Transcript: Carl Sandburg: Chicago

PENELOPE NIVEN: The turning point for Sandburg in Chicago was that publication in Poetry Magazine in 1914 of Chicago Poems and some others. That was the turning point because picture him before then. He and Paula have come uh... into Chicago from Milwaukee. He's taken a particular job on a socialist newspaper. He's lost the job. He has been writing for a hardware journal. He's-- he is so adrift. He's desperate to find work, the bread and butter work as he always called it, to support his family. He's practically given up the idea of the poetry. His wife says you can't give it up and she's typing those poems at night and during the day on a typewriter that doesn't even have all of its keys and, and she gives him the faith to go on. And he, at this wonderful moment of convergence, gets the acceptance in Poetry Magazine and he finds a job. So this is the, this is the turning point for him.

LILIAN SANDBURG: And among those poems was the "Chicago" poem, which aroused quite a little controversy. And I think that the very fact that it aroused controversy really helped win the prize, the prize for it because there was more interest in it.

AUDIO (ROSCOE LEE BROWNE reads "Chicago," from Poetry of Carl Sandburg):

CHICAGO

Hog Butcher for the World,

Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,

Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight

Handler;

Stormy, husky, brawling,

City of the Big Shoulders.

TED KOOSER: And don’t you suppose, even in today’s day and age that people still think about Chicago in the way that Sandburg sort of portrayed it for people?

STUDS TERKEL: But it was “hog butcher of the world”… there were the stockyards. It was “stacker of wheat”, the granaries… “Player with railroads, nation’s freight handler,” one thousand passenger trains stopped off in Chicago every day.

PENELOPE NIVEN: Chicago captured his imagination when he was a young immigrant boy back in Galesburg. It held his imagination from the moment he first saw it. It permeated his work uh…for years and years afterward.

STUDS TERKEL: But it's still that city, it's still the archetypal American city that Sandburg sang about.

EDWARD HIRSCH reads “Chicago”: Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.

STUDS TERKEL: And guys would kid that, ‘Show me another city, so corrupt’…but all of that was part of the archetype of the city, and that's the one that Sandburg celebrated.

TIM STAFFORD (reciting excerpt from Chicago):

Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing

with white teeth

Under the terrible burden of destiny, laughing as a

young man laughs, laughing even as an ignorant

fighter laughs who has never lost a battle

Laughing and bragging that under his wrist is the

pulse, in his rib, 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.

EDWARD HIRSCH: There’s something in Sandburg that’s raw, that’s violent, that’s coarse, that’s uneven, but which is deeply democratic.

GEOFFREY O’BRIEN: Sandburg, from the moment he emerged into public awareness, was seen as the harbinger of a new kind of poetry.

PENELOPE NIVEN: One of the most popular poems of the time was Joyce Kilmer’s ‘I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree.’ This was a--this was a poem in vogue and, and then here comes Sandburg with ‘The Hog Butcher to the World,’ something-- and it is-- that's so unorthodox in its form, first of all, but also in its subject matter and it was-- truly was a shock.