AD (POEM) ~

We know poets — Lew Welch and James Dickey, among others, have had jobs in advertising.
Here's a half-minute ad (poem) from Direct-TV.

LUCILLE CLIFTON ~

my poem



a love person
from love people
out of the afrikan sun
under the sign of cancer.
whoever see my
midnight smile
seeing star apple and
mango from home.
whoever take me for
a negative thing,
his death be on him
like a skin
and his skin
be his heart's revenge.



.



lucy one-eye
she got her mama's ways.
big round roller
can't cook
can't clean
if that's what you want
you got it world.


lucy one-eye
she sees the world sideways.
word foolish
she say what she don't want
to say, she don't say
what she want to.


lucy one-eye
she won't walk away
from it.
she'll keep on trying
with her crooked look
and her wrinkled ways,
the darling girl.



.



if mama
could see
she would see
lucy sprawling
limbs of lucy
decorating the
backs of chairs
lucy hair
holding the mirrors up
that reflect odd
aspects of lucy.


if mama
could hear
she would hear
lucysong rolled in the
corners like lint
exotic webs of lucysighs
long lucy spiders explaining
to obscure gods.


if mama
could talk
she would talk
good girl
good girl
good girl
clean up your room. 


 .



i was born in a hotel,
a maskmaker,
my bones were knit by
a perilous knife.
my skin turned around
at midnight and
i entered the earth in
a woman jar.
i learned the world all
wormside up
and this is my yes
my strong fingers;
i was born in a bed of
good lessons
and it has made me
wise.


 .



light
on my mother's tongue
break through her soft
extravagant hip
into life.
lucille
she calls the light,
which was the name
of the grandmother
who wanted by the crossroads
in virginia
and shot the whiteman off his horse,
killing the killer of sons.
light breaks from her life
to her lives . . .


mine already is
an afrikan name.

 

The Collected Poems of

Lucille Clifton

1965-2010

Boa Editions

2012

edited by

Kevin Young

and Michael S. Glaser 

LOW FIDELITY AMERICANA ~

tom russell & friend

bacon rind
photo





harry partch
Partch, who died in 1974, is shown playing an instrument he built partly out of wine bottles and hubcaps.






lenny bruce
w/ his wife honey harlowe & their daughter kitty bruce






jack kerouac






charles bukowski






ira hayes






edward abbey






chief seattle
the only known photograph

EARTH ~

(click on image to enlarge)

Timothy Egan


National Trails





nytimes

NEW FROM LONGHOUSE! ~

Ishihara Yoshiro

 Hiroaki Sato, translator  

 "In Illness" ( Tanka )

Three color unfolding concertina format with photographs and poems

 New and limited

  Longhouse, 2012
 A signed edition is available upon request
$8, unsigned


Buy now (U.S. addresses with $2 s/h) with Paypal:

 

VOICE ~

Kurt Schwitters

Superman artist/performer Kurt Schwitters (Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters), was dead at age 60 on January 8, 1948. He was born and was later buried in Hanover, Germany.

He composed in an exhilarating galaxy of media and genre — Surrealism, Dada, Constructivism, poetry, painting, sculpture, sound, graphic design, typography and what came to be known as installation art. His collages, called "Merz Pictures", made his name.

Merz ABCD
(1928)







Schwitters composed and performed an early example of sound poetry, Ursonate (1922–32; a translation of the title is Original Sonata or Primeval Sonata). The poem was influenced by Raoul Hausmann's poem "fmsbw" which Schwitters' heard recited by Hausmann in Prague, 1921. Schwitters performed the piece regularly, developing and extending it, until finally publishing his notations for the recital in his last Merz periodical, 1932.


The musician and painter Billy Childish has a Kurt Schwitters poem tattooed on his left buttock. He made a short film on Schwitters's life, titled The Man with Wheels, (1980, directed by Eugean Doyan).


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Childish












wikipedia & bob

INTERCEPTION ~

Timothy Egan

SPOKEN ~

Stevie Smith

Florence Margaret Smith, known as "Stevie Smith" (20 September 1902 – 7 March 1971) was an English poet and novelist. Born in Kingston upon Hull, was the second daughter of Ethel and Charles Smith. She was called "Peggy" within her family, but acquired the name "Stevie" as a young woman when she was riding in the park with a friend who said that she reminded him of the jockey Steve Donaghue.

