Selected Poems

by Carl Sandburg, Paul Berman (Editor)

With the publication of  Chicago Poems  in 1916, Carl Sandburg became one of the most famous poets in the voice of a Midwestern literary revolt, fusing free-verse poetics with hard-edged journalistic observation and energetic, sometimes raucous protest.

By the time his first book appeared, Sandburg had been many things—a farm hand, a soldier in the Spanish-American War, an active Socialist, a newspaper reporter and movie reviewer—and he was determined to write poetry that would explode the genteel conventions of contemporary verse. His poems are populated by factory workers, washerwomen, crooked politicians, hobos, vaudeville dancers, and battle-scarred radicals. Writing from the bottom up, bringing to his poetry the immediacy of America’s streets and prairies, factories and jails, Sandburg forged a distinctive style at once lyrical and vernacular, by turns angry, gritty, funny, and tender.

Paul Berman takes a fresh look at Sandburg’s work and what it can tell us about twentieth-century America in a volume that draws on such volumes as  Cornhuskers ,  Smoke and Steel , and  Slabs of the Sunburnt West .

About the American Poets Project
Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today’s most discerning poets and critics.

Genres: Poetry

220 pages, Hardcover

Published October 5, 2006

About the author

Free verse poems of known American writer Carl August Sandburg celebrated American people, geography, and industry; alongside his six-volume biography Abraham Lincoln (1926-1939), his collections of poetry include Smoke and Steel (1920).

This best editor won Pulitzer Prizes. Henry Louis Mencken called Carl Sandburg "indubitably an American in every pulse-beat."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_San...

Reviews

[Tree]

There are memorable lines and some great poems that stir the soul and mind.
What Sandberg did over 100 years ago to change poetry cannot be overestimated, and many of the injustices he wrote of all those years ago are sadly still injustices today.
Personally, I didn’t like all of the poems in the collection. Quite a few showed a lack of emotion or effort, but that doesn’t change the fact that Carl Sandberg belongs in the upper echelon of American poetry.

[Janet C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

These deserve to be read aloud.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

From Chicago Poems (1916)...

By day the skyscraper looms in the smoke and sun and has a soul.
Prairie and valley, streets of the city, pour people into it and they mingle among its twenty floors and are poured out again back to the streets, prairies and valleys.
It is the men and women, boys and girls so poured in and out all day that give the building a soul of dreams and thoughts and memories.
(Dumped in the sea or fixed in a desert, who would care for the building or speak its name or ask a policeman the way to it?)

Elevators slide on their cables and tubes catch letters and parcels and iron pipes carry gas and water in and sewage out.
Wires climb with secrets, carry light and carry words, and tell terrors and profits and loves--curses of men grappling plans of business and questions of women in plots of love.

Hour by hour the caissons reach down to the rock of the earth and hold the building to a turning planet.
Hour by hour the girders play as ribs and reach out and hold together the stone walls and floors.

Hour by hour the hand of the mason and the stuff of the mortar clinch the pieces and parts to the shape an architect voted.
Hour by hour the sun and the rain, the air and the rust, and the press of time running into centuries, play on the building inside and out and use it.

Men who sunk the pilings and mixed the mortar are laid in graves where the wind whistles a wild song without words
And so are men who strung the wires and fixed the pipes and tubes and those who saw it rise floor by floor.
Souls of them all are here, even the hod carrier begging at back doors hundreds of miles away and the brick-layer who went to state's prison for shooting another man while drunk.
(One man fell from a girder and broke his neck at the end of a straight plunge--he is here--his soul has gone into the stones of the building.)

On the office doors from tier to tier--hundreds of names and each name standing for a face written across with a dead child, a passionate lover, a driving ambition for a million dollar business or a lobster's ease of life.

Behind the signs on the doors they work and the walls tell nothing from room to room.
Ten-dollar-a-week stenographers take letters from corporation officers, lawyers, efficiency engineers, and tons of letters go bundled from the building to all ends of the earth.
Smiles and tears of each office girl go into the soul of the building just the same as the master-men who rule the building.

Hands of clocks turn to noon hours and each floor empties its men and women who go away and eat and come back to work.
Toward the end of the afternoon all work slackens and all jobs go slower as the people feel day closing on them.
One by one the floors are emptied. . . The uniformed elevator men are gone. Pails clang. . . Scrubbers work, talking in foreign tongues. Broom and water and mop clean from the floors human dust and spit, and machine grime of the day.
Spelled in electric fire on the roof are words telling miles of houses and people where to buy a thing for money. The sign speaks till midnight.

Darkness on the hallways. Voices echo. Silence holds. . . Watchmen walk slow from floor to floor and try the doors. Revolvers bulge from their hip pockets. . . Steel safes stand in corners. Money is stacked in them.
A young watchman leans at a window and sees the lights of barges butting their way across a harbor, nets of red and white lanterns in a railroad yard, and a span of glooms splashed with lines of white and blurs of crosses and clusters over the sleeping city.
By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars and has a soul.

