Inch Eight: Poetry Month and a G.O.A.T.

One of my Sandburg books; yes, I own others

Warren has been teaching Music Appreciation for Non-Music Majors at Ohio Wesleyan this past year; the last class was yesterday. He has enjoyed it immensely and has already been asked back to teach again next year. And, as a true teacher who understands that students may teach the teacher, Warren has learned much from his young students. One of the things he learned this semester was G.O.A.T. when one student called Bach a G.O.A.T. 

Warren was baffled. "Bach is a goat?," he asked, thinking of the barnyard animal. "No!" the student replied, and then explained the acronym. (Warren loved it and then incorporated it into his slides: "Beethoven: Another G.O.A.T." and (my favorite): "Rite of Spring: A G.R.O.A.T.") (The R stands for "Riot.")

With a nod to Warren's experience, I am paying homage to a poet I consider a G.O.A.T. as we close out National Poetry Month. (In looking back, I realize I used to give much more writing time and depth to National Poetry Month; I have unintentionally left it by the wayside.)

My G.O.A.T. in poetry? Carl Sandburg. Sandburg was a contemporary of Robert Frost (no small poet there either) and the two of them, more on Frost's side than Sandburg's, had a running competition throughout their careers. Frost achieved four Pulitzers, all for poetry, and remains the only poet to do so, but Sandburg irked him by, in addition to winning two for poetry, by winning one for his four-volume history, Lincoln: The War Years. 

Me? I love Sandburg for his voice. I love him for seeing and capturing this country in his words. The Lincoln work is monumental. His poetry is monumental. I even own (newly acquired from a Little Free Library in our community) Rootabaga Stories, his creation and telling of American fairy tales instead of retelling European ones.

An amazing LFL find! 

We have been to Sandburg's grave in 2020; his ashes are under a rock at his childhood home in Galesburg, Illinois. And, as I noted in a long ago blog, even though I knew Sandburg had died in 1967, I burst into tears when I finished the Penelope Niven biography of him back in 2014. 

Sandburg and Frost are part of the deep past. Given changes in curriculum nationwide, I would be stunned if either is still read in high school. (I wrote in 2014 about the 2007 vandalization of Frost's home by teens and none of them knowing who Frost was.) And I understand that: poetry does not stand still and there have been decades of great poets since their era. But I also understand that when poetry is cut to the bare bone in curricula, we all are poorer. 

But I am old enough that I know who those poets are and what they gave us. And so here's to Carl Sandburg—okay, and Robert Frost too—for giving us the poetry that stirred them to stir us. 

And that is a good thing to remember—the power of poetry to stir us—as we close out National Poetry Month.