ACCENTS
Carl Sandburg revisited
As we drove through the Great Smokies of North Carolina and Tennessee last Friday, Carl Sandburg came back to mind vividly strong with all that he wrote for the less privileged of humanity. Carl Sandburg, the Poet of the People, is revisited in my column of seven years ago titled The most detestable word. Read on:
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“Who were those editors picking the most detestable word in the English language and deciding the one word just a little worse than any other you can think of is ‘Exclusive’?”
Thus Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) opens a poem, one of the many he has written in the collection entitled, The People, Yes.
We spent one weekend last month in North Carolina with a not-to-be-missed itinerary, a visit to the Carl Sandburg Home which has been preserved as a National Historic Site. Standing on a hilltop of Blue Ridge Mountains, his residence 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.”
At once, these lines from Sandburg greet the visitor to Connemara, the name of this beautifully serene place: “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?’” We bought two books of his poetry, The People, Yes and Chicago Poems with the seal of the Sandburg Home on them. Perusing his poems at leisure, we glean answers to those questions.
Long ago in a course in American Literature, the teacher assigned us to read his poem titled Chicago, but our discussion was so cursory, I could recall only the first line – Chicago as Hog Butcher for the World. 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 “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, a farmer from whose pen flow 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 sticks 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 pot-shot at the filthy rich and their touch-me-not attitude.
Among the myriad conditions of men, he writes of laughter, too: “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…” Don’t you think that in these lines Sandburg could also be describing present times? The poem continues to the day when the laughter changes key, “foretokening revolt” as it had been in the history of many a nation.
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.” If that doesn’t express the feelings of his fellow Americans on the Iraq war, I don’t know what would.
Email: lagoc@hargray.com