__________________

Not Waving but Drowning



Nobody heard him, the dead man,  
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought  
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,  
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always  
(Still the dead one lay moaning)  
I was much too far out all my life  
And not waving but drowning.


~ Stevie Smith
New Selected Poems 

(New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1988) 

__________________


Novels ~

    Novel on Yellow Paper (Cape, 1936)
    Over the Frontier (Cape 1938)
    The Holiday (Chapman and Hall, 1949)

Poetry ~

    This Englishwoman (1937)
    A Good Time Was Had By All (Cape, 1937)
    Tender Only to One (Cape, 1938)
    Mother, What Is Man? (Cape, 1942)
    Harold's Leap (Cape, 1950)
    Not Waving but Drowning (Deutsch, 1957)
    Selected Poems (Longmans, 1962) includes 17 previously unpublished poems
    The Frog Prince (Longmans, 1966) includes 69 previously unpublished poems
    The Best Beast (Longmans, 1969)
    Two in One (Longmans, 1971) reprint of Selected Poems and The Frog Prince
    Scorpion and Other Poems (Longmans, 1972)
    Collected Poems (Allen Lane, 1975)
    Selected Poems (Penguin, 1978)
    New Selected Poems of Stevie Smith (New Directions, 1988)

Also ~

    Some Are More Human Than Others: A Sketch-Book (Gaberbocchus, 1958)
    Me Again: Uncollected Writings of Stevie Smith (Virago, 1984)
    "The Necessity of Not Believing" (Gemini No. 5, Spring 1958, Vol. 2, No. 1)

"A book can take you anywhere"~

Hernando Guanlao and his library in the centre of Manila in the Philippines

"a book can take you anywhere"






guardian u.k. 

NORTHERN ~



there's an exhilaration going on here — a combined landscape love and two people love in a new rental car, borrowed for four days, let loose and sweeping a landscape these passengers have returned to after an absence of decades. little has changed, unlike where they have come from and will return to. the territory is too far away from the mainstream and too extreme in its properties to be easily changed — see how the highway, built for and by farmers and woodsmen and large families and isolation, sweeps with the lay of the land, each building needed and cared for or else long gone. this is a no-fooling place, and we are self-guiding through, passing through, having been here before, exactly the same way: of love for one another and for the earth but hurdling at large speed through large landscape. for days and weeks and months and years before this moment we have been on-foot, traveling. now this. tense changes in the text will be unavoidable. someone watching this knows exactly where we are, but I'm calling it earth since we are caught in a matter of time


the film began on the far northern reaches between two states, finally stopping for gas, traveling since the middle of the night, climbing climbing to this spot, where like I say we've been here before. a corner market and not much else, still a pay phone, big old fashioned coca-cola sign white and red lettered, a much older sign rusting and saying even more of what this place once was. a beatup car pulls in next to us, solo driver, a pit-stop with a cd or tape left going, window cracked, the driver grunts getting out and will grunt when he stoops to get back in behind the wheel, pearl jam is playing. he's local — you can tell from his clothes, his walk, his familiarity, and the car has been diminished to short runs. we have pearl jam somewhere with us and so from this driver and stranger we take up his music as we continue our journey, over a landscape that will be slowly but surely disappearing, although it hasn't that much in the four decades since we've been away
 

no one is about where we are, some of these buildings we pass may be abandoned, though someone has run up that flag, and someone is caring to mow that cemetery, it's saturday and people are home, good size trucks are parked in dooryards and we're still early birds. where's this highway going? it's wilderness and expansive tracts of water, lakes, ponds, bogs, swamps, the famous pointed fir trees of another author's book title. and what will keep it all sustained? the landscape will do quite fine without us, thank you, but what of this highway and where it is all headed to? there is an exhilaration in the love and to the land, the music brought along but inspired by its use from another and taken from his car into this car, the camera is running

