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National Poetry Month: Carl Sandburg

By Glynn Young 8 Comments

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.

More on Carl Sandburg

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Glynn Young
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Glynn Young
Editor and Twitter-Party-Cool-Poem-Weaver at Tweetspeak Poetry
Glynn Young lives in St. Louis where he retired as the team leader for Online Strategy & Communications for a Fortune 500 company. Glynn writes poetry, short stories and fiction, and he loves to bike. He is the author of Poetry at Work and the Dancing Priest Series. Find Glynn at Faith, Fiction, Friends.
Glynn Young
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Latest posts by Glynn Young (see all)
  • Looking for the Poetry in Vermeer, a Blockbuster of an Art Exhibition - March 17, 2023
  • An Updated Take on Keats’s Odes by Anahid Nersessian - March 14, 2023
  • In Praise of Small Museums - March 7, 2023

Filed Under: Americana Poems, Carl Sandburg, Poems, poetry, Poets

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Comments

  1. Kathleen says

    April 20, 2010 at 8:55 am

    Feel properly introduced to Chicago now. He knows how to conjur up a picture.

    Reply
  2. Maureen Doallas says

    April 20, 2010 at 9:14 am

    I think no celebration of National Poetry Month would be complete without Sandburg. I like the “muscle” in Chicago and how Sandburg names it with all those capital letters. Used Up is quite beautiful, I think.

    Thank you for the shout-out. What a nice surprise!

    Reply
  3. n davis rosback says

    April 20, 2010 at 2:26 pm

    a man who knows chicago
    a man who was made by the midwest

    my husband is now flying
    heading straight for the windy city
    and also will drive to iowa
    another midwest man
    visiting the midwest

    Reply
  4. laura says

    April 20, 2010 at 8:28 pm

    His words really do paint a picture of another time. More glamorous, more dangerous…fickle too.

    Very good selection.

    Reply
  5. Ann Kroeker says

    April 21, 2010 at 1:45 pm

    There’s a family story that my mom’s oldest brother, Uncle Jim, was visiting cousins in Chicago. They entered a bookstore where Carl Sandburg was doing a reading or something, and they grabbed my uncle and paid him a small amount of money to follow Sandburg around the store with an ash tray. Apparently Sandburg wouldn’t flick as he smoked or look for an appropriate container; he would just smoke it, letting the ashes lengthen until they’d drop off on their own in chunks. Uncle Jim was there to catch.

    The story might not be true, but it’s fine to think that it’s possible.

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Carl Sandburg - The Chicago Poems | Tweetspeak PoetryTweetspeak Poetry says:
    June 1, 2013 at 10:01 am

    […] for more Poetry Reviews More on Carl Sandburg More Poets and […]

    Reply
  2. How to Write a Poetry Review says:
    July 21, 2015 at 8:48 am

    […] Does the volume have a geography? Robert Frost has New England, Carl Sandburg had Chicago, Walt Whitman had the Civil War hospitals of Washington and his home in New York, and […]

    Reply
  3. Reading ‘Spoon River Anthology’ for the Third Time - says:
    August 9, 2016 at 5:00 am

    […] or success. In 1914, Marion Reedy, editor of Reedy’s Mirror in St. Louis (and a promoter of Carl Sandburg and Sara Teasdale, among others), published several of Masters’ poems, which were noticed by […]

    Reply

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