Thursday, April 3, 2014

National Poetry Month—The Rage of Carl Sandburg

Sandburg, the young Chicago reporter was mad at what he saw.



Yesterday’s Poetry Month was all about spring time, flowers, butterflies, and love.  Today’s, not so much.  To quote a sometime poet from Liverpool “I heard the news today, oh boy….”  The Tuesday news was full of crap that made me mad.  Boiling mad.  The Supreme Court handed the ragged remnants of Democracy worst malefactors of great wealth.  The climate change deniers, all of their paid mouthpieces and all of the dopes they sucker whined that a UN report says that the jig is likely up for civilization.  And even way down in the human interest stories is word that dickheads in the South Carolina legislature will not pass an 8 year old girl’s dream bill to designate the Woolly Mammoth as the official state fossil without stipulating that it was created by God 6,000 some odd years ago.
So pardon me my taste in poetry today does not run to hearts and flowers.  I’m looking for some old fashion outrage!  There is plenty out there—Ginsberg’s Howl! is just that.  I know bitter war poetry by bushel basket.  And Ive read plenty of movement verse, some of it very good.
But when I want to get my rage on, I turn to Carl Sandburg.  And that first, great book that shook up the country, Chicago Poems.  There is a lot more there than the one poem they used to teach us in school and that in the Windy City is considered a mark of civic pride by those who don’t understand it, history, or Sandburg.  Beyond “Hog butcher to the world…” the book is alive with the city he knew intimately as a working reporter, understood because he was a died-in-the-wool avowed Socialist, and connected with every person in it as a Universalist.
Share some of Sandburg rage with me today.

Masses

Among the mountains I wandered and saw blue haze and
     red crag and was amazed;
On the beach where the long push under the endless tide
     maneuvers, I stood silent;
Under the stars on the prairie watching the Dipper slant
     over the horizon’s grass, I was full of thoughts.
Great men, pageants of war and labor, soldiers and workers,
     mothers lifting their children—these all I
     touched, and felt the solemn thrill of them.
And then one day I got a true look at the Poor, millions
     of the Poor, patient and toiling; more patient than
     crags, tides, and stars; innumerable, patient as the
     darkness of night—and all broken, humble ruins of nations.

They Will Say

     Of my city the worst that men will ever say is this:
You took little children away from the sun and the dew,
And the glimmers that played in the grass under the great sky,
And the reckless rain; you put them between walls
To work, broken and smothered, for bread and wages,
To eat dust in their throats and die empty-hearted
For a little handful of pay on a few Saturday nights.

Population Drifts

New-mown hay smell and wind of the plain made her
     a woman whose ribs had the power of the hills in
     them and her hands were tough for work and there
     was passion for life in her womb.
She and her man crossed the ocean and the years that
     marked their faces saw them haggling with landlords
     and grocers while six children played on the stones
     and prowled in the garbage cans.
One child coughed its lungs away, two more have adenoids
     and can neither talk nor run like their mother,
     one is in jail, two have jobs in a box factory
And as they fold the pasteboard, they wonder what the
     wishing is and the wistful glory in them that flutters
     faintly when the glimmer of spring comes on
     the air or the green of summer turns brown:
They do not know it is the new-mown hay smell calling
     and the wind of the plain praying for them to come
     back and take hold of life again with tough hands
     and with passion.

Anna Imroth

Cross the hands over the breast here—so.
Straighten the legs a little more—so.
And call for the wagon to come and take her home.
Her mother will cry some and so will her sisters and
     brothers.
But all of the others got down and they are safe and
     this is the only one of the factory girls who
     wasn't lucky in making the jump when the fire broke.
It is the hand of God and the lack of fire escapes.

Fellow Citizens

I drank musty ale at the Illinois Athletic Club with
     the millionaire manufacturer of Green River butter
     one night
And his face had the shining light of an old-time Quaker,
     he spoke of a beautiful daughter, and I knew he had
     a peace and a happiness up his sleeve somewhere.
Then I heard Jim Kirch make a speech to the Advertising
     Association on the trade resources of South America.
And the way he lighted a three-for-a-nickel stogie and
     cocked it at an angle regardless of the manners of
     our best people,
I knew he had a clutch on a real happiness even though
     some of the reporters on his newspaper say he is
     the living double of Jack London's Sea Wolf.
In the mayor's office the mayor himself told me he was
     happy though it is a hard job to satisfy all the office-
     seekers and eat all the dinners he is asked to eat.
Down in Gilpin Place, near Hull House, was a man with
     his jaw wrapped for a bad toothache,
And he had it all over the butter millionaire, Jim Kirch
     and the mayor when it came to happiness.
He is a maker of accordions and guitars and not only
     makes them from start to finish, but plays them
     after he makes them.
And he had a guitar of mahogany with a walnut bottom
     he offered for seven dollars and a half if I wanted it,
And another just like it, only smaller, for six dollars,
     though he never mentioned the price till I asked him,
And he stated the price in a sorry way, as though the
     music and the make of an instrument count for a
     million times more than the price in money.
I thought he had a real soul and knew a lot about God.
There was light in his eyes of one who has conquered
     sorrow in so far as sorrow is conquerable or worth
     conquering.
Anyway he is the only Chicago citizen I was jealous of
     that day.
He played a dance they play in some parts of Italy
     when the harvest of grapes is over and the wine
     presses are ready for work.

Nigger

I am the nigger.
Singer of songs,
Dancer. . .
Softer than fluff of cotton. . .
Harder than dark earth
Roads beaten in the sun
By the bare feet of slaves. . .
Foam of teeth. . . breaking crash of laughter. . .
Red love of the blood of woman,
White love of the tumbling pickaninnies. . .
Lazy love of the banjo thrum. . .
Sweated and driven for the harvest-wage,
Loud laughter with hands like hams,
Fists toughened on the handles,
Smiling the slumber dreams of old jungles,
Crazy as the sun and dew and dripping, heaving life
     of the jungle,
Brooding and muttering with memories of shackles:
               I am the nigger.
               Look at me.
               I am the nigger.

Ready to Kill

Ten minutes now I have been looking at this.
I have gone by here before and wondered about it.
This is a bronze memorial of a famous general
Riding horseback with a flag and a sword and a revolver
     on him.
I want to smash the whole thing into a pile of junk to be
     hauled away to the scrap yard.
I put it straight to you,
After the farmer, the miner, the shop man, the factory
     hand, the fireman and the teamster,
Have all been remembered with bronze memorials,
Shaping them on the job of getting all of us
Something to eat and something to wear,
When they stack a few silhouettes
          Against the sky
          Here in the park,
And show the real huskies that are doing the work of
     the world, and feeding people instead of butchering them,
Then maybe I will stand here
And look easy at this general of the army holding a flag
     in the air,
And riding like hell on horseback
Ready to kill anybody that gets in his way,
Ready to run the red blood and slush the bowels of men
     all over the sweet new grass of the prairie.

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