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Max’s Musings

By Max Molleston

Over centuries and decades, poetry enthusiasm has come and gone. Revivals depend on educated readers who recognize a strong poem for their (and its) reasons and  give a poet and their poems credence, a confidence that spreads from person to person, in poetry circles. Not long ago, The Gazette  paper, published in Cedar Rapids, reached into the past of Cornell College at Mount Vernon. Its President and wife, and a school of higher learning gave early credibility to Carl Sandburg, the native of Galesburg, Illinois. His first stipend to  read at Cornell was one-hundred dollars. The story, part of  The Gazette’s Time Machine series, credits then Cornell President Clyde Tull and his wife Jewel with the push toward the poet, then forty-two and as the article states, “when he was criticized as a rough-shod poet.” Sandburg returned to Cornell’s  campus many times through the 20s, 30s, 40s and early 50s to read his latest poetry, then  sing songs he liked, playing his guitar to accompany. Doing a short search for Sandburg poems, I found a publication from 1936 titled The Best Loved Poems of the American People which has no mention or nary a poem by Sandburg. We must presume that  Mount Vernon’s Cornell College more or less “kick started” his career, and his gratitude returned to that place and his friends, the Tulls, for decades, at a continued one-hundred dollars per appearance, his choice. The article, authored by correspondent Diane Fannon-Langton points out his prose writing, in the four volume Abraham Lincoln: The War Years “earned him the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1940” and added to his literary credits, already building, through his own work and the friendships of the Tulls of Cornell College, and discovery of his skills by other individuals and  poetry groups. I am willing to wager that you’ve read Sandburg poems you may or may not recall, from a book of poetry aimed at young boys and girls, published in 1957. These are about school, one  on writing, another, arithmetic.

Primer Lesson

Look out how you use proud words.

When you let proud words go, it is not easy to call them back. 

They wear long boots, hard boots; They walk off proud;     they can’t hear you calling—

Look out how you use proud words

Arithmetic 

Arithmetic is where numbers fly like pigeons in and out of your head. 

Arithmetic tells you how many you Lose or win if you know how many you had before you lost or won. 

Arithmetic is seven  eleven  all good children go to
heaven – or five six bundle of sticks. 

Arithmetic is numbers you squeeze from your head to your hand to your pencil to your paper till you get
the answer.

Arithmetic is where the answer is right  and everything is nice and you can look out the window
and see the blue sky

– or the answer is wrong and you have to start all over and try again and try and see how it comes out this time.

There are more Carl Sandburg poems in this book “Favorite Poems old and new” selected  for boys and girls by Helen Ferris Tibbets, published by Doubleday and Company, Inc. What we have written and you have read, Cornell College and a couple of poems for kids, plays out the wide range of Sandburg’s thoughts, in poetry and prose .

He had  been a columnist, and penned his most known poems about Chicago  and much more.

We close this month with a short poem almost all of us know and can present from our memories. We all like it because it is cute. (and short)

Fog

The fog comes 

on little cat feet.

It sits looking

over  harbor and city

on silent haunches 

and then, moves on.

In a book on the Peoples of Canada I found a passage on the poem Flanders Fields, and am trying to find it, again. Join me in June, that glorious month for weddings  and gardens.