Support for WPR comes from UW Credit Union, dedicated to providing financial planning from

caring partners who develop portfolios that address members' needs. More at UWCU.org. Your best interest

always comes first. Hey there, podcast listeners, it's Anne.

A hundred years ago, the poet Carl Sandberg turned Chicago into an American icon when he called it the city of broad shoulders.

He wrote a series of poems describing Chicago as a gritty Midwestern metropolis, teeming with hardworking immigrants.

Well, now, composer David Nagler has celebrated the 100th anniversary of those poems by dusting them off and setting them to music.

His new song cycle features a roster of musical heavy hitters, and this week, Charles Monroe Kane brings us a conversation with David Nagler about what those poems mean to him

personally and what it feels like to contribute to the continuum of the Chicago experience.

Oh. what it feels like to contribute to the continuum of the Chicago experience. Hog Butcher for the world tool maker. So it was 1998, and my mother had visited the Carl Samburg home in Flat Rock, North Carolina.

My sister was, I think she's working at a summer camp down there, and my mother went to visit her, she had a day off, and she said, oh, I'll go check out the Carl Sandberg home.

And she brought me back this anthology of poems called Harvest Poems. And she gave it to me

at the end of the summer, not long before I went to Chicago to visit. I didn't know very much at all

about Sandberg, but I knew that that was probably his most well-known work, with the exception of the Abraham Lincoln biography.

And so I read it while I was there. It's these 16 poems out of Chicago poems, just about 150. And I just thought they were great. And more specifically, they just reminded me of song lyrics as I read them.

And so that was, that was sort of where it all started.

City of the big shoulders.

So you're reading them and you're like, yeah, these are songs.

I mean, to me, that seems like a pretty big leap because I know, I know, I know, I know lyrics,

is poetry and all the stuff, but I, you know, I got to tell you, when I heard I was going to do this interview, I had the album.

I'm like, wait, wait, I'm not going to read that.

I'm going to reread the poems.

I'm a big fan of Sandberg.

...