Carl Sandburg's economic times and ours

April 25, 2014|By Kevin Stein
  • Poet Carl Sandburg, seen here in 1956, often wrote about American culture’s odd man out, as he did in “Child of the Romans.”
Poet Carl Sandburg, seen here in 1956, often wrote about American culture’s odd man out, as he did in “Child of the Romans.” (George Tames, Getty Images)

Poet Carl Sandburg ought to be trending on Twitter. He should be cited on CNN, declaimed under the Capitol dome and quoted as ear candy in the State of the Union address. Poetic justice would find him enjoying a sudden back-to-the-future moment in all its digitized whoosh and bang.

After all, his rough-hewn poems kindled the bonfires of Populist complaint long before our current fascination with "income inequality." A century following the 1913 publication of his landmark "Chicago Poems," Sandburg stands as one American writer who arguably got right his poetics and his economics.

What's more, his discomfort with the economic divide rifting early 1900s industrial culture has proved to be prescient indeed.

One needn't look further than the recent news that a mere 85 human beings now control as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion among us.

Fittingly, Sandburg's work itself shovels such a chasm between readers who on one side revere his fervent populism and on the other bristle at his anti-capitalist jibes. Reading Sandburg, though, one rarely suffers the aftertaste of someone out for himself. He seems rather the sort who innately understands poetry is not a form of personal ambition.

A product of hardscrabble life both at home and on the itinerant road, Sandburg sticks up for the little guy in a culture obsessed with grandiose landscapes of wealth. His work maps our nation's economic Grand Canyon separating a cohort of haves from legions of have-nots. Sandburg does so largely by focusing not on his private grievance but rather on the culture's odd man out, fixing his poem's topography on a lone character contemplating opulent niceties that ever elude him.

While "Chicago Poems" is chock-full with apposite specimens, his "Child of the Romans" proffers a fine example of this poetic odd-man-out framework.

The dago shovelman sits by the railroad track

Eating a noon meal of bread and bologna.

A train whirls by, and men and women at tables

Alive with red roses and yellow jonquils,

Eat steaks running with brown gravy,

Strawberries and cream, eclaires and coffee.

The dago shovelman finishes the dry bread and bologna,

Washes it down with a dipper from the water-boy,

And goes back to the second half of a ten-hour day's work

Keeping the road-bed so the roses and the jonquils

Shake hardly at all in the cut glass vases

Standing slender on the tables in the dining cars.

Favoring filmic strategies, Sandburg displays a director's penchant for postmodern quick-cut juxtaposition. His poem's camera eye frames a "dago shovelman" breaking for a peasant lunch alongside the railroad his backbreaking labor maintains in finest order. Note how Sandburg's scene contrasts the worker's "dry bread and bologna" with the gravy-swimming steaks served to the dining car's well-heeled denizens. Note, too, how theatrical understatement sweetly offers up strawberries and cream to further sour the comparison.

Even Sandburg's then-common, if now incendiary, use of the racial slur accentuates his character's outlier status. This shovel man, descendant of prodigious road builders, serves a role much like that of the ancient legionnaires. Those men built and maintained a vast circuit of roadways undergirding both the Empire's military power and a luxuriously decadent lifestyle for the select few. As with our own working class, they built the Empire's pathways to war, fought its bloody clashes and maintained its means to haul homeward battle's spoils.

What's curious, thus apt, is how the efforts as well as the person of Sandburg's odd man out go unnoticed by the "men and women at tables / Alive with red roses and yellow jonquils." Invisible, both the man and his 10-hour shift would likely be noted only if his labors were substandard — only if, say, the tabled flower vases wobbled wildly enough to pitch water into the laps of those in the proverbial lap of luxury.

It's worth noting Sandburg avoids any mention of American industrial power and achievement, railroad safety or even the societal benefits of such modern conveniences — precisely the things that capitalism and this worker's efforts make possible. Doing so, Sandburg implies that the hands shaping these things into being receive decidedly less reward for their contributions than do our lauded captains of industry.

The challenge — and often the failure — of political poetry is the risk of putting off one's audience by fumingly preaching to them. Few readers welcome brickbats of self-hate cudgeled to their ears. Sandburg, at his clumsy worst, is capable of just that.

Here, Sandburg never says outright whom we should regard as good and bad guys. He doesn't harangue the capitalist venture. Instead, he merely counterposes the man's pride in workmanship with the extravagance of the pampered. His elemental odd man out appears therefore resolute as he shovels privilege for the wealthy while —simultaneously, Sandburg winks — digging his own grave.

Kevin Stein is Illinois' poet laureate.