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Feature Poet/Writer: Matthew Paris

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Matthew Paris

Carl Sandburg

I only met Carl Sandburg once, briefly; I can't say that I had any more personal experience of him beyond that an evening I spent in 1958 at the University Of Michigan at which he entertained us with songs mostly. He was playing the circuit of 50s celebrities of that time along with by then the slightly senile and vacuous John Crowe Ransom, the startling Alan Watts, and young, electric brilliant Karl Stockhausen.

Beyond that I heard many stores of Sandburg’s rather extended stay at his Brooklyn apartment told to me by Norman Rosten. Many of these tales are recounted by Norman in his Milleresque novel Over and Out; the don’t have to be repeated by me. I am writing this very partial and indirect portrait out of much more deduction than the sane personal evidence I have of him but I think I might have something to say about him that hasn’t been said.

I had admired Sandburg's poetry very much in college though of course nobody in any of my classes mentioned his name anymore than they would talk casually of Beelzebub or Moloch. As a bard Sandburg works squarely in the tradition of Whitman but his rhetoric was leaner, very physical, sometimes muted and tragic. He had began as an anarchist journalist in Chicago and wrote some of his famous short poems marveling at a city that was the bog butcher of the world. Whitman didn’t go to slaughterhouses and praise them for a wild energy; there was a raw Chicago spirit in this man of such magical gifts and carefully honed verse. Sandburg had garnered a reputation in the newspapers because of his biography of Lincoln in several volumes and his sales for later long poems of populist verse like The People Yes. His poems about Chicago were anthologized in volumes of American poetry. Sandburg was a great talent and a masterful writer; he certainly deserved all the nation from the book world he got. He adorned his career with some singing of American folk songs while playing the guitar; one heard these home style performances on records. It was also very canny of him to move into the Lincoln geography at a time when direct social activism was losing its secure base in America; it wasn’t just a stratagem. Lincoln was a man born in a log cabin.

One afternoon in 1958 I sat in an auditorium in Ann Arbor waiting for Sandburg to appear, hoping that he would be as wonderful as he seemed to be. Sandburg came out after a moment, a wiry man of middle height dressed in dungarees and plaid shirt like a farmer. He went through his repertoire of American folk chestnuts with muted vigor. “I know I’;m not a great guitarists and singer,” he said. “I just like to pay the songs.”

Of course he was performing for us much as Einstein might have shown up to play a Bach Sonata, there not for his violin playing but that somehow the music would have given us some token of the soul of the man who had been such a mathematical genius. Einstein never did make that tour. Sandburg probably picked up some needed money as he ran these shows from college town to college town. His books probably weren’t selling in great quantity; he probably didn’t make any large lucre from this North Carolina goat farm where he was living. These tours were easy work and Sandburg seemed honestly to love making music. Sandburg was really a Midwesterner and journalist who had spent much of his early life in cities but we didn’t ask to many questions about this man’s authenticity. I enjoyed the show for very shallow reason. Sandburg looked exactly as he did in his pictures. I was getting a sense of a poet who was by them a piece of Americana.

A few hours afterwards Sandburg was ushered across the street to the Michigan Union where he was asked to hang out with some of the folk singers we had at the school. Many of them were virtuosi on the guitar and banjo; quite a few of them were Oakland singers as well. Sandburg came into the cafeteria, took one adsmoid look at this coterie of young folkies, frowned, and abruptly left for his hotel room. Why he did I don’t know. Sandburg might have been tired, could have felt much older than this crew, and perhaps after two hours of playing American icon didn’t want to go through that routine anymore that day. In any event the Michigan, no less unauthentic than he was, certainly felt rejected and were disappointed.

