Ridge Lines: The Sandburg legacy

It's exciting! The Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site will celebrate its 50th anniversary this Wednesday. The day will be filled with activities, but most exciting to me is the community read-aloud from 9 a.m. - 1 p.m. of Sandburg’s “The People, Yes.” Forty-eight readers will read short portions of the poem.

The entire day (9 a.m. – 4 p.m.) will be chock-full of music, tours and special events — all focused on the park and Sandburg's legacy. The celebration will conclude with a performance by Grammy award-winning musician Dan Zanes. There's even going to be a birthday cake. The day will also offer an opportunity to view treasured artifacts at the Museum Preservation Center.

Most of us are familiar with pieces of the Sandburg legacy.

A poem often anthologized is “Fog,” with its “little cat feet.” As a teacher I always enjoyed sharing “Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind” with my students. Sandburg had a way of speaking that was uniquely his own. He would hold onto syllables — just long enough — before he finished the word: “The woman named Tomorrrrrrrow … sits with a hairpin in her teeth.”

Sandburg voiced the words of Lincoln in the Aaron Copeland masterwork “A Lincoln Portrait” and won a Grammy for his efforts.

There was a masculinity to Sandburg’s verse: “Hog butcher, tool maker, stacker of wheat.” I remember the Flat Rock Playhouse touring company’s production of “The World of Carl Sandburg,” particularly Actress Helen Bragdon's rendering of “The Machine.”

Carl Sandburg was a good neighbor. He visited with Robroy Farquhar and Louise Bailey. On occasion he would accept an invitation to speak at Flat Rock High School, where he would read and talk with the assembled students.

Mrs. Sandburg purchased groceries at the A&P that once stood on the corner of Main and Sixth Avenue. A bank is located there now. Carl Sandburg and I shared the same dentist.

Carl Sandburg was a revolutionary, a mid-Westerner — “a force of nature.”

But there was a gentleness to this man. It is revealed in the book “My Connemara” by Paula Steichen, his granddaughter. Paula and her younger brother John spent their early years growing up on the farm. They explored the bamboo thicket and the cheese house. They fed and observed the famous goats.

Paula and John, as youngsters, attended Rosa Edwards Elementary School in Hendersonville. I did too.

Paula remembers when her grandfather came to the school to read from the “Rootabaga Stories.” She was in the third grade. I have written of the time when Carl Sandburg came to the school and sang “Goober Peas.” My classmates and I laughed, not fully aware of the greatness of the man with the big tuft of white hair.

There is something majestic about “The People, Yes”: a fusion of history and contemporary events—legends, myths, tall tales. Sandburg captures the whole world in the epic poem: “The people, yes/The blundering people will live on ...” There is something hopeful and courageous.

The poem was published in 1936, following the Great Depression. On Dec. 5 of that year, Sandburg wrote: “I am quite sure ‘The People, Yes’ would have gone to a wider audience had it been cast in a form indicating it had no relation to poetry.” And yet, poetry seems right. He and fellow poet Robert Frost sparred occasionally about verse form. It was Frost who said that free verse was like “playing tennis with the nets down.”

It could have been a drama or a prose work, but the challenge of poetry seems appropriate. Sandburg wrote to Benjamin Cordoza in 1936: “‘The People, Yes’ has some of the chaos and turmoil of our time and of all time in it. Parts of it are superb; the creations of free imagination operating among the people.” I admire the phrase “free imagination among the people.” It speaks of possibility…of hope and promise.

“The Letters of Carl Sandburg'' was edited by Herbert Mitang and published by Harcourt. It is a fascinating collection of letters that gives insight into the man from his early years to his final days at Connemara.

In 1935 Sandburg wrote to Alfred Harcourt: “At regular intervals I get queried when am I going to do an autobiography. Any attempt at it is long years away.” “And ‘The People, Yes’ may carry about all that would be essential in that usually foolish undertaking that persons style ‘The Story of My Life.’” (I remember reading Sandburg’s biographical work “All the Young Strangers” [1953] while in high school.)

Carl Sandburg (the People's Poet) died on July 22, 1967.

Young Paula once asked her grandmother: “Gramma, what would you do if all us died? Could you go on living?” Her reply, according to Paula, was unforgettable: “As long as I have the earth and the sky I can live forever.”

The mountains and farm life were instilled deep into Paula's being.

From “The People, Yes”: “In the night and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people march: Where to? what next?”