Bucking the National Endowment for the Arts

Having just set up streaming internet radio, independent of our media oligarchs, I've devoted a stream to the great poet of the prairie. Who actually reads his best poems, even his home town, especially during the government-funded BIG READ?

I would like to see Karen Finley as the featured author for the BIG READ. We could read about her sweet potato, and what she does with it. As much fun as that might be, I still prefer Sandburg. It is his time. Carl Sandburg Days starts in a few weeks. Yet we are supposed to be reading Edgar Allen Poe, because it is our assignment. And this in a town that hates its crows.
Quoth the raven, nevermore

Sandburg doesn't seem like he's dead.; He sees the same things I do. Everything is living, the world is not a windup clock for him. His language is fresh and modern. "Chicago" was a lot more than one poem - yesterday I just recorded 4 of them read by a local lawyer, and added them to our playlist. He could be the start of a revolution. He is tuning up his guitar. I hear laughter. There's more to say, but plenty of time. Tune in, and tune in. Print some posters, and check out our other streams. Eventually our schedule will online at http://kgbr.tumblr.com. We have some things already. We gaze at the model that Rustbelt Radio erected at Pittsburgh Indymedia, and learn. Meanwhile we rebroadcast what they offer, and add some of our own.

Tune in, tune in, and tune in some more. Here are some of the new-old poems we just recorded yesterday, from Chicago Poems by Carl Sandburg:

BATH

A MAN saw the whole world as a grinning skull and
cross-bones. The rose flesh of life shriveled from all
faces. Nothing counts. Everything is a fake. Dust to
dust and ashes to ashes and then an old darkness and a
useless silence. So he saw it all. Then he went to a
Mischa Elman concert. Two hours waves of sound beat
on his eardrums. Music washed something or other
inside him. Music broke down and rebuilt something or
other in his head and heart. He joined in five encores
for the young Russian Jew with the fiddle. When he
got outside his heels hit the sidewalk a new way. He
was the same man in the same world as before. Only
there was a singing fire and a climb of roses everlastingly
over the world he looked on.

IN A BREATH

To the Williamson Brothers

HIGH noon. White sun flashes on the Michigan Avenue
    asphalt. Drum of hoofs and whirr of motors.
   Women trapsing along in flimsy clothes catching
   play of sun-fire to their skin and eyes.

Inside the playhouse are movies from under the sea.
   From the heat of pavements and the dust of sidewalks,
   passers-by go in a breath to be witnesses of
   large cool sponges, large cool fishes, large cool valleys
   and ridges of coral spread silent in the soak of
   the ocean floor thousands of years.

A naked swimmer dives. A knife in his right hand
   shoots a streak at the throat of a shark. The tail
   of the shark lashes. One swing would kill the swimmer. . .
   Soon the knife goes into the soft under-
   neck of the veering fish. . . Its mouthful of teeth,
   each tooth a dagger itself, set row on row, glistens
   when the shuddering, yawning cadaver is hauled up
   by the brothers of the swimmer.

Outside in the street is the murmur and singing of life
   in the sun--horses, motors, women trapsing along
   in flimsy clothes, play of sun-fire in their blood.

DYNAMITER

I sat with a dynamiter at supper in a German saloon
   eating steak and onions.
And he laughed and told stories of his wife and children
   and the cause of labor and the working class.
It was laughter of an unshakable man knowing life to be
   a rich and red-blooded thing.
Yes, his laugh rang like the call of gray birds filled with
   a glory of joy ramming their winged flight through
a rain storm.
His name was in many newspapers as an enemy of the
    nation and few keepers of churches or schools would
   open their doors to him.
Over the steak and onions not a word was said of his
   deep days and nights as a dynamiter.
Only I always remember him as a lover of life, a lover
   of children, a lover of all free, reckless laughter
   everywhere--lover of red hearts and red blood the
   world over.