Rainbows Are Made: Poems by Carl Sandburg [Library Binding]

Lee Bennett Hopkins (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1982

Seventy humorous and serious poems dealing with people, word play, everyday things, nature, night, and the sea.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Arithmetic
Auctioneer
Bird Talk
Boxes And Bags
Bright Conversation With Saint-ex
Bubbles
Buffalo Dusk
Bundles
Cadenza
Children
Choose
Cool Tombs
Corn And Beans
Crabapples
Crossing Ohio When Poppies Bloom In Ashtabula
Different Kinds Of Good-by
Doors
Elm Buds
Fog
Fourth Of July Night
Good Night
Grass
The Hammer
Harvest
Heavy And Light
Humdrum
I Know Something, But I Shan't Tell
I Love You
Illinois Farmer
Is Wisdom A Lot Of Language?
Lines Written For Gene Kelly To Dance To
Little Girl, Be Careful What You Say
Lost
Manual System
Metamorphosis
Money Is Power: So Said One
Moon Rondeau
Nocturn Cabbage
North Atlantic
Old Deep Sing-song
Paper 1
Paper 2
Pencils
The People, Yes: 3
The People, Yes: 9
Phizzog
Prayers Of Steel
Primer Lesson
Proud Torsos
The Rich
River Moons
Santa Fe Sketches
Sea Chest
Sea Slant
Shirt (2)
Sketch
Sketch Of A Poet
Soup
Southern Pacific
Splinter
Spring Cries: 1
Spring Cries: 2
Spring Cries: 3
Stars
Timesweep
Two Moon Fantasies
Was Ever A Dream A Drum?
The White Man Drew A Small Circle In The Sand
Window
Wingtip
Wrong Number
Young Sea
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder® --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Lee Bennett Hopkins is "one of America's most prolific anthologists of poetry for young people," according to Anthony L. Manna in the Children's Literature Association Quarterly. The compiler of numerous children's verse collections, "Hopkins has spent his career trying to make the crystal image accessible to children," noted Manna. His collections encompass a variety of topics, including animals, holidays, the seasons, and the works of noted poets like Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg. Poetry, Hopkins stated in Instructor magazine, "should come to [children] as naturally as breathing, for nothing—no thing: can ring and rage through hearts and minds as does this genre of literature."

Born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1938, Hopkins grew up in a poor but close family. At age ten, his family moved in with other relatives to make ends meet, and he spent most of his youth in Newark, New Jersey. The oldest child in the family, Hopkins had to help out with the family finances, often missing school so he could work. Though the family was able to get on its feet again and rent a basement apartment, relations soon deteriorated between Hopkins's parents, leading to a lifelong separation. The circumstances of his youth would later play a prominent part in his fiction writing for young adults.

FRITZ EICHENBERG (1901-19XX) was an artist of wide-ranging talents, from colorful illustrations for children's books such as Ape in a Cape for which he won the Caldecott Medal to wood engravings for books by Poe, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy. Born and trained in Germany, he moved to New York City in 1933 where he continued to work as a fine artist, graphic designer, and teacher whose work is represented in museums and galleries nationwide and around the world.  --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Library Binding: 81 pages
• Publisher: Harcourt Childrens Books (J); 1st edition (March 1982)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0152654801
• ISBN-13: 978-0152654801
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,255,949 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ingredients Include Sun, Clouds, Rain and A Wilingness To Look, June 20, 2009

By 

a gentle sound (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rainbows Are Made: Poems by Carl Sandburg (Paperback)

The thing about cleaning my classroom, as the school year ended yesterday (I am a 1st grade teacher with 25 plus years of experience K-6), is that I return again to wishing for the time to write a fitting statement on all the books from my book boxes. I have thousands to be sorted and held, looked at fondly and to "remember" to help bring me closure on "this group." Books seem to be so important I get them in shape first. They once were the heart of my work.