 

film © bob arnold
once in vermont films

LOVE IS WHAT STAYS ~

Mark Murphy

photo by Gary Brocks

Mark Murphy (born March 14, 1932)
    1956 Meet Mark Murphy (Decca)
    1957 Let Yourself Go (Decca)
    1959 This Could Be the Start of Something Big (Capitol)
    1960 Mark Murphy's Hip Parade (Capitol)
    1960 Playing the Field (Capitol)
    1961 Rah! (Riverside Records)
    1962 That's How I Love the Blues (Riverside)
    1965 Swingin' Singin' Affair (Fontana)
    1966 Who Can I Turn To (Immediate)
    1970 Midnight Mood (Saba)
    1973 Bridging a Gap (Muse)
    1975 [[Mark 2 (Muse)
    1975 Mark Murphy Sings (Muse)
    1977 Mark Murphy Sings Mostly Dorothy Fields & Cy Coleman (Audiophile)
    1978 Stolen Moments (Muse)
    1979 Satisfaction Guaranteed (Muse)
    1981 Bop for Kerouac (Muse)
    1982 The Artistry of Mark Murphy (Muse)
    1983 Brazil Song (Cancões Do Brazil) (Muse)
    1983 Mark Murphy Sings the Nat King Cole Songbook (Muse)
    1984 Living Room (Muse)
    1985 Beauty and the Beast (Muse)
    1986 Kerouac Then and Now (Muse)
    1987 September Ballads (Milestone)
    1990 What a Way to Go (Muse)
    1991 I'll Close My Eyes (Muse)
    1991 Night Mood (Milestone)
    1996 North Sea Jazz Sessions, Vol. 5 (Jazz World)
    1997 Song for the Geese (RCA)
    2000 Some Time Ago (High Note)
    2000 The Latin Porter (Go Jazz)
    2001 Links (High Note)
    2002 Lucky to Be Me (High Note)
    2003 Memories of You (High Note)
    2004 Bop for Miles (High Note)
    2004 Dim the Lights (Millennium)
    2005 Once to Every Heart (Verve)
    2007 Love Is What Stays (Verve)
    2010 Never Let Me Go (Self produced)

VOICE ~

Mary Lou Williams

PYNCHON / ORWELL ~

Prophecy and prediction are not quite the same, and it would ill serve writer and reader alike to confuse them in Orwell's case. There is a game some critics like to play, worth maybe a minute and a half of diversion, in which one makes lists of what Orwell did and didn't "get right." Looking around us at the present moment, for example, we note the popularity of helicopters as a resource of "law enforcement," themselves forms of social control — and for that matter at the ubiquity of television itself. The two-way television bears a close enough resemblance to flat plasma screens linked to "interactive" cable systems, circa 2003. News is whatever the government says it is, surveillance of ordinary citizens has entered the mainstream of police activity, reasonable search and seizure is a joke. And so forth. "Wow, the Government has turned into Big Brother, just like Orwell predicted! Something, huh?"  "Orwellian, dude!"

Well, yes and no. Specific predictions are only details, after all. What is perhaps more important, indeed necessary, to a working prophet, is to be able to see deeper than most of us into the human soul. Orwell in 1948 understood that despite the Axis defeat, the will to fascism had not gone away, that far from having seen its day it had perhaps not yet even come into its own — the corruption of spirit, the irresistible human addiction to power, were already long in place, all well-known aspects of the third Reich and Stalin's USSR, even the British Labour party — like first drafts of a terrible future. What could prevent the same thing from happening to Britain and the United States? Moral superiority? Good intentions? Clean living?

What has steadily, insidiously improved since then, of course, making humanist arguments almost irrelevant, is the technology. We must not be too distracted by the clunkiness of the means of surveillance current in Winston Smith's era. In "our" 1984, after all, the integrated circuit chip was less than a decade old, and almost embarrassingly primitive next to the wonders of computer technology circa 2003, most notably the Internet, a development that promises social control on a scale those quaint old twentieth-century tyrants with their goofy mustaches could only dream about.

from Thomas Pynchon's foreword

 George Orwell, 1984

SPEECH ~

The Great Dictator 
(1940)





The Great Dictator is a comedy film by Charlie Chaplin released in October 1940. As usual, Chaplin wrote, produced, and directed, in addition to starring as the lead ("Adenoid Hynkel": Adolf Hitler). Having been the only Hollywood film maker to continue to make silent films well into the period of sound films, this was Chaplin's first full-fledge talking picture as well as his most commercially successful film. A digitally restored version of the film was released on DVD and Blu-ray by The Criterion Collection in May 2011. In this famous scene, and the closing of the film, the dictator has come to his senses and is now playing not as a dictator or even an actor, but as Charlie Chaplin with something to say.

