The People? Oh Yes.

Read through the sections that have been made available from Carl Sandburg's The People, Yes, (they can be found here: https://docs.google.com/open?id=0BxkM7d2fD2tPRUFYZHJSdFg0cWc ) and take note of whatever strikes you as intriguing, provocative, brilliant, stupid, touching, offensive, etc.

1.     While reading these passages from Carl Sandburg’s The People, Yes, ask yourself how you think Sandburg views his function as a poet (hint: look at section 4). Then, think about how these ideas ultimately define “The People, Yes” and its objective. Do these ideas differ from those that Whitman projects in poems like “Song of Myself” about his role as a poet? Does the objective of Leaves of Grass differ from the objective of The People, Yes? How so, or why not? (You might take a look at the concluding section of “Song of Myself.” Here, Whitman writes that he is “untranslatable.” What does Whitman mean when he says he is “untranslatable?” Would you consider Sandburg “untranslatable” from what you have read? Why or why not?)

9/11 Poems

One defining feature of many of these 9/11 poems is anger, which is frankly somewhat upsetting to read since the poems, in that sense, don’t really provide you with a sense of collective loss or communion. Most of the poets here write about the tragedy in terms of cause, not the heavy, insufferable loss that followed. In this way they differ largely from “Lilacs.” But there are exceptions. The late Wislawa Szymborska’s poem, “Photograph from September 11,” asks some similar questions that Whitman raises in “Lilacs.” For instance, what can poetry do for the dead, and for the living, in the aftermath of a tragedy like the assassination of Lincoln or 9/11? How does one properly mourn the dead? “O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved?” Whitman asks, while Szymborska decides to break off her poem in order to leave those that jumped from the towers floating. It’s the best that she can really do for them, she says.

Project: One Act Play

Using the Calamus poems, biographical information, letters, and interviews, I would like to write a one act play about Walt Whitman and Peter Doyle. It would be fairly experimental and surreal, taking place inside a street car that would stetch across the stage like a large room (it may come out looking rather Brechtian, or something). It would involve not only their meeting, but contain their whole relationship, the Civil War, the assassination of Lincoln, everything we’ve discussed in class, including homosexuality and comradeship, and with a focus on this relationship between poet and muse.   “We loved each other deeply, but there were things preventing that, too. I saw them,” Doyle said in an interview. I think this idea will be used as a general arch of the play.