Carl Sandburg and Lew Sarett: a joint lecture and recital

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220
The J. B. Pond Lyceum Bureau
Presents
Carl Sandburg
The Poet of the City
Author of

CHICAGO POEMS
CORNHUSKERS
 Etc.

and


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Lew Sarett
LONE CARIBOU
The Poet of the Wilderness
Author of
MANY, MANY MOONS, Etc.
in
A JOINT LECTURE AND RECITAL
From Their Own Writings

Americans All in an All American Program

Managed by
J. B. POND LYCEUM BUREAU



50 East 42nd Street
New York


Fine Arts Building
Chicago







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CARL SANDBURG
The Poet of the City
AN ALL AMERICAN PROGRAM
LEW SARETT
The Poet of the Wilderness

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THE IMPRESSION one gets when hearing Mr. Sandburg's Chicago poems, is of a heavy steel gray sky, rent open here and there and through the rents shining pools of clear pale blue.  No one hearing him can fail to see that Sandburg is one of the most important poets in America today.  Something of the Whitman who loved to catalogue people and places, something of O. Henry who loved colloquial America, and something of the homely outlook and gesture of that other Illinoisan, Lincoln, each play its phrase in the tune of Sandburg.

More than any other poet who has found a public, Mr. Sandburg uses the speech of the common people of America, with its colloquialisms and its slang.  It is because he likes the folk speech, the plain man's way of saying things.

The lyceum that engages Sandburg will make no mistake, wrote Elbert Hubbard.  Turn him loose on the platform and he will hold the audience.  There is challenge in his tone, argument in his words—his face and form convince.

Who and what is Mr. Sandburg?  The Chicago Tribune book page editor, Burton Rascoe, recently published the following sketch in the Who's Who Section:—

America has always shambled to its destiny, says Edith Wyatt in one of her essays; Lincoln as statesman, Grant as military genius, Whitman as poet, each has shambled to his destiny.  That Carl Sandburg shambled to his destiny is altogether correct.  He quit grammar school at 13 and began driving a milk wagon in Illinois prairie blizzards.  His formative years were spent working in brickyards and potteries, and riding rattlers to Kansas wheat fields where he swung a pitchfork at the thrashing machine.  He worked his way through Lombard College, Galesburg, Ill.  He washed dishes in Denver hotels, shoveled coal in Omaha, saw active service during the Spanish War.  During the war he represented a syndicate of newspapers in the Scandinavian countries.  He enjoys newspaper writing as a craft and the writing of poetry as an art and a religion.  (The American Library Association, comprising all the foremost public library workers in America, asked Mr. Sandburg to be their speaker at their Saratoga Springs convention on July 4, 1918.)  Of himself he says, I am not sure I am writing poetry.  My favorite anecdote is the one about Hokusai, the Japanese painter who died at the age of 92, saying, 'If I had lived five years more I should have been a painter.'  At college he took away an oratorical prize.  He plays the banjo and has a large repertoire of Negro ballads and spirituals, and cowboy songs, which he sings.  He averages five hours sleep a night, is a long-distance hiker, eats in one-arm lunchrooms, always has his pockets full of clippings and manuscripts, gets letters from vagabonds and missionaries the world over, and has two of his poems included in Martha Foote Crow's Anthology of Christ Poems.  A wife and three daughters are among his steadfast attractions in a piney home at Elmhurst, Illinois.


Review of Reviews:
Carl Sandburg has made poetry out of Chicago.  He has shaped poetry that is like a statue by Rodin.  It has no determinate outlines; the whole blends at every angle of feeling and perception with the larger reality.


The Editor:
Every young poet of today should study the talk of the crowd and the talk of children; unconscious and familiar uses of language show the heart of the folk and stimulate language in an imaginative and human way; that is one of the best reasons for studying Carl Sandburg.

LEW SARETT brings the faces and voices of the wilderness vividly before the people of his audience.  Voyageurs, fur traders, trappers, timber cruisers, squaw men, lumber-jacks—these tough, picturesque, laughing and singing people who live on the outposts and the borderlines of our accumulated culture—the shoulders, faces and songs of these people move across the screen of the Sarett art.  His contributions to the leading outdoor magazines, Outing, Hunter-Trader-Trapper, Outdoor Life, American Forestry, Outer's Book and Recreation, and to Poetry and Reedy's Mirror, as well as his book of wilderness poems, Many Many Moons, forthcoming from Henry Holt and Co., these are only side reflections of an adventurous, colorful life crowded with the people and phantoms of the Northwest border and wilderness.  Out of the tall timber and the white nights of this North Country comes Lew Sarett—known among the Chippewas as Lone Caribou—woodsman, guide and forest ranger, author, lecturer, and Associate in English at the University of Illinois.  With him he brings to the literary world and the platform his Indian chants and dances, his wolf cries, his French-Canadian chanson, and his remarkably refreshing poetry.

PRESS CLUB:

Poetry is older than Egypt and younger than Oklahoma.  It is man's Eternity of sentiment.  They tell us that there is to come the poet of business, of science, of the worry called progress, but there is but one poet, the never-dying poet of nature.  Among the poets arising, none gives more of graceful and healthful promise than Lew Sarett.  He is true because he is of the woods, his muse a perfumed breeze, sweetly murmuring; the gathering storms of Nature throbs in his verse.

