The Poet and the Champion Goat

A Poetry Tale about Carl Sandburg, told by Hello Doggo.

Carl Sandburg won three Pulitzer Prizes. And in his own household, he still may not have been the biggest star.

That was a goat.

Her name was Puritan Jon’s Jennifer the Second. In nineteen sixty she was recognised as the top-producing Toggenburg goat in the world.

She belonged to Sandburg’s wife, Lilian, whom the family called Paula. Paula was the sister of the photographer Edward Steichen, and she did nothing by halves.

It began in Michigan in nineteen thirty-five. Their youngest daughter, Helga, wanted a cow. Carl, as Paula remembered it, said a cow was more than they could handle, but a goat would be just their size.

In time, there were more than two hundred of them.

In nineteen forty-five the whole family moved south, to a farm called Connemara in North Carolina, partly because the herd needed more room and a milder climate. Carl got peace and quiet to write. The goats got the pasture.

And Jennifer? In one official test lasting three hundred and five days, she gave five thousand, seven hundred and fifty pounds of milk. That’s more than two and a half thousand quarts.

Most poets would be thrilled with a body of work like that.

Back in nineteen eighteen, Carl had written a poem called Autumn Movement, about beautiful things passing. The old things go, he wrote, not one lasts.

Paula’s answer was rather more practical.

Breed a better one.