- Skyscraper, pg. 19-21

From Cornhuskers (1918)...

I too have a garret of old playthings.
I have tin soldiers with broken arms upstairs.
I have a wagon and the wheels gone upstairs.
I have guns and a drum, a jumping-jack and a magic lantern.
And dust is on them and I never look at them upstairs.
I too have a garret of old playthings.

- Upstairs, pg. 65

From Smoke and Steel (1920)...

There will be a rusty gun on the wall, sweetheart,
The rifle grooves curling with flakes of rust.
A spider will make a silver string nest in the
darkest, warmest corner of it.
The trigger and the range-finder, they too will be rusty.
And no hands will polish the gun, and it will hang on the wall.
Forefingers and thumbs will point casually toward it.
It will be spoken among half-forgotten, whished-to-be-forgotten things.
They will tell the spider: Go on, you're doing good work.

- A.E.F., pg. 87-88

From Slabs of the Sunburnt West (1922)...

1
Roll open this rug; a minx is
in it; see her toe wiggling;
roll open the rug; she is a
runaway; or somebody is trying
to steal her; here she is;
here's your minx; how can we
have a play unless we have
this minx?

2
The child goes out in the storm
stage thunder; "erring daughter,
never darken this door-sill again";
the tender parents speak their curse;
the child puts a few knick-knacks in
a handkerchief; and the child goes;
the door closes and the child goes;
she is out now, in the storm on the
stage, out forever; snow, you son-of-a-gun,
snow, turn on the snow.

- Props, pg. 116

From Good Morning, America (1928)...

The green bug sleeps in the white lily ear.
The red bug sleeps in the white magnolia.
Shiny wings, you are choosers of colour.
You have taken your summer bungalows wisely.

- Small Homes, pg. 119

From The People, Yes (1936)...

"The people is a myth, an abstraction."
And what myth would you put in place of the people?
And what abstraction would you exchange for this one?
And when has creative man not toiled deep in myth?
And who fights for a bellyful only and where is any name worth remembering for anything else than the human abstraction woven through it with invisible thongs?
"Precisely who and what is the people?"
Is this far off from asking what is grass? what is salt? what is the sea? what is loam?
What are seeds? what is a crop? why must mammals have milk soon as born or they perish?
And how did that alfalfa governor mean it: "The common people is a mule that will do anything you say except stay hitched"?

- The People, Yes, 17, pg. 124

From Complete Poems (1950)...

I have seen
The old gods go
And the new gods come.

Day by day
And year by year
The idols fall
and the idols rise.

Today
I worship the hammer.

- The Hammer, pg. 132

[Edward Rathke]

Despite the use of some racist terms (many of the poems are about 100 years old, which is maybe sort of an excuse), this holds up as a fantastic group of poems. It's very much proletarian literature, in that these poems are about workers. Workers in the Midwest in the early 20th century.

He has an interesting use of language and meter that really propels his imagery along. And it's so nice to read poetry that lacks abstraction or personalization. That probably sounds a bit odd, especially since most of the poetry I tend to like is at least a bit abstract, but Sandburg is about as concrete as you can get in these poems. He really digs into the earth and into people, without turning that view inward to himself.

But, yeah, had never heard of Sandburg till I randomly picked this up at the library, but I dig it.

[Russ · Rating 5 out of 5]

The introduction and history, written by Paul Berman make this truly a gem.The American Poets books are all well worth collecting. Sandburg's work is well represented here.

[Socraticist · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t read a lot of poetry because I don’t particularly enjoy it, but this is good stuff, neither flowery nor introspective. Real blue collar, working man and disadvantaged woman poetry. What other American was writing like that in the teens and twenties?

Some poems require more work to sort out mentally than I want to do, but there are plenty of others that are just immediately accessible. A nice little volume with plenty of substance for its 142 pages.

[David Biagini · Rating 5 out of 5]

I returned to reading Carl Sandburg after decades of neglect. I found the poems in the collection to be a good representation of his works. Now that I'm older, I have a greater appreciation of his poems than when I read them when I was younger - both the content and the style. In a way, this collection of poems made me long for my native Illinois.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like his Chicago poems since I live in the area, but most of poems fall flat for me.

[Lynn · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you ever want to read a collection of poems that is evocative of the time period of the poet, then this is a great selection. The introduction by Paul Berman gives a great history of Sandburg and the poems that follow clarified everything that Mr. Berman said about him. The poems themselves are harsh and gritty but paint a very clear picture of the people/time. My favorite was "Prairie" from the Cornhuskers volume.
I tend to favor poetry that is more melodic and mysterious with hidden imagery but I found myself drawn to Sandburg's straight forward narration of life for a working man.

[Bill · Rating 2 out of 5]

I did not like this book as much as I expected I would.