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.'"