"Why Did the Children Put Beans in Their Ears?" by Carl Sandburg (Lucky Words podcast 2025, episode 7)

"Why Did the Children Put Beans in Their Ears?" by Carl Sandburg (Lucky Words podcast 2025, episode 7)

From Lucky Words by Jeffrey Windsor

May 21, 2025 · 6 min · Season 2025 · Episode 7

About this episode

This episode explores the concept of poetry's portability through Carl Sandburg's poem 'Why Did the Children Put Beans in Their Ears?'

In the spirit of getting more prescriptive, this is the first of an intermittent and irregular series about how and why of poetry. Today: the portability of poetry, illustrated with a classic by Carl Sandburg, “Why Did the Children Put Beans in Their Ears?” ## Text of poem “Why Did the Children Put Beans in Their Ears?” by Carl Sandburg "Why did the children put beans in their ears when the one thing we told the children they must not do was put beans in their ears? "Why did the children pour molasses on the cat when the one thing we told the children they must not do was pour molasses on the cat?" I promised in the recording that you'd have it just about memorized by the time I was done with the episode. Let me know if that's true or not. I strongly suspect that it is, or close enough at least. When I say that a poem is portable, I mean of course that you can carry it in your head. But here's an interesting thing that's true of poetry and very few other forms of art: what you have in your head is not a copy of the art, and it isn't a memory of the art. You have the thing itself . If you have the poem memorized, you have the poem, the original, all the time. You may remember a…

Topics covered

  • poetry
  • Carl Sandburg
  • art
  • creativity

Keywords

  • poem
  • memorization
  • art forms

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Lucky Words, Why Did the Children Put Beans in Their Ears

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