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.

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