Now there is ticking, standard, bomb and bust, and "the education politics." We hear those that say we are "failing" even as our system is the one the world would come to join. But this book was one I used in 4th grade a good deal years past, as a transition teacher in a migrant town teaching very wise thoughtful children, very serious ones, because it carries poems I'd put up on the board each AM or distribute copied in something I called "The Poem Opener." From that each child developed a poetry portfolio of collected work over the course of a year. Sandburg bloomed out of this volume, as other days held Hughes, other poets, that I selected to use with them. Beyond that collection, of course, were the room requirements for one weekly recitation. It was just part of the day. Our day.

I did the same in 1st teaching quite proudly until NCLB described the contents of all the minutes in its demanded "new curricular fix" in an under-performing school take-over....which really was narrowing, omitting literature and poetry, art, science, math concept and pretty much anything I once knew as content. That's what they did. It's not what they say they did. It's what they did. It appears to say it is seen as a political act.

And few are willing to lay it on the line and tell you.

However as is happening nowadays it was what was done while denying that was the "intention."

But in 1st we once memorized and recited as a group poems like "My Shadow," or some other piece, that wasn't usually too nonsensical, was NOT written by a textbook company to be sold and actually pointed you into thought, language and the power of the "word." Believe me, that's gone in my world now. We selected work that fit the themes. Ones I invented by knowing just a little. Now we say things that are some of the worst examples of poetry I ever saw, stamped out in a cookie cutter and "sold" as good to do with children. Well they told us so...so it must be so. You'll not see Sandburg then. Not even little cat feet.

All that said, let me describe the book. It's printed on a thick slightly cream paper set with woodcuts or wood engravings. I grew up in linocut classes with Darryl Gray -an artist in my hometown of Morgantown, WV- so I developed early a vast appreciation for this kind of printing. These prints by Fritz Eichenberg are not on every page but they do occur in the book in a meditative fashion as sections change, and really enhance the work. So striking me first, as I have that visual nature coming from a background in art, is my reaction to what a great way to present his poetry against a backdrop of artwork that is strong, textured, black and white, powerful, hard and clean. Each print has a corresponding Sandburg quote like: "Poetry is a shuffling of boxes of illusions buckled with a strap of facts."

Or perhaps " Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away." This frames the poetry that follows in the section.

That last quote is shown with a print of a tree in a forest with a sleeping old man. Father Time, Methuselah, it calls out to connection to your own interpretive wits. Just as so much of the poetry inside might ask you to build that ability, over the telling of the critic. Or as is hapening now the silence of the dead.

In schools at one time, and probably today, I've been trained and told that we are not developing critical thinkers or interpreters of literature/life/text which set against a backdrop of insistance on lock step teaching, proscribed curriculum, the deflowering of literature allowed to kids, and the move to workbook sounds like the shell game dialog. It still alarms me when I see the wonderful, rich poetry gone. It's so marginalized as to be invisible. But what, I ask does poetry do?

You should ask it with me i think because it is your world that is losing that connection for a significant number of children that need to have the vision.

Sandburg's work here for kids is not silly. It isn't Shel Silverstein either, it doesn't bounce and slip slide, it isn't snide and it can't really be taken as comparable to these pieces I do see available to kids in bought approved stamped state books where over thought the child is given a piece of alliterative cotton candy. It dwells in a different place.

These are poems of shirts, mothers, the earth, the solidity of man, the infinity of everything else. These are dust and push, lurch and tree, good works. You are clearly within the hands of an able father that is defining the pieces he might wish to share with a child as their roots. The soil, water, the ideas that a child might like to wonder with him about.

It talks about time, people, nation, Dreams, drums, crabapples, Astubula, but really it's his voice , the voice of an observer, telling of as Hopkins says in his Introduction it's telling of moments. Sandburg asks questions, ones that echo the child asking of ice and time, mothers and math.