CLASSIC IN MY PANTS ~

Shakespeare and Company by Sylvia Beach
(tales of brave Ulysses)



Now it's no secret that the hero Ulysses has friends high up, or, rather, a friend — in fact, the Goddess Minerva. She appears now in one, now in another, disguise. This time it was in the very male form of Ernest Hemingway.

I hope the following disclosures won't get Hemingway into trouble with the authorities — surely they wouldn't bother someone who is a Nobel Prize winner — but it was due to Hemingway that my copies of Ulysses penetrated into the United States.

I set my problem before Minerva-Hemingway. He said, "Give me twenty-four hours," and the next day he came back with a plan. I was to hear from a friend of his in Chicago, a certain Saint Bernard B., a most obliging friend, whom I call Saint Bernard because of his rescue work, and he would let me know how the business could be carried out.

This man wrote to say that he was going ahead with his preparations and that he was moving over to Canada. He asked if I would be willing to pay the rent on a studio in Toronto, which I agreed to at once, of course. Then he sent me the address of his new domicile and told me to ship all copies to him there. I sent them off, and, since there was no ban on Ulysses in Canada, they reached him safely. The job he then undertook was one requiring great courage and cunning: he had to get hundreds of these huge books across the border.

Daily, he boarded the ferry, a copy of Ulysses stuffed down inside his pants, as he described it to me later. It was in the days of bootlegging, so a certain number of odd-shaped characters were around, but that only increased the risk of being searched.

As the work progressed, and he was getting down to the last few dozen copies, Bernard imagined the port officials were beginning to eye him somewhat suspiciously. He was afraid they might soon inquire more closely into the real nature of the business — presumably selling his drawings — that took him back and forth every day. He found a friend who was willing to help him, and the two of them boarded the ferry daily, each with two copies now, since they had to work fast — one in front and one behind; they must have looked like a couple of paternity cases.

What a weight off our friend's minds, and off his person, when he got the last of his great tomes over to the other side! If Joyce had foreseen all these difficulties, maybe he would have written a smaller book.

Anyhow, the Ulysses subscribers in America who received their copies should know that they have Hemingway and Hemingway's obliging friend to thank for that large parcel the American Express delivered at their door one day.


from Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company
(Harcourt Brace, 1959)

sylvia beach & james joyce





last heard, the above book, that looks like it was left behind in the laundromat, goes for $65,000

 RANGES ~

Over four days we took off for ranges unknown. Things developed as we opened our eyes.


First there was heading down to Woodstock, New York to take care of Janine’s grave, and of course she was waiting for us, red granite flat stone from Barre, Vermont. Still young morning we knelt down and brushed the grass cuttings off the gravestone and there we were with her, hard to believe. One year has passed by. We thought to bring flowers, but no, we’ll bring garden flowers from our home next time and plant them here. The ones she told us she likes. The ones we once brought for her home and yard. The ones she never stopped talking about. For the moment we left a lemon sweet on the stone and walked up into town. . .to her favorite art store and rummaged around until something met our eye. . .and when we found the simple steel rings for a notebook, colored gold, green and Janine’s favorite red, we bought all three and returned to the grave and locked those rings together as bracelets that she also always wore and loved and how right this looked for her, and placed them on the glossy stone and left things that way. The lemon sweet shared between us as we walked away.


On the way to Woodstock, from Vermont, we played the new and quite long Bob Dylan album Tempest, and then played it again for good measure, and what do you know the last song ended just as we came into the town. . .climbing the hill. . .look to your left and there’s a restaurant with a sign in the window “Bob Drinks Here.”


I won’t say much about the album. There are lines like cartoon captions, a very long song that rolls on the waves with the familiar sway of an Irish sea-shanty. You know  the song I mean. It goes on for too long but then some people think the Irish go on for too long, others term it endurance and never go to war against the Irish. Dylan doesn’t seem to care what any of us think at this point (or at any point) in his life. Few of the songs can be taken up as one of our own. They’re all his private wonders or demons and since we’re waiting for the songs, he’s giving them to us. He doesn’t mind, it’s what he does. He’s already saved millions of lives. Think about this for a moment. He’s saved millions of lives. He being his songs and his endurance. Don’t sound ignorant, once again, by criticizing the painful and rotting sound of his voice. It’s a voice that has spoken for you. If you don’t think it has, where you been?


