Carl Sandburg’s boyhood; Carolyn Forché’s political awakening.
Dear readers,
Not long ago at a book party (yes, they still exist), I fell into conversation with a well-known poet (they also still exist) who told me that, at her editor’s urging, she was hard at work on her memoir.
How’s that going? I asked.
“Oh, I hate it!” she told me merrily. She wasn’t used to writing long: “I want to cut every page down to a paragraph, and every paragraph down to a line. I want to be writing poems.”
Fair enough. Just because somebody excels at one form of language is no guarantee that she will excel at another; in theory, asking a poet to write a memoir makes no more sense than asking a ballerina to play rugby. But some dancers, it turns out, are spectacular in the scrum. Here are two.
—Greg
“Prairie-Town Boy,” by Carl Sandburg
Nonfiction, 1955
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
