Smoke in a North Wind

I love setting American poetry, and I regret not discovering Carl Sandburg's wonderfully industrial and thought-provoking poetry sooner. Smoke in a North Wind sets several poems from Sandburg's Cornhuskers and Smoke and Steel that explore man's relationship to technology. 

This song cycle was composed in collaboration with fellow composer Doug Harbin, who set the same six texts in the opposite order. At the premiere, Harbin's settings formed the first half of a mirror work, with mine forming the second. Each cycle may also be programmed independently.

Smoke

I sit in a chair and read the newspapers.

Millions of men go to war, acres of them are buried, guns and ships broken, cities burned, villages sent up in smoke, and children where cows are killed off amid hoarse barbecues vanish like finger-rings of smoke in a north wind.

I sit in a chair and read the newspapers. 

Manual System 

Mary has a thingamajig clamped on her ears
And sits all day taking plugs out and sticking plugs in.
Flashes and flashes—voices and voices
               calling for ears to put words in
Faces at the ends of wires asking for other faces
               at the ends of other wires:
All day taking plugs out and sticking plugs in,
Mary has a thingamajig clamped on her ears

Under a Telephone Wire

I am a copper wire slung in the air,
Slim against the sun I make not even a clear line of shadow.
Night and day I keep singing—humming and thrumming:
It is love and war and money; it is the fighting and the
    tears, the work and want,
Death and laughter of men and women passing through
    me, carrier of your speech,
In the rain and the wet dripping, in the dawn and the
    shine drying,
A copper wire.

Hats

HATS, where do you belong?
                  what is under you?
On the rim of a skyscraper's forehead
I looked down and saw: hats: fifty thousand hats:
Swarming with a noise of bees and sheep, cattle and waterfalls,
Stopping with a silence of sea grass, a silence of prairie corn.
  Hats: tell me your high hopes.

Prayers of Steel

Lay me on an anvil, O God.
Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar.
Let me pry loose old walls.
Let me lift and loosen old foundations.

Lay me on an anvil, O God.
Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike.
Drive me into the girders that hold a skyscraper together.
Take red-hot rivets and fasten me into the central girders.
Let me be the great nail holding a skyscraper through blue nights into white stars.

Grass

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
    I am the 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 the grass.
Let me work.