What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In our third series, The Poems of Others II, twenty-four poets pay homage to the poems that led them to write. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the essay. 
Carl Sandburg

I am riding on a limited express, one of the crack trains of the nation.
Hurtling across the prairie into blue haze and dark air go fifteen all-steel coaches holding a thousand people.
(All the coaches shall be scrap and rust and all the men and women laughing in the diners and sleepers shall pass into ashes.)
I ask a man in the smoker where he going and he answers: "Omaha."

from the book CHICAGO POEMS / Dover Thrift Editions
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Cover of the Dover Thrift Editions reprint of Carl Sandburg's Chicago Poems
What Sparks Poetry:
Marianne Boruch on Carl Sandburg's "Limited"

"A solid first person speaker lives in, and guides Sandburg’s poem which is both contained and expansive in its imagery, those steely trains so tightly made crossing a continent of grassland and farms and woods and cities and poverty and fortune. There’s thinking (via assertion and the underground parenthetical) and conversation in the piece, a sense of myth and miraculous in the ordinary, rust and ashes waiting in what is snappy-fast and gleaming. Nothing is as it seems."
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2020 Literature Award Winners

The American Academy of Arts and Letters has honored the achievements of 19 writers. Poetry Daily editorial board member Sandra Lim was awarded one of eight Arts and Letters Awards in Literature while Mary Ruefle was recognized with the Arthur Rense Poetry Prize.
 
viaAMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS
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