It's a jazz affair, drum crashes and cornet razzes.
The trombone pony neighs and the tuba jackass snorts.
The banjo tickles and titters too awful.
The chippies talk about the funnies in the papers.
The cartoonists weep in their beer.
Ship riveters talk with their feet
To the feet of floozies under the tables.
A quartet of white hopes mourn with interspersed snickers:
"I got the blues.
I got the blues.
I got the blues."
And . . . as we said earlier:
The cartoonists weep in their beer.
Carl Sandburg, 1878-1967; Honky Tonk in Cleveland, Ohio.
Life's Beginnings
Author-Poet Carl August Sandburg was born in a three-room cottage in Galesburg, Illinois on January 6, 1878, second of seven children born to poor Swedish immigrants August and Clara Anderson Sandburg. A year after Carl's birth, the family sold the cottage in favor of a larger home in the city. The economic destitution subject to the family was the catalyst to Sandburg's early entry into the work force; after quitting school at the age of thirteen, he persisted for over a decade working odd jobs to support the family. He delivered milk, harvested ice, laid bricks, threshed wheat in Kansas, and shined shoes in Galesburg's Union Hotel. In 1897, at the age of nineteen, he struck out on his own and started traveling as a hobo.
Sandburg later performed the folk songs he learned as a hobo at speaking arrangements. The profound rift he saw firsthand between the rich and the poor spawned a distrust for the capitalist system.
In the beginnings of the 1898 Spanish-American War, Sandburg volunteered for service; he was shipped to Puerto Rico, where his only combat was against the mosquitoes.
He returned home a year later, and at the age of twenty-one and the coaxing of a friend, entered Lombard College. His years there honed his political views and allowed through a "legitimate" outlet the growth of his literary talents. Sandburg joined the Poor Writers' Club, whose venerable members met informally to read and critique poetry. The leader of the group, Phillip Green Wright, encouraged the young poet's talent and became his mentor.
A Writer's Beginnings
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
Carl Sandburg, 1878-1967; Fog.
Sandburg had developed his writing skills and become a Socialist when he left Lombard. He wrote for two years before his first book, In Reckless Ecstacy, was published from his mentor's basement press in 1904. These were followed by Incidentals (1907) and The Plaint of a Rose (1908), also reaching the masses from Wright's basement. He started work for the Social Democratic Party, distributing pamphlets and other literature. Through his work with the party, Sandburg met his wife, Lilian Steichen.
Sandburg returned to Illinois and took up work as a journalist. For several years he worked as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, mostly covering labor issues and later writing his own feature.
A Writer's Fame and Return to Origin
Sandburg was unknown to the literary world when, in 1914, a group of his poems appeared in the nationally circulated Poetry Magazine. Two years later his book Chicago Poems was published, and the thirty-eight-year-old author found himself in the beginnings of a career that would bring him international acclaim. Sandburg published another volume of poems, Cornhuskers, in 1918, and wrote an analysis of the 1919 Chicago race riots.
Sandburg's next famous work was 1922's Rotabaga Stories, a collection of children's tales. This led to the notion of a biography of Abraham Lincoln directed at children. Three years of research and a shift in itinerary changed the children's book into a massive two-volume piece aimed at adults. A later, related piece, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years won Sandburg the 1940 Pulitzer Prize.
Carl Sandburg continued writing. He completed more poems, a novel (Remembrance Rock), and an autobiography (Always the Young Strangers). His 1951 work, Complete Poems, won him a second Pulitzer. Carl Sandburg died in his home on July 22, 1967; his ashes were buried before Rememberence Rock, a large boulder on the property encased by the cabin in which he was born. His wife's ashes took their place next to his ten years later.
http://www.poets.org/poems/poems.cfm?prmID=1036
http://www.poets.org/poems/poems.cfm?prmID=1034
http://carl-sandburg.com/
http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/S/Sandburg.asp
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