When my grandfather read Sandburg to me I was transported. I was carried away.
I can still hear the sound of my grandfather’s deep voice, the way it vibrated and rumbled through me as I sat tucked under his arm, my head resting on his chest.
I walked down dark, gritty, dangerous city streets, a babble of voices all around me, tall skyscrapers towering overhead. Crowds pushed me down sidewalks and the air was full of interesting smells and sounds.
I stood on the windswept prairie, a hot wind blowing my hair across my face. I rode the rails across a landscape as flat and empty as anything can be, through tall grass that dipped and waved and bowed with the wind.
I saw the world through a poet’s eyes. I heard it in the voice of a man with the heart of a poet.
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Related Pieces
Piece Description
When my grandfather read Sandburg to me I was transported. I was carried away.
I can still hear the sound of my grandfather’s deep voice, the way it vibrated and rumbled through me as I sat tucked under his arm, my head resting on his chest.
I walked down dark, gritty, dangerous city streets, a babble of voices all around me, tall skyscrapers towering overhead. Crowds pushed me down sidewalks and the air was full of interesting smells and sounds.
I stood on the windswept prairie, a hot wind blowing my hair across my face. I rode the rails across a landscape as flat and empty as anything can be, through tall grass that dipped and waved and bowed with the wind.
I saw the world through a poet’s eyes. I heard it in the voice of a man with the heart of a poet.
Transcript
Cheryl-Anne Millsap
Staff writer
My grandfather was a good man. He worked hard, more than 40 years in the steel mills of the Deep South. He pulled long shifts, double shifts and overtime.
He was a man with many interests, but not a lot of formal education. The Second World War and then a family to support may have interrupted his education, but he knew how to learn whatever it was he wanted to know.
He read books. He was never without a book.
My grandfather always had a book in his pocket, or curled into the domed top of his metal lunchbox. He kept a book by the bed and on the table by his favorite reading chair.
There was usually a book in the car, the latest prize from a trip to the used book store downtown.
He was never without something to read, and whenever I could manage it, he wasn’t far away from me.
At night, after dinner and before I was sent away to bed by my child-...
Read the full transcript
Intro and Outro
INTRO: OUTRO:Cheryl-Anne Millsap writes for The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, WA. She is the author of "Home Planet: A Life in Four Seasons" and can be reached at catmillsap@gmail.com
James Reiss
Posted on November 27, 2009 at 10:57 PM | Permalink
Sandburg Is SpoCAN Here
For years Cheryl-Anne Millsap has been broadcasting from the Inland Northwest. It’s good to see a hefty bunch of her recent pieces for Spokane Public Radio have been uploaded onto PRX—and good to hear her clear voice again.
In this drop-in, her personal essay about her grandfather has the sentimental warmth of a fireside chat. Her piece is titled “The Poetry of Carl Sandburg,” but it’s more a tribute to her bookish grandpa than to the author of “Chicago Poems.” Millsap begins, “My grandfather was a good man,” and she returns to this line as a refrain and her central theme.
It turns out that one of the main reasons Millsap’s granddad was a good man is that he “gave [Millsap] a good start,” i.e., he gave her Sandburg’s “poetry and steel mills and train cars and ordinary people.” It would have been excellent if Millsap had quoted a few lines from one or two of Sandburg’s poems. Failing this, she leaves us to make the connection between poems like “Fog” or “Gone” and her own plainspoken writing style, as well as her own down-home vision of ordinary life.
Who knows what kind of writer Millsap might have become if her grandpa had read poems to her by T. S. Eliot or Wallace Stevens? Let’s leave that question unanswered for now—and enjoy her words from a place that could hardly be called a “hog butcher for the world,” eastern Washington state’s Lilac City!