Program to Showcase Carl Sandburg Poetry & Songs

Mike Adams

McCook Community College will host a program Feb. 26-27 at the Fox Theater showcasing the work of poet Carl Sandburg and featuring the music of a former McCook man.

"The Sandburg Project: Carl Sandburg's Poetry and Songs" celebrates Sandburg's songs, poetry and proverbs from the Great Plains and Nebraska by bringing to the Nebraska public Sandburg's own style of performance.

Singer/songwriter Mike Adams, formerly of McCook, will collaborate with Bill Kloefkorn, Nebraska State Poet, professor and with orator Dr. Charles Peek at a McCook performance of Sandburg's Great Plains poetry and American Songbag songs. Dr. Kathryn Benzel, a distinguished faculty member at the University of Nebraska-Kearney, will present a 20 minute lecture on Carl Sandburg's work.

The project is twofold with poetry and songwriting workshops and the Project performance. The combination of workshops and performance brings together professional writers, high school and university students, and general public.

The workshops will be staged at MCC on Feb. 26 and include morning and afternoon sessions with a lunch included as part of the registration. Workshop participants will work with professionals one-on-one and in small groups to create your own songs and slogans. The poetry workshop is limited to 20 participants and the lyric writing workshop to 10 participants.

"Poetry for the People" by Bill Kloefkorn assisted by Dr. Charles Peek.  Kloefkorn will introduce the session with basics of writing poetry, and then the group will work into small sessions and one-on-one to refine participants' writing.

"Word Melodies" by Mike Adams. Participants will learn and apply the basics of song writing through the workshop introduction. Then participants will collaborate in small groups to create songs of the prairie.

Following the workshops, the performers and musicians enact the American "song and slogan" at McCook's Fox Theatre, just as Sandburg toured the opera houses and auditoriums across the United States. This performance also includes area musicians Terry Sinnard, and Lonnie Weyeneth.

The performance is set for 7:30 p.m. at the Fox Theater on Feb. 27.

Carl Sandburg's startling portraits of "living, pulsing" Americans document a national heritage of integrity and resilience, of hard work and joyful play, of spiritual and practical life—a value system that shaped the nation through Jefferson's and Lincoln's times into our present. In Cornhuskers (1918) and Smoke and Steel (1922) Sandburg uses the breadth and depth of his Midwestern and prairie portraits to demonstrate an American collective voice and anthem—his "song and slogan"—and gives back to the people a clear voice.