I've been watching a documentary about poet Carl Sandberg; the son of Swedish immigrants, self-educated, Sandberg is truly an American innovator and truth-speaker. I don't know if I fully understood how revolutionary he truly was. I thought of him as an Ogden Nash or Will Rogers when hearing his most famous phrases: "the city of big shoulders" or "the fog comes in on little cat feet." While Sandberg lived simply and spoke plainly, he wrote poems that were challenging in form and message.
In the poem of Chicago, Sandberg offers an bare look at the ugliness of this city:
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.
But Sandberg embraces the vitality of the city, as well:
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.
A working man, himself, and supporter of and organizer for the Democratic Socialist party, Sandberg knew that the life in and of Chicago triumphed over the death found in the city.
We can thank Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry magazine, for recognizing the true American voice of Carl Sandberg at a time when some reviewers called his work "clumsy, vulgar, metrically inferior and ...prosaic." Monroe became his champion and brought him into a group of poets who included Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, Sara Teasdale, and Edwin Arlington Robinson.
Sandberg did find other supporters of his work. In 1916, one reviewer predicted that "When men study the growth of humanity in the twentieth century, they will read Carl Sandburg's Chicago Poems." Reading the poem, The Right to Grief, I am uncomfortable at how little it seems humanity has grown in the past 100 years..
Take your fill of intimate remorse, perfumed sorrow,
Over the dead child of a millionaire,
And the pity of Death refusing any check on the bank
Which the millionaire might order his secretary to
scratch off
And get cashed.
Very well,
You for your grief and I for mine.
Let me have a sorrow my own if I want to. I shall cry over the dead child of a stockyard hunky.
His job is sweeping blood off the floor.
He gets a dollar seventy cents a day when he works
And it's many tubs of blood he shoves out with a broom day by day.
Now his three-year-old daughter
Is in a white coffin that cost him a week's wages.
Every Saturday night he will pay the undertaker fifty cents till the debt is wiped out.
The hunky and his wife and the kids
Cry over the pinched face almost at peace in the white box.
They remember it was scrawny and ran up high doctor bills.
They are glad it is gone for the rest of the family now will have more to eat and wear.
Yet before the majesty of Death they cry around the coffin
And wipe their eyes with red bandanas and sob when the priest says, "God have mercy on us all."
I have a right to feel my throat choke about this.
You take your grief and I mine--see?
Tomorrow there is no funeral and the hunky goes back to his job sweeping blood off the floor at a dollar seventy cents a day.
All he does all day long is keep on shoving hog blood ahead of him with a broom.
(The Right to Grief)
Frederick, John T. "Review of Chicago Poems." Midland 2.6 (June 1916):
No comments:
Post a Comment