Bill Everett
Jul 24, 2017 · 1 min read

A time ago when my older daughter was in school and interested in poetry, I encountered a series of short definitions of poetry in a collection of Sandburg’s writings. It seemed to me that she would find them interesting. But I decided not to show her the definitions in the book at that time.

I wrote the numbered definitions on a legal pad with a blank line between the definitions. After scissoring the definitions apart, I folded each definition into a small thin bundle. While she was out of the house, I hid the bundles in her room, a few in obvious places (such as wedged between the frame and the glass of her mirror). It took her several weeks to find them all.

About three decades later, definition 35 is the one still stuck in my mind. http://www.hhimwich.com/files/definitions_of_poetry_carl_sandburg.pdf

Another poem by Sandburg to which I have often referred people in recent years is “Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind” (excerpt “… the greatest nation: nothing like us ever was”).

Regarding your questions about modern minds, I don’t have much to say. I know only a very little about one mind: mine. I do believe that each mind is unique. Consequently, I tend to think about “minds” in terms of probability distributions of different characteristics. Lines from a song I first learned from Carolyn Hester singing it in a small concert come to mind: “Some are bad, some are good, some have done the best they could, and some have tried to ease my troubling mind.”

    Bill Everett

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