Lew Sarett vizualizes the Indian and the wilderness as never hitherto painted.  He makes us feel the atmosphere in which the Indian lives; and the Indian out of his atmosphere is like a cornstalk pulled up by the roots.  He came out of the forest and the children of the wild follow him.  With them they bring their mystic song and their throbbing oratory.  We forget that it is Sarett, so convincing is he; and then at last recognize the artist.

(Signed) OPIE READ.

CONGRESSMAN AT LARGE, KANSAS.

Lew Sarett's faculty of taking people along with him, giving them while they are under his spell the very atmosphere of the lakes and the forests, and making them see the lakes and the forests, and making them see the things in his mind's eye, and hear the weird sounds that are calling in his memory,—this faculty of his is not less than marvelous.

(Signed) The Hon. CHAS. SCOTT.

Beneath the spell of his deep rich voice, his abundant vitality and dramatic fire the audience experiencd a power it had never before felt.… It realized that the man was living and breathing every thought that was finding expression.—Beloit College Round Table.

Sarett has equipment.  Years a woodsman, other years a wilderness guide, companion of red and white men, as an outrider of civilization, university instructor, headline performer at western Chautauquas, magazine writer, he brings wisdom of things silent and things garrulous to his poems.  Old men with strong heads and shrewd slow tongues, young men with tough feet, the wishing song of mate for mate—they are here.  The loam and the lingo, the sand and the syllables of North America are here.



PART I


I.
CITY POEMS


by Carl Sandburg




Skyscrapers, Smoke, Bridges, Women, Peddlers, Fish Criers, Teamsters, Night Lights.




II.
FLYING MOCCASINS


by Lew Sarett




1.The Squaw Dance.







a.Musical version, piano accom-paniment.






b.The Squaw Dance, poetic interpretation.





2.Beat Against Me No Longer.




III.
FOGS AND FIRES

by Carl Sandburg




Laughing Corn, Buffaloes, Steamboat Whistles, Potato Blossom Song and Jigs, Valley Mist.




IV.
CHIPPEWA MONOLOGUES


by Lew Sarett




1.Little-Caribou Makes Big Talk.






2.Chief Bear's-Heart Makes Talk.





(This program is subject to change)



PART II


V.
SLANTS


by Carl Sandburg




Prayers of Steel, Shenandoah, Faces in a Winter Log Fire, Shambling to Destiny,




VI.
LONE FIRES


by Lew Sarett




1.  The Loon; 2.  The Wolf Cry; 3.  The Granite Mountain; 4.  The Wilderness Call; 5.  Courtin' Time; 6.  Fish; 7.  White-Throat; 8.  Of These Four Things; 9.  The Great Divide.




VII.
CORNHUSKERS


by Carl Sandburg




Wilderness, Leather Leggins, Prairie Horizons.




VIII.
RUNNING WATER


by Lew Sarett




1.The Chant of the Coyote.






2.Chippewa Flute Song.






3.The Blue Duck.







a.Musical version, tomtom accompaniment.






b.The Blue Duck, poetic interpretation.




(This program is subject to change)




POEMS
By>
CARL SANDBURG and LEW SARETT

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By CARL SANDBURG
CHICAGO POEMSandCORNHUSKERS
Each, $1.35 net

In Cornhuskers Mr. Sandburg is concerned less with the city and more with the Prairie which will be here when the cities are gone, and there is evident in this work a stronger lyric note than in the earlier poems.


There are not three poets in America who have either his vigor or finesse of touch.—
N. Y. Evening Post.

A poet of rare quality.  To me he is clearly one of the most far-sighted critics of life that the world of poetry has revealed, and poets have ever been the seers and critics of the ages.—Clement K. Shorter in The Sphere (London).


A deep and sincere sense of life.… a book in whose hospitality you can look out quietly and thoughtfully for long at the plain ways of our civilization, making ready for a new thousand years.—
New Republic.



By LEW SARETT
MANY, MANY MOONS Flying Moccasins Lone Fires Chippewa Monologues
A Book of Wilderness Poems
With an Introduction by Carl Sandburg Just Published, $1.50, net

The author has wandered among the Indians for ten years and been given an Indian name by them.  He divides his book into three parts, of which the second is a lyric intermezzo, more of the scenes and sounds the Red Man knows than of the Indian himself.  In it the loon, the wolf, the frog, white throat and swamp owl are audible.  There are two fine love songs, and God Is at the Anvil, forging dawn and sunset.  In Parts I and III we get the Indian of today himself, a weird, bizarre contradiction, stamping and grunting, sometimes with his feathers adorning a battered derby, but we also get him as the child of Nature who knows her every mood, and is full of poetic superstition, shown in strange chants and dances, also eloquent in pleading the wrongs of his race.  The book concludes with a tragic note and we see the Red Man in a vivid allegory drowned beneath wave after wave of white men.


Sarett brings wisdom of things silent and things garrulous to his book.  Old men with strong heads and shrewd slow tongues, young men with tough feet, wishing song of Mate for Mate—they are here.  The loam and the lingo, the sand and the syllables of North America are here.  'Many Many Moons' says yes to life.'—
The Introduction.


There is but one poet, the never-dying poet of nature.  Among the poets arising, none gives more of graceful and healthful promise than Lew Sarett.—
Opie Read.

Henry Holt & Company Publishers 19 West 44th St., New York





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