Sandburg was the son of Swedish immigrants so his work carries this flavor too somehow. He was born in Galesburg, Illinois which is west of Chicago. His work and life and times took him into labor, writing, reporting, touring, singing. I connected to this book having recently listened to the story of one of his guitars on NPR and hearing him sing a folktune. He was a folk musician/singer. A great writer. And I recall Lyndon Johnson's epitaph for him, recall his passing as those times wrote our many goodbyes. He was speaking to this book in saying:

"Carl Sandburg needs no epitaph. it is written for all time in the fields, the cities, the face and heart of the land he loved and the people he celebrated and inspired. With the world we mourn his passing. It is our pride and fortune as Americans that we will always hear Carl Sandburg's voice within ourselves. For he gave the truest and most enduring vision of our own greatness."

And what of the poetry. Well I like particularly a few that I did put into the binders of living children and I hope the hearts and minds of former students are able to recall it. (Back when, heaven forbid, I did "Whatever I wanted" over what I am assigned to do)

Ones like this one I put here in consideration of Father's Day:

From

The People, Yes

A father sees a son nearing manhood

What shall he tell that son?

"Life is hard; be steel; be a rock."

And this might stand him for the storms

and serve him for humdrum and monotony

and guide him amid sudden betrayals

and tighten him for slack moments.

"Life is a soft loom; be gentle; go easy."

And this too might serve him.

Brutes have been gentled where lashes failed.

The growth of a frail flower in a path up

has sometimes shattered and split a rock.

A tough will counts. So does desire.

So does a rich soft wanting.

Without rich wanting nothing arrives.

I really love this one.

Soup

I saw a famous man eating soup.

I say he was lifting a at broth

Into his mouth with a spoon.

His name was in the newspapers that day

Spelled out in tall black headlines

And thousands of people were talking about him.

When I saw him,

He sat bending his head over a plate

Putting soup in his mouth with a spoon.

On war, on time, on history and memory:

Grass

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.

Shovel them under ad let me work-

I am grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg

And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.

Shovel them under and let me work.

Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:

What place is this?

Where are we now?

I am grass.

Let me work.

How about this one for those I read of late that speak to so much:

Said the scorpion of hate: "The poor hate the rich. The rich hate the poor. The south hates the north. The west hates the east. The workers hate the bosses. The bosses hate their workers, The country hates the towns. The towns hate the country. We are a house divided against itself. We are millions of hands raised against each other. We are united in but one aim-getting the dollar. And when we get the dollar we employ it to get more dollars."

Amen.

I'll stop with this because I took it to heart first reading this book as a child and it has been one of my frames:

Little Girl, Be Careful What You Say

Little girl be careful what you say

when you make talk with words, words-

for words are made of syllables

and syllables, child, are made of air-

and air is so thin-air is the breath of God-

air is finer than fire or mist,

finer than water or moonlight,

finer than spider-webs in the moon,

finer than water-flowers in the morning:

and words are strong, too,

stronger than rocks or steel

stronger than potatoes, corn, fish, cattle,

and soft, too, soft as little pigeon-eggs,

soft as the music of hummingbird wings.

So little girl, when you speak greetings,

when you tell jokes, make wishes or prayers,

be careful, be careless, be careful

Be what you wish to be

This is a book that a child carries into thought.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stays with you, March 31, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Rainbows Are Made: Poems by Carl Sandburg (Library Binding)

In 5th grade, we had to choose a poem to recite from a book ofthe teachers choice. I was given this book, and fell in love with it.'Grass' is haunting, and subtle word play makes every read seem like the first time.

5.0 out of 5 stars A great way to introduce poetry to youth., June 24, 2008

By 

Ginger Purvis (Encinitas, ca United States) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Rainbows Are Made: Poems by Carl Sandburg (Paperback)

I bought "Rainbows Are Made" for a teenager as a Congratulations gift, and he has since looked up more of Carl Sandburg's work. I'm waiting to see if his curious enjoyment of it takes him any further. For now, I can't think of anything else that would recommend the permanence of this collection anymore than this.