We drive home over back roads and along streams and rivers, hill and dale, there’s a story around every bend.


The next day, for breakfast, packed from home, we chow down in a lovely outdoor chapel in northern New Hampshire way the hell up. At the "Shrine of Our Lady of Grace" which we first came upon almost twenty years ago, a spacious cemetery for many motorcyclists, and there are lit totems to tell you just who. So far we have kept away from knowing anything more about this isolated location or any of its history. We prefer finding it on our own. We arrive after traveling before dawn, have breakfast, warm in the sun, then leave for other green pastures. The dead left in their place under the out stretched arms of angels and saints. I saw them when we arrived, I saw them when we left.


We’ll get as far east as Rangley Lakes, Maine where we haven’t been since 1974 and before that Sweetheart came here with her family in 1957 — a drive from Virginia and they stayed a week in one of the snug cabins along the shore. Her sister water-skied. It was America at the time. Wilhem Reich, one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry and a resident of the area passed away in prison the same year. He was sixty years old. If you don’t know about his morality play with the authorities while living in this remote region, go look up his tale of invention and struggle. Today one old-timer is bent down on one knee applying plastic letters to a small sign for his gift shop. Two friends in suspenders watch from a porch until he is done. Like watching him is helping him, and it is in a sort of backcountry-by-the-water-all-day-sort-of-way. I can tell much the temper of the small town by watching these three, who watch the two of us cross a dock for better purchase and a view up lake to the shadowy blue mountains. Sweetheart thinks she may have crossed this dock as a little girl. Could be.


We got here winding high at the top edge of the White Mountains. Through more stalled and junked and beaten to shit equipment that I’ve seen in the back woods any time in my life. Backhoes thunked in place in tall grass, bulldozers stopped and rusted, everywhere a snarling black or silver motorcycle, go-kart, dune buggy, ATVs shot or for sale, or just dumped onto their sides and left. Lumps of yellow work equipment all over the landscape. Homes miserable and hopefully better inside. Hellish ROMNEY signs everywhere, and small pesky flags, and even more shit-canned equipment. No one putting 2 + 2 together. (This is two days before the Romney video is released c/o Mother Jones). Not one, one! OBAMA sign in all our four days flying and weaving the roads over five broad states. Way up in somewhere and don’t ask where New Hampshire someone has mounted onto the side of their old woodshed, about the size of a sheet of plywood, a color photograph of the younger George Bush, smirk and all, with bold words scribed under the poster for all the road to see: “Miss Me Yet?” it asks. Fuck no, I say aloud, as we pass.


ROMNEY signs are all we see in Dixville Notch. Staked in anywhere you can set a stake. You know what happens there in about six weeks. Let’s watch what happens. As for “The Balsams,” the majestic and castle inn splendor of this alpine region, where we once came and had a look and taste without spending a dime, it’s all gone to seed, boarded up and falling to pieces. Dying on the vine with its towers and turrets and craftsmen shaped windows and framing, fantastical and tucked away amongst steep stone ledges and cliffs, the smell of the trees, makes it all the more wondrous of once upon a time. We’re “moving on” and leaving behind, indecently, whole traditions and lives. Expect pay back.


Mt. Washington in cloud cover, but the most beautiful cloud cover. Some mountains are meant not to always be fully seen. All my life coming to Mt. Washington I’ve seen the summit 50% of the time. I love the fact humans can’t always get what they want.


It took good friends in the midwest to tell us all about Sugar Hill, and this after we’ve combed the White Mountains for most of our lives. We were at the Robert Frost home tucked in the woods and white-framed, plunked between Sugar Hill and Franconia, it doesn’t matter — it’s in the woods, and in much better shape than we last left it a few decades ago, when we arrived and it was desolate and seemingly forgotten. Now, on the wall in the small barn renovated into a gift shop/museum, are large black and white photographs of poets who have had residency at this famous poet’s house where its costs $5 to take a self-guided tour, but I figured just like years ago standing at Robinson Jeffers' Pacific-edged home in Carmel — neither man would want us there, never mind standing in their yard, so why bother them now? We have a once-around slow walk of the house, notice the tiny eave windows, and everything bundled about the homestead facing hard the weather freight from the large-size Whites to the east. The view is grand but diminished with the influx of saplings and scrub. We need a woodsman to return.


