People Yes

by Carl Sandburg and Sandburg

Book Overview

A long poem that makes brilliant use of the legends and myths, the tall tales and sayings of America. "If America has a folksinger today he is Carl Sandburg, a singer who comes out of the prairie soil... who can hand back to the people a creation that has scraps of their own insight, humor, and imagination" (Padraic Colum).

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0156716658
• ISBN13: 9780156716659
• Release Date: May 2009
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 300 Pages
• Weight: 0.73 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

book order

received quickly and in perfect condition. had been inpossible to find in brick and mortar stores

Rediscovering An Old Friend

I first read, "The People, Yes" in 1966, while I was still a high school student. I discovered then that reading and writing poetry was cool. More than anything I had ever read before that it spoke to me in such a personal way, that poetry could be warm, sad, funny and powerful all at the same time. While my friends talked about Kerouac, and Ginsberg, and of course Catcher in the Rye, I read everything Carl Sandburg ever wrote. I used my original copy to teach my high school students with until the cover fell off and the pages came apart. It has always held a special spot on my bookshelf, and now I have given this book to my daughter, and she carries it with her everywhere with her own copy of "Always The Young Strangers". She said she never knew poetry could be so powerful, yet easy to understand. Until I gave her this book, she said she hated to read the poetry they assign in school because "this is poetry. It has so much to say, and I know he wants me to understand his words, and he doesn't hide behind archaic language, literary symbols or obscure references that seem irrelevant." The Poetry of Carl Sanburg is timeless. I never understood why his place in American Literature was not much higher. To me he is the best American poet of the twentieth century, in a class by himself. After thirty years and hundreds of readings, I still find something new every time.

An old friend I'd never met before

Oh, my! To think I never read this before. I knew of it, of course, fromquotes and snippets (my mother took me to see "The Family of Man" at the Museum of ModernArt in New York in the fifties). Why doesn't Sandburg rank higher in our artistic pantheon? Too left wing? Not pretentious enough? More like Woody Guthrie than like T. S. Eliot? Anyway, this is wonderful stuff, reads aloud wonderfully, funny, wise, and you'd better believe it has a message for the nineties. "Another baby in Cuyahuga County, Ohio--why did she ask: 'Papa, what is the moon supposed to advertise?'" "The public has a mind? Yes. And men can follow a method and a calculated procedure for drugging and debauching it? Yes. And the whirlwind comes later? Yes." A treasure. And fun to read.