Carl Sandburg revisited

After more than a year's absence from Bayan Ko, I dusted the few select volumes in my bookcase, and lingered on a thin paperback, small yet highly valued because it carries the seal of the Carl Sandburg Home in North Carolina. The title: The People, Yes , one of Sandburg's books of poetry.

The hubby and I were on a leisurely weekend with the family of my daughter and a not-to-be-missed itinerary stop was a visit to the Carl Sandburg Home which has been preserved as a National Historic Site like his birthplace in Illinois. I remember the mounted photos and lines from Sandburg that greeted us: “It is necessary now and then for a man to go away by himself and experience loneliness; to sit on a rock in the forest and to ask of himself, ‘Who am I, and where have I been, and where am I going?'” Leafing through his poems, I gleaned answers to those questions. In this small volume of poetry is a champion of the poor, a multi-talented human being who chose to be one of the people. Yes, one of the masa .

The poet's home is nestled in Connemara, the name of a beautifully serene, pastoral place where Sandburg did most of his writings. Connemara encompasses acres of the sprawling hills of North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains. It was the setting of a rich imagination that produced a “writer, biographer, folksinger, lecturer, and [the accolade] Poet of the People who spoke for those who did not have words or power to speak for themselves.”

Long ago in a course in American Literature, the teacher assigned us to read Sandburg's poem titled Chicago , but our discussion was so cursory, I could recall only the first line—Chicago as Hog Butcher for the World . A poem that pays tribute to the workingman. The blue-collared. The daily wage-earner. The counterpart of the “isang kahig, isang tuka” masses of our people. It is only now when reading him without the compulsion of a classroom that I get to know the magnitude of his stature as Poet of the People. There was Chicago's mass of laborers: “ 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.”

Sandburg won two Pulitzer Prizes, the first in 1940 for history having published the four-volume set Abraham Lincoln: The War Years , and the second in 1951 for poetry for his Complete Poems . It is said his interest in labor laws and in the plight of the workingman was sharpened having been a laborer in farms, in railroads, and as a reporter of the Chicago Daily News which resulted in the publication of The Chicago Race Riots . The National Alliance for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) honored him for his coverage of the 1919 Chicago race riots and for his “lifelong struggle to extend the frontiers of social justice.”

In the Audio Room of the Sandburg Home, we viewed a family tending a mountain farm that has produced prize-winning goats. On film was a farmer from whose pen flowed compassion for the ordinary man and woman, writing against the exploitation of workers, calling an end to child labor, and advancing human rights. A scene that surfaces in the mind was, when interviewed and asked what he thought was the most detestable word in the English language, Sandburg crisply replied: “Exclusive.”

Never more was his take on the exclusive enclave of the rich and famous starkly brought to bear than in the short poem, A Fence : “ Now the stone house on the lake front is finished and the workmen are beginning the fence./The palings are made of iron bars with steel points that can stab the life out of any man who falls on them./As a fence, it is a masterpiece, and will shut off the rabble and all vagabonds and hungry men and all wandering children looking for a place to play./Passing through the bars and over the steel points will go nothing except Death and the Rain and Tomorrow .” Indeed, a most biting criticism of the filthy rich and their touch-me-not attitude.

The poet reposed faith in the people's awareness of the chicaneries around them by writing of their laughter: “ The people laugh, yes, the people laugh./They have to in order to live and survive under lying politicians, lying labor skates, lying racketeers of business, lying newspapers, lying ads…” Lines that could well apply to present times. The poem continues to the day when the laughter changes key, “foretokening revolt” as it had been in EDSA I, the bloodless revolution that made our country stand tall and proud in the history of nations.

Having lived through World War I and World War II, Carl Sandburg also wrote War Poems and I pick here a stanza about the “sixteen million [who] are killing… and killing and killing.” “ I never forget them day or night:/They beat on my head for memory of them;/They pound on my heart and I cry back to them,/To their homes and women, dreams and games .” The poet comes alive, hitting the heart strings, yours and mine, on the ramifications of the Iraq war or any war for that matter. (Comments to juliacl agoc@yahoo.com )