Slabs of the Sunburnt West - Carl Sandburg

   1922; 75 pages.  New Author? : Yes.    Genre : American Poetry; ; 20^th Century Poetry; Highbrow Literature.  Overall Rating : 6*/10.

    2019 is drawing to a close, and it’s time to read my once-a-year poetry book.  This year, I've decided to go with something from a 20^th-century American poet.  Somebody serious, highbrow, and whom I’ve never read/reviewed before.

    That eliminates Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends, which I read decades ago.  And Dr. Seuss.  Neither of those qualify as “serious.  Ditto for Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski, the latter known as “The Poet of the Proletariat”.  They’re both fantastic, but calling them “highbrow” is a bit of a stretch.  and I’ve used them for my poetry goals in previous years.

    Off the top of my head, I can only think of two poets for this undertaking – Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg.  We were forced to read some of Robert Frost’s stuff in high school – “two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both…” - and all that.  Sheesh, that stuff stays etched in my brain.

    That leaves Mr. Sandburg, and I can’t quote any of his poetry by heart.  So let’s find something short and sweet, and see if I can broaden my poetic horizons.  Like his 75-page-long book, Slabs of the Sunburnt West.

What’s To Like...

    Slabs of the Sunburnt West consists of 32 poems covering a scant 75 pages, and published in 1922, a couple of years after Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) won his first (of three) Pulitzer Prizes for his book of poems “Cornhuskers”.  Sandburg is noted for his stark portrayals of America in his day, particularly the Midwest which was his stomping ground for most of his life.

    I didn’t see any overarching theme in Slabs of the Sunburnt West.  The poems vary in both length and tone, and literary devices such as rhyming and meter are not used.  The longest entry was 15 pages,  quite a few of them were a half-page in length.  The book can be an incredibly fast read, so if you have a book report due tomorrow and you haven’t even started to read one, you can impress your English teacher by choosing this one.

    My favorite poems in the bunch, in order of appearance, are:

And So Today (pg. 20)

Moon Riders (pg. 34)

At The Gates of Tombs (pg. 37)

Gypsy Mother (pg. 41)

Improved Farm Land (pg. 63)

Slabs of the Sunburnt West (pg. 67)

    “And So Today” chronicles Carl Sandburg’s thoughts on the dedication of the (first) Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and I found it particularly powerful.  “Improved Farm Land” laments the deforestation of the Midwest to make room for acres upon acres of cornfields.  And I learned to origin of the city name “Chicago” by reading the first poem, "The Windy City".

    In general, I preferred the longer poems, and the few that had a whimsical air to them.  The poem that resonated the most with me was the titular “Slabs of the Sunburnt West”, reading as if Sandburg was observing the far west for the first time, from the window of a train.  It would’ve been a lot more brown and less green than his native Illinois, similar to how I felt when my family moved from Pennsylvania to Arizona when I finished high school.

 Kewlest New Word ...

Teameoes (n., plural) : Who knows?  Googling didn’t give any definition for this word.  Methinks Mr. Sandburg made it up.

Excerpts...

And so today – they lay him away

The boy nobody knows the name of-

The buck private – the unknown soldier –

The doughboy who dug under and died

When they told him to – that’s him.

If he picked himself and said, “I am ready to die,”

If he gave his name and said, “My country, take me,”

Then the baskets of roses to-day are for the Boy,

The flowers, the songs, the steamboat whistles,

The proclamations of the honorable orators,

They are all for the Boy – that’s him.

(pg. 21, from “And So Today”)

Brancusi, you will not put a want ad in the papers telling

God it will be to his advantage to come around and see

You; you will not grow gabby and spill God earfuls of

Prayer; you will not get fresh and familiar as if God

Is a next-door neighbor and you have counted His shirts

On a clothes line; you will go stammering, stuttering, and

Mumbling or you will be silent as a mouse in a church

Garret when the pipe organ is pouring ocean waves on

The sunlit rocks of ocean shores; if God is saving a corner

For any battling bag of bones, there will be one for you,

There will be one for you, Brancusi.

(pg. 53; from “Brancusi”)

Civilizations are set up and knocked down

The same as pins in a bowling alley.
(pg. 37, from “At The Gates of Tombs”)

    Poetry is not my favorite reading genre and when I do tackle it, I greatly prefer for the lines to rhyme and have meter.  Therefore Slabs of the Sunburnt West was a bit of a slog for me.  A couple of the entries, such as “Hell on the Wabash” (pg. 64) didn’t even seem like they qualified to be called poetic.  I employed my usual strategy for books of poems: reading only a couple of them at any given sitting.

    Overall, for me there were a half-dozen fantastic poems interspersed among a lot of ones that didn’t do much for me.  Still, if I have to read high-falutin’ poetry by an upstanding 20^th-century American poet, I’d choose Sandburg over Frost any day.

    6 Stars.  Carl Sandburg lived till the ripe old age of 89, garnering three Pulitzers (two for Poetry, one for History), before passing away in 1967, when I was 17.  If you look up this book at Amazon, you’ll find zero reviews for it.  At Goodreads, it has 14 ratings and one review.  It seems as if America has pretty much forgotten one of its foremost writers.  And I find that kind of sad.