New poems
and stories
from
Sandburg
Carl Sandburg. Billy Sunday and Other Poems: Unpublished, Uncollected and Unexpurgated Works. George and Willene Hendrick, eds. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1993. Pp. 118 with introduction, photographs and notes. $19.95 (cloth). More Rootabagas: Stories by Carl Sandburg, Pictures by Paul 0. Zeiinsky. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. Pp. 94 with foreword byGeorge Hendrick. $18 (cloth). Billy Sunday and Other Poems contains 40 poems by Carl Sandburg, some unpublished, and some from magazines and journals, that have been collected here for the first time. George and Willene Hendrick culled them from the Sandburg memorabilia housed at the University of Illinois, where George is on the English faculty. Both of the Hendricks are experts on American literature. The editors have divided the book into twelve sections, each representing an aspect of Sandburg's preoccupations as a writer. Taken as a whole the book should help to revitalize Sandburg's reputation as a poet. It certainly reveals him as part of that progressive American tradition described by Cornel West, the philosopher and theologian, as "prophetic Christianity and radical democracy." Sandburg takes out after the flamboyant preacher. Billy Sunday, in the two poems which open the collection. In "Billy Sunday" Sandburg begins by challenging the evangelist: You come along tearing your shirt yelling about Jesus. I want to know what the hell you know about Jesus? It is the trivialization of God and the usurpation of religion by the powerful for their own purposes that sets Sandburg's teeth on edge. He spells this out in "God's Children": I hear Billy Sunday And the Kaiser and the Czar Talking about God Like God was some pal of theirs, ... I can't help it I feel just like God was some cheap dirty thing bom from a fiddler's bitch and kicked from one back door to another. Seeing people treated as "some cheap dirty thing" also angered Sandburg. He spoke out against what he called the "industrial feudalism" of his day. A case in point is Sandburg's "The Eastland," about an excursion ship loaded with 2,500 workers and their families who were being treated to a company picnic on July 24, 1915, when the boat sank in the Chicago River, drowning 800 people. With its stark lines (such as "Women and kids, wet hair and scared faces/The coroner hauling truckloads of the dripping dead"), the poem becomes an indictment of an industrial society indifferent to workers dying of consumption, infants without milk, children laboring in factories, the institutionalization of prostitution, working men maimed on the job. By the living Christ, these would make disaster pictures to paste on the front pages of the newspapers... I see a dozen Eastlands Every morning on my way to work And a dozen more going home at night. Sandburg's attitude here is at one with his antiwar sensibility. In "Planked White Fish," a protest against World War I, he speaks of aviator Horace Wild, who tells him: He saw near Ypres a Canadian soldier fastened on a bam door with bayonets pinning the hands and feet 28/July 1994/Illinois Issues And the arms and ankles arranged like Jesus at Golgotha 2,000 years before. This is a poem where horror is piled on horror, not the least of these being the casual manner in which the discussion takes place while the men are eating dinner in a downtown Chicago club. The poem anticipates our own selective indifference as we watch an atrocity on television and then switch channels. There are poems about the newspaper business. In "Dailies" Sandburg speaks of city rags that are "dirty and always fighting." He justifies his own stance as a poet in "A Reporter in Debt": unless I am dirty and dusty from the pits how can I write the people of the pits? These poems about journalism derive from Sandburg's two decades as a newspaperman. They also reveal how he broke with traditional poems bound up in stilted literary language and took his chances with the straightforward, hard writing that characterizes journalism at its best. This is his legacy, poetry emboldened with the idiom of the workplace and the street. His descendants are legion. But he was also a man in touch with the literary life and current of his times. "These Valleys Seem Old" is a set of four poems based on translations of inscriptions on Chinese paintings. These sparse renderings hold up well. Poems on Edgar Lee Masters, all published for the first time here, trace Sandburg's early appreciation of and final disenchantment with the Spoon River poet. Then there are the love poems. These forthright, often beautifully erotic statements, should not come as a surprise, considering the ardent letters Sandburg and Lilian Steichen exchanged before and during their marriage. He speaks of the easy give and take of the comfortably married in "An Interwoven Man and Woman Talked":
They talked of kingdoms, empires,
republics.
Readers of the Rootabaga Stories, first issued in 1922, will be happy with the new collection of tales that Sandburg
never got around to publishing. More Rootabagas has a foreword by George Hendrick, who quotes Sandburg as saying that he could find no satisfactory American fairy tales and wanted something "more in the American lingo." Of the many dozens of these tales in the University of Illinois holdings, ten have been selected for this volume. They are attractively illustrated by Paul 0. Zeiinsky. The stories were made up to entertain Sandburg's daughters, and they feature characters with wonderful names: Silver Pitchers, Burnt Chestnut, Peter Potato Blossom (who happens to be a girl). Some of the tales are obviously stretched, but even these are filled with fine phrases that linger in the memory, such as "sky blue whispering cats." There is variety here: cheerful nonsense about green hat- eating horses; a parable which recounts the destructive feud between the short and the long noses; appreciation of the inventiveness which allows mud slingers to do their will, but without being able to hurt anyone. I read the stories with pleasure and with awe for the inventiveness of Carl Sandburg. John Knoepfle, professor emeritus of English at Sangamon State University, is a much- published poet and authority on folk literature. His sixteenth book of poems. Begging an Amnesty, was published this year by Druid Press in Birmingham, Ala. July 1994/Illinois Issues/29
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