Poetry Jam 2020: Carl Sandburg

[lunabee34]

Our selection for this past month was Carl Sandburg's Honey and Salt.



July: Mascha: The Poems of Mascha Kaléko

August: Shakespeare's sonnets

September: W. D. Snodgrass' Not for Specialists

October: Toi Derricotte's Tender

November: Franny Choi's Soft Science

December: Pablo Neruda's The Heights of Machu Picchu

Comments

[lunabee34]

This is a collection of poems about love; I think most of them are about love, even the ones which do not on the surface appear to be. The imagery in the poems that don't seem to be about love then shows up in the poems that define love.

Most of the imagery is of the natural world (birds, fog, sea, horses).

Love the title "Love Is a Deep and a Dark and a Lonely."

My favorite poem is the first poem, the title poem. I can't find it online, and it's long, so I don't want to type it up. LOL It's so beautiful, though. I read most of this collection out loud to myself, and "Honey and Salt" is just a joy to read aloud. I found myself really moved by that poem in a way that I haven't been in awhile.

I also really liked these lines from the final poem in the collection (which is super long and on the whole not one I enjoyed much); they are about a snail's shell:

"'This is the image wherein I live; / the outer form of me to be here / when the dried inner one drifts / away into thin air.'"

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

I had a lot of different feelings about this one. I sat down to read it and read about 30% without much thought at all. No negative thoughts but no real positive ones either. So I set it aside. Then I came back to it some days later, and really liked it, so the middle 30%. I definitely feel the draw is a trees not forests situation. A few of the poems I liked as a whole (Like Quotations) but most I felt were ho-hum, yet embedded in the ho-hum were gems of lines, one line or two or more, that I felt like I could really ponder. Like in Shadows Fall Blue on the Mountain. Has a man ever been praying, "Make me into a think goblet of glass oh Lord I fear what my shadow tells me?" Lots of interesting nature imagery, colour imagery. He's a Midwestern poet so that Midwestern city + farm aesthetic. I don't know what he's saying in a lot of them, and in some of them, I think I know but it's just not my cup of tea (some of the poems that focus on love). Nevertheless, a lot of interesting lines. 'Let the writing on your face be the smell of apple orchards in late June.' The last 40$ I settled in with more appreciation but less of the surprised by joy feeling I had in the middle. Probably just mood and energy level and attitude on my part.

[lunabee34]

I had a pretty similar reading experience except that I loved the first one and then felt pretty neutral for a bit until the middle. I really did not like the final long poem. I completely agree about the isolated awesome lines buried in poems that otherwise don't speak to me.

I'm glad I read it, but I wonder how representative this volume is of his work in general. IDK

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

FYI, I haven't been able to find the Mascha work anywhere but Amazon so I'll probably not join you for July but definitely August (I love me a sonnet!).

[lunabee34]

Thanks for telling me!

I ended up buying it myself because I lost access to the university library system over the summer.