About thirty years later I was sitting over coffee in Brooklyn Heights with Norman Rosten. He began telling me some of his vintage Carl Sandburg stories. Norman had connected with Sandburg as an older poet, had invited him to Brooklyn to enjoy a month or two in the city. Norman was expecting more or less the benign icon I had very superficially seen in passing in Michigan in 1958. “He was a true crack,” Norman said. “All he wanted to talk about was how goat’s milk cured everything. He brought up gallons of it from North Carolina; the apartment smelled of it for a few months. Mostly he wanted to sleep with my wife. He would chase her all over the house. I didn’t know what to say to him. On one level it was comical; he was an old man by then and couldn’t sprint after women all that quickly. It embarrassed me, of course.”

At that moment I realized that Norman had seen a Carl Sandburg that was a long way from Abraham Lincoln. I wondered how many other authors I thought I knew something about were very different spirits behind their public masks.

It the end it didn’t matter. What lasts in poets is their poetry. Sandburg is one of our great poets. If we ever met Aeschylus or Shakespeare they might show up with a wagon load of pigs and spray everyone in sight with skunk oil. After they left, once they passed over the horizon and were gone with all their bladders filled with skunk oil, we would still value their poetry.

While I was in Sandburg's sainted presence as a young man I thought cynically as a genuine demi-god he was making a college tour, picking up the posh guerdons of the day like a professional. Tomorrow he might have to live off the goats. Now over half a century I am in my old age, knowing that after a time of lust and ambition a man enters a theater of history in which he is more or a mote than a prince ion infinity and eternity. I suspect that Sandburg was leaving as a kind of Jacksonian message in his seemingly simple presentation. He had played very simple folk songs we had all heard, chestnuts with simple tunes we didn’t have to struggle to enjoy; he didn’t overwhelm us with virtuosity and spiky obbligatos on the guitar either. I think he might in a covert way have been pitching for a simpler and homier view of Art as a way of touching millions of common people.

It was the time of an elitist reaction to popular and populist Art in which craft and complexity in poetry as well as music was valued for its own sake, detachment was positioned by our savants as a sign of intelligence, he himself as a poet and thinker was not only out of fashion but in danger of being called some kind of treasonous Red.

It’s no wonder that by 1959 he claimed a mystical affinity to Abraham Lincoln, himself criticized by Henry Adams as a common man; Sandburg had also wisely wrapped the American flag around himself in defense. It’s also possible that he took the tack of not reading his post-Whitmanesque verse but putting himself with these folk songs right at the center of American common culture, defining it as what it was as well as giving himself a small barony in it.

Sandburg was right to take the refuge he did on a goat farm in North Carolina and pen a five volume biography of Abraham Lincoln when he did. I don';t know whether Sandebrg ever made a liiving from herding goats but at leslt he woend the land under him and hadh penty to eat and drink He ws also justifieid in find some resoancnes between Lincocn and his own charcater. Both weer self educated men from the Midwest who were champions of the populace. Whether anyone can live up to the icon that gathers around them like a carnival costume when they become a public commodity, though if they are a poet they aren’t quite profitable, is another matter. Sandburg didn't invent American free verse as Walt Whitman did but he was one of the masters of it over many decades.. He was initially an anarchist who spent more time in Chicago than he wanted to remember that much. Yet of course the public image of anyone who is known at all is always simpler than the poet himself.

I was amused to hear Norman Rosten's stories of the real Carl Sandburg over many lunches. Norman pt many of them into his novel: Over and Out. In person Sandburg was even in his old age a randy fellow who chased Norman's wife Hedda around the house when Sandburg stayed in Brooklyn Heights as their guest. He exuded an odor of goat. When he visited people he usually brought them goat milk and cheese, more than they ever needed. If I were to try to have an accurate notion of who Carl Sandburg was, I’d take Norman's view of him more than my own more brief and less intimate experience with Sandburg back in the late 50s.

Sometimes it takes half a century to get a message from a poet when both bard and listener are in the middle of their lives; it is a miracle when one gets them at all.

Home Planet News Online Feature Poet/Writer: Matthew Paris

Home Planet News Online
Feature Poet/Writer: Matthew Paris