There’s a guy, probably father and husband, who wants to sell us burgers and fries from his hamburger joint along the highway, and it does look cheery enough with all his kids and others chipping in at preparing food for Saturday night except the host is anxious and pushy and too eager, enough for us to lose our appetite in a flash! He’s got a shelf of small clipboards with menus on each one and all with a pen and nobody is in the place and the clipboards look brand new and and the kids look full of enthusiasm and the host is waiting for us to save his life except we can’t. . .we aren’t that rich.


Every night we drive all the way home through the night to get home, our home — we’ve had rascals wanting to harass our place, mildly terrorize the location, plus we can’t afford a motel room anywhere in this country any longer and instead buy the gas to move. $4 or better in New Hampshire and New York. $3.85 in Vermont. About the same in Maine. We saw one gas station at 6AM New Hampshire Sunday with a reading of $3.75 at the pump. A long line of thirsty vehicles already running out to the road. We will come for gas at this place on our return home and be ready for the next day. By then the price will be bumped to $3.79.


By the third day we’re beach bums all day at the very same place where cops one year ago shook us down for no reason whatsoever except they didn’t like something they were looking at. Or we reminded them of someone else, or something else. Who knows with idiots. I’m not calling them idiots, their superior officer all but called them idiots when we traveled to their station and put in a quiet complaint about his deputies’outrageous behavior. The poor elder ranger all but agreed with our assessment. So little is making sense any longer, except, and thankfully, most people are remaining civil and may want things to make as much sense as you do. It’s one hope.


We don’t see these bad cops anywhere during our beach combing days. Maybe they were reassigned to Siberia? There's just a friendly ranger trimming the hedge outside his outpost and taking our entry fee of $5 which is well worth preserving this birding compound, open waterland, winding dirt road into the puckerbrush and the wild blue yonder. Hiking for miles the edge of that blue yonder, with the tide out, we scavanged up nine sand dollars, none with chips. Barefoot, tramping, and becoming one with the landscape — one more little ingredient to knowing who and where you are.


Today I work in a driftwood weathered cabana open on all sides to the weather and half in the sun. A simple shelter. The ocean is right there.  I can hear some guy carrying a fishing rod over his shoulder and a Park-the-car-in-Harvard-Yard accent coming up from the shore after spending half the morning tossing out a line. It’s pretty free and clear doing what he’s doing and I’m doing; we’re just doing. Though he tells me he’s had “no bites” in over five hours. My Sweetheart naps next to me because she’s driven half the night.


On the beach we stay warm from dawn to noon by staying in the sun. Eat another home packed breakfast, my jacket off and on the wet sand where we hunker down, eyes on the water, wind in her hair.

photo ©  bob  arnold

EARTH ~

the book to own

Shambhala Books

2012

--       all day in the mountains

ants are also walking


Taneda Santoka

POOR SIDE OF TOWN ~

Link to Mother Jones article
 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/19/opinion/mitt-romney-class-warrior.html?hp

ARTIST ~

Alice Neel
John Lee Hooker

Once In Vermont film© bob arnold

EARTH ~

Vasko Popa

THE SONG OF YOUNG TRUTH


Truth sang in the darkness
On top of the limetree in the heart



The sun it said will ripen
On top of the limetree in the heart
If the eyes shine on it



We mocked the song
Seized and bound truth
And murdered it here under the limetree



The eyes were busy
Outside in another darkness
And saw nothing

ANVIL PRESS
2011

CHICAGO POEMS ~

Marilyn Monroe and Carl Sandburg
by Arnold Newman

I AM THE PEOPLE, THE MOB


I am the people—the mob—the crowd—the mass.

Do you know that all the great work of the world is
---done through me?

I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the
---world's food and clothes.

I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napo-
---leons come from me and the Lincolns. They die.
---And then I send forth more Napoleons and Lin-
---colns.

I am the seed ground. I am the prairie that will stand
---for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me.
---I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted.
---I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and
---makes me work and give up what I have. And I
---forget.

Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red
---drops for history to remember. Then—I forget.

When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the
---People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer
---forget who robbed me last year, who played me for
---a fool—then there will be no speaker in all the world
---say the name: "The People," with any fleck of a
---sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision.

The mob—the crowd—the mass—will arrive then.


CARL SANDBURG
Chicago Poems
University of Illinois Press