Sharpening Your Knowledge: Carl Sandburg’s Pencils

Sharpening Your Knowledge: Carl Sandburg’s Pencils

As we continue our celebration of Blackwing Month and the release of the Blackwing 602, we’re focusing on writers who are letting their ideas come to fruition in the form of paper and graphite rather than pixels and fonts. Today we’re taking a closer look at great American poet Carl Sandburg and a poem he wrote about our favorite subject: pencils.

Carl Sandburg was born Illinois in 1878 and did not live a privileged life, nor the life of your typical writer. He dropped out of school at the age of thirteen to begin working and never received a college degree, despite attending Lombard College for four years. It was at Lombard however that Sandburg met Phillip Green Wright, a professor and the man who paid for the publication of Sandburg’s first volume of poetry, Reckless Ecstasy, in 1904.

Sandburg would go on to author many more volumes of poetry other publications before his death in 1967. His most notable publications included a biography of Abraham Lincoln, titled Abraham Lincoln: The War Years. It earned him his first Pulitzer Prize in 1940. His Collected Poems would capture another Pulitzer Prize in 1951.

In 1920, Sandburg published a collection of poems titled Smoke and Steel, a volume containing poems championing American agriculture and industry set to the backdrop of the city of Chicago. Sandburg split this volume into ten different sections, “Smoke Nights,” “People Who Must,” “Broken-face Gargoyles,” “Playthings of the Wind,” “Mist Forms,” “Accomplished Facts,” “Passports,” “Circles of Doors,” “Haze,” and “Panels,” with each of these sections containing as few as five and as many as forty-nine poems. In the section titled “Playthings of the Wind,” Sandburg presents the reader with a poem titled “Pencils,” a poem that seems out of place in a volume focused on industry and agriculture, but a poem that gives us a bit of insight into the mind of the writer.

The poem opens with the lines “Pencils/telling where the wind comes from/open a story,” followed by the lines “Pencils/telling where the wind goes/end a story.” These lines show the power that a pencil holds in the hands of a writer: the power to create, the power to explain, the power to begin and the power to end. This creative power gives its wielder the ability to tell anything he or she wishes to tell, even if that anything is as ephemeral as the where the wind comes from or where the wind goes.

The poem continues with the lines “These eager pencils/come to a stop/.. only .. when the stars high over/come to a stop.” The obvious implication in these lines is that the pencil’s ability to create never ceases, but also that creation is inherent to the pencil. These pencils will always be telling someone where the wind comes from or where the wind goes because it is in their very nature. Therefore, it seems impossible to pick up and use a pencil without, in some way, creating.

As the poem accelerates towards its conclusion, it evokes images of “cryptic babies calling life,” “sea horses/running with the clocks of the moon” and “shooting stars,” each of which the poem’s speaker claims to have never seen come to a stop. Each of these images, while disparate, conjures up a very specific image in the mind of the reader, further cementing the pencil’s position as a creative tool in the hands of a writer. Then, as the poem wraps up, one of the shooting stars is seen “snatching a pencil of fire” and “writing a curve of gold and white” across the sky. Here, nature itself is seen as having used a pencil to create the image of a shooting star, proving once again that there is a fundamental connection between pencils, creativity and beauty.

So, there you have it. Carl Sandburg, the great American poet, knew the creative power of pencils, just like we do here at Pencils.com. But, just like there are many ways to use a pencil, there are many ways to read a poem. Check out the full poem here and let us know what you think about our interpretation in the comments section below.
Click here to enter one of your original poems in our Blackwing 602 writing contest.