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THE BROWNS BOARD

War Poems: 3 of 3


Sober Poet

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This is the 3rd in series of war poetry. I welcome any comments or analysis.

 

American Poet Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)

 

monroe-and-sandburg.jpg

 

Wow, what do you say about Carl Sandburg? Yes, that is him hanging in the pic with Marilyn Monroe. Bob Dylan loved him too and famously sought him out on an extended road trip detailed in Rolling Stone magazine.

 

You could start with the three Pulitzer prizes, two for poetry and one for his amazing biography of Abraham Lincoln. Sandburg supported the Civil Rights Movement and was the first white man to be honored by the NAACP with their Silver Plaque Award as a "major prophet of civil rights in our time.” To this day, Sandburg remains the only American poet ever invited to address a joint session of Congress. He did serve in the military as well, volunteering for the Spanish American War in Puerto Rico but never seeing action. Like Edgar Allen Poe, Sandburg also attended West Point briefly, flunking out after failing math and, ironically, grammar.

 

This poem, “Planked Whitefish” is from his early days during World War I, and offers the opinion of a daredevil ambulance driver returned from Europe. There is a raw intensity in the poems of this period that is plain to see below. Few poets have ever expressed themselves in such a way, and that is why I say: “If you are gonna ‘burg…make it a Sandburg”.

 

Planked Whitefish

Over an order of planked whitefish at a downtown club,
Horace Wild, the demon driver who hurled the first aeroplane that ever crossed the air over Chicago,
Told Charley Cutler, the famous rassler who never touches booze
And Carl Sandburg, the distinguished poet now out of jail,
He saw near Ypres a Canadian soldier fastened on a barn door with bayonets pinning the hands and feet
And the arms and ankles arranged like Jesus at Golgotha 2,000 years before
Only in northern France he saw
The genital organ of the victim amputated and placed between the lips of the dead man's mouth,
And Horace Wild, eating whitefish, looked us straight in the eyes,
And piled up circumstantial detail of what he saw one night running a truck pulling ambulances out of the mud near Ypres in November, 1915:
A box car next to a field hospital operating room … filled with sawed-off arms and legs …
Faces in the gray and the dark on the mud flats, white faces gibbering and loose convulsive arms making useless gestures,
And Horace Wild, the demon driver who loves fighting and can whip his weight in wildcats,
Pointed at a blue button in the lapel of his coat, “P-e-a-c-e” spelled in white letters, and he blurted:
“I don't care who the hell calls me a pacifist. I don't care who the hell calls me yellow. I say war is the game of a lot of God-damned fools.”

 

Bonus Poem!

 

“Grass” is one of my all-time favorites. I worked at Gettysburg College for 7 years and studied the battle in detail. I have to say, in my opinion, the activity of over 100,000 men trying to tear each other’s eyes out leaves a “bruise” on a landscape, if you will. You can feel it; it is real and is part of the attraction that brings us to these places. Sandburg is playing with that idea here; that we gradually forget the horrors of war and so are doomed to repeat them:

 

Grass

 

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.

Shovel them under and let me work—

I am the grass; I cover all.

 

And pile them high at Gettysburg

And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.

Shovel them under and let me work.

Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:

What place is this?

Where are we now?

 

I am the grass.

Let me work.

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