerned around a strike deadline, and it’s safe to say that women have carried proportionally more of the stress of the past few years in the workplace. She tells me her coworkers are riven by this announced possibility. Some of the most stressed, see this as adding to their stress; others see this as an attempt to remedy some of what’s wrong in their field. Sandburg sees a dialectic in his river of working women, though his poem’s more about the general wearing-down of a life of work.
“Happiness” is probably the best-known of the three Sandburg poems in today’s piece. It’s significant to know that Sandburg is a 1st generation immigrant, and he writes continually of the immigrant experience in his poetry. I don’t think it’s too hard to translate from Sandburg’s immigrants to today. My weekend summer nights here in my neighborhood feature accordion music as this poem mentions, though the singing is in Spanish for my ears. Oh, my wife and teenager sometimes have trouble sleeping, and then there’s this noise. I have trouble sleeping too, but I also hear this Sandburg poem in my head, accompanying from his time the Mexican songs from the yard three houses down the street.
Consider this on a holiday: no one feels leisure like a working person.
“Muckers” may take a little translation. When I was growing up, closer in time to Sandburg’s than today is, a ditch digger was not a job description so much as a derogatory term. It stood for someone who had no ambition, no skills, no ability to advance. If you lacked those things, you might be cursed to become “a ditch digger.” It was essentially workplace hell — and the inhabitants, damned by their sins of omission. My father once preached a sermon I can recall from my youth in which the dignity of a ditch digger’s work was proclaimed. The detail he spoke of then, the part I can remember, was that some care as well as muscle was required to carve out a stable and straightaway ditch.
Sandburg’s poem takes a red-wheelbarrow to the job site, writing (as he would often do) an Imagist poem concerned not just with concise precision in the observation, but more at why so much depends on what is observed. And he’s got a punch line, one anyone who’s ever suffered through the worthlessness of unemployment will understand.
Together these three poems I perform today celebrate those who give up their lives in peacetime. “You dreamy poet,” some may be saying now, “That’s the way of the world. Don’t you know?” Oh, Sandburg knows. He went to work at 13. I was self-supporting at 18. The difference between us and some other poets is that we’ll write and sing about this. It’s as universal as love and heartbreak, near as universal as death, and it’s the mundane ground upon which poetry and music and all the arts are stroked upon.
Carl Sandburg: proud to be the guitar strangler, rockin’ maker, stacker of tracks of wax, hex-string player, and folk-rock maven of Modernist poetry.
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My musical performance is longer today than most Parlando pieces, but then it does present three poems and asks for a quantity discount. After working out and executing the acoustic guitar and “punk orchestral” setting of Emily Dickinson last time I wanted to plug in a Stratocaster and wail a bit, and so what you’ll hear today is a live electric guitar performance recorded then. One production oddity I’ll note: I recorded the two chordal “rhythm guitar” parts after the lead melodic part. The player gadget to hear the performance is below for many of you, and I provide this highlighted link for those viewing this blog in ways that cannot display the graphical audio player.
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*My teenager reminds me that “Labor Day” is not the international workers day that is May Day. I remind them that American Labor Day came out of the labor movement too, and no matter how you parse things, having two days to celebrate work and workers is not too much, no more than we should be embarrassed in America to have a Veterans Day and a Memorial Day.
Frank Hudson 