Carl Sandburg (1878 – 1967) is another poet who, like Walt Whitman and Robert Frost, could qualify as “America’s Poet.” He has the distinction of receiving two Pulitzer Prizes, one for volume 2 of his biography of Abraham Lincoln (Abraham Lincoln: The War Years) and one for his Complete Poems.

He is most closely associated with Chicago and the Midwest, and for National Poetry Month, I thought it fitting to include “Chicago” as one of his featured poems.

Chicago

Hog Butcher for the World,
      Tool maker, Stacker of Wheat,
      Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
      Stormy, husky, brawling,
      City of the Big Shoulders:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your
      painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: yes, it is true I have seen
      the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women
      and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my
      city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be
      alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall
      bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted
      against the wilderness,
        Bareheaded,
        Shoveling,
        Wrecking,
        Planning,
        Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his
      ribs the heart of the people,
               Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked,
      sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
      Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.

Poems Done on a Late Night Car

I. CHICKENS

I am The Great White Way of the city:
When you ask what is my desire, I answer:
“Girls fresh as country wild flowers,
With young faces tired of the cows and barns,
Eager in their eyes as the dawn to find my mysteries,
Slender supple girls with shapely legs,
Lure in the arch of their little shoulders
And wisdom from the prairies to cry only softly at the ashes of my mysteries.”

II. USED UP
Lines based on certain regrets that come with rumination
upon the painted faces of women on North Clark Street, Chicago

                     Roses,
                 Red roses,
                   Crushed
In the rain and wind
Like mouths of women
Beaten by the fists of
Men using them.
   O little roses
   And broken leaves
   And petal wisps:
You that so flung your crimson
   To the sun
Only yesterday.

III. HOME

Here is a thing my heart wishes the world had more of:
I heard it in the air of one night when I listened
To a mother singing softly to a child restless and angry in the darkness.

I Am the People, the Mob

I am the people–the mob–the crowd–the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world’s food and
      clothes.
I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons come from me
      and the Lincolns. They die. And then I send forth more Napoleons
      and Lincolns.
I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand for much plowing.
      Terrible storms pass over me. I forget. The best of me is sucked out
      and wasted. I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and makes
      me work and give up what I have. And I forget.
Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red drops for history
      to remember. Then–I forget.
When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the People, use the
      lessons of yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me last year,
      who played me for a fool–then there will be no speaker in all the
      world say the name: “The People,” with any fleck of a sneer in his
      voice or any far-off smile of derision.
The mob–the crowd–the mass–will arrive then.

Postings and News Updates:

Read “Losing Control” by Maureen Doallas at Writing Without Paper. It’s a stunningly beautiful poem.

Monday’s Poem A Day from the Academy of American poets was “The Love-Hat Relationship” by Aaron Belz, from his Lovely, Raspberry published by Persea Books.

Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems were published in 1916, when he was 34 years old. “Chicago,” the poem that helped establish his reputation, was published in Poetry Magazine two years before that. (It contains the line Chicagoans love – “City of Big Shoulders.”)

Except for “Chicago,” I hadn’t read any of these poems before. As I read those collected with “Chicago” and the others grouped under the headings of “Fogs and Fires,” “Shadows,” and “Other Days,” the words and themes and ideas were oddly familiar. After searching my memory for a while, I realized two connections.

First was the obvious one. Sandburg’s Chicago poems are of the same root as Upton Sinclair’s novel “The Jungle.” Sinclair was focused upon telling the story of the plight of immigrants at the turn of the 20th century and how they were exploited by employers, landlords and shopkeepers. And the novel did cause quite a stir when it was published, but not for reason Sinclair had hoped. Readers focused on the descriptions of the meatpacking industry, and national outrage led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act, which established the Food & Drug Administration. Everyone overlooked or forgot about the immigrants.

In the Chicago Poems, Sandburg writes about the immigrants and laborers who helped turn Chicago into the economic powerhouse it became. And many of the poems clearly have a Sinclair kind of feel to them. Take “Onion Days,’ for example:

Mrs. Gabrielle Giovannitti comes along Peoria Street every morning at nine o’clock
With kindling wood piled on top of her head, her eyes looking straight ahead to
find the way for her old feet.
Her daughter-in-law, Mrs. Pietro Giovannitti, whose husband was killed in a tunnel
Explosion through the negligence of a fellow-servant,
Works ten hours a day, sometimes twelve, picking onions for Jasper on the Bowmanville road.

Jasper, as it turns out, sits in his Episcopal church service, enjoys the chanting of the Nicene Creed, and plans how to advertise the onion-picking jobs so he can attract even more applicants and drive wages down.

The second connection I made was that the Sandburg poems evoke the same kind of thoughts and feelings when I look at paintings by Edward Hopper. I‘ve written three poems about Hopper paintings and posted them at my own blog, and reading these works by Sandburg put the paintings back in mind. It may be that, chronologically, Sinclair, Sandburg and Hooper were of overlapping generations, and Sinclair and Sandburg both had a strong Chicago connection. And one of Hopper’s most famous paintings, Nighthawks, is in the Chicago Art Institute.

All said, I enjoyed reading Sandburg’s poems. They are of a period – some of them include language and ethnic nicknames that would be deemed politically incorrect today – but they are good stuff. And I read the Dover thrift edition of the Chicago Poems, which cost me all of $2. Can’t beat that price.