On Chicago: Two poems by Sherwood Anderson
February 6, 2010
In Middle America men are awakening. Like awkward and untrained boys we begin to turn toward maturity and with our awakening we hunger for song. But in our towns and fields there are few memory haunted places. Here we stand in roaring city streets, on steaming coal heaps, in the shadow of factories from which come only the grinding roar of machines. We do not sing but mutter in the darkness. Our lips are cracked with dust and with the heat of furnaces. We but mutter and feel our way toward the promise of song.
From: Mid-American Chants (1918)
CHICAGO
I am mature, a man child, in America, in the West, in the
great valley of the Mississippi. My head arises above
the cornfields. I stand up among the new corn.
I am a child, a confused child in a confused world. There
are no clothes made that fit me. The minds of men
cannot clothe me. Great projects arise within me. I
have a brain and it is cunning and shrewd.
I want leisure to become beautiful, but there is no leisure.
Men should bathe me with prayers and with weeping,
but there are no men.
Now — from now — from to-day I shall do deeds of fiery
meaning. Songs shall arise in my throat and hurt me.
I am a little thing, a tiny little thing on the vast prairies.
I know nothing. My mouth is dirty. I cannot tell what
I want. My feet are sunk in the black swampy land, but
I am a lover. I love life. In the end love shall save me.
The days are long — it rains — it snows. I am an old man.
I am sweeping the ground where my grave shall be.
Look upon me, my beloved, my lover who does not come.
I am raw and bleeding, a new thing in a new world. I
run swiftly o'er bare fields. Listen — there is the sound
of the tramping of many feet. Life is dying in me. I
am old and palsied. I am just at the beginning of my life.
Do you not see that I am old, O my beloved? Do you
not understand that I cannot sing, that my songs choke
me? Do you not see that I am so young I cannot find
the word in the confusion of words?
SONG OF THE SOUL OF CHICAGO
On the bridges, on the bridges — swooping and rising, whirling
and circling — back to the bridges, always the bridges.
I'll talk forever — I'm damned if I'll sing. Don't you see
that mine is not a singing people? We're just a lot of
muddy things caught up by the stream. You can't fool
us. Don't we know ourselves?
Here we are, out here in Chicago. You think we're not
humble? You're a liar. We are like the sewerage of our
town, swept up stream by a kind of mechanical triumph
— that's what we are.
On the bridges, on the bridges — wagons and motors, horses
and men — not flying, just tearing along and swearing.
By God we'll love each other or die trying. We'll get to
understanding too. In some grim way our own song shall
work through.
We'll stay down in the muddy depths of our stream — we
will. There can't any poet come out here and sit on the
shaky rail of our ugly bridges and sing us into paradise.
We're finding out — that's what I want to say. We'll get
at our own thing out here or die for it. We're going
down, numberless thousands of us, into ugly oblivion.
We know that.
But say, bards, you keep off our bridges. Keep out of our
dreams, dreamers. We want to give this democracy thing
they talk so big about a whirl. We want to see if we
are any good out here, we Americans from all over hell.
That's what we want.
NOTE: I have only begun to read a bit of Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio), but I must admit - so far I don't get him. Regarding the above two poems, one naturally will compare them to Carl Sandburg's, "Chicago," but in my humble evaluation there is no comparison. Anderson confuses me. Am I missing something? Please, enlighten me!
For more information on Sherwood Anderson, see his Chicago History Online links page.
Photo credit: Ohioana Library
Posts
2.jpg)
4 comments:
Winesburg is a great book, but regarding his poetry, I agree with you - I don't get it either. Or should I say "poetry" - to me this really isn't poetry at all, but prose with line breaks. And definitely not even close to Sandburg.
Completely agree. It also took me a while to get into Winesburg, but it does start to grab you. The poetry, on the other hand, is lost on me. Thanks for stopping!
it's almost like he's trying to be a psychologist and make a political or philosophical comment at the same time. it is kind of difficult to immediately understand but as you think about it you begin to intuitively grasp it.
I get it. This last snow storm, the revelry of neighbors, out together for the first time in four months, together, working for their common goals. I walked my neighborhood. In the middle of the unplowed streets, neighbors were out, bottles passed, cars dug, alleys cleared by hand as 40 people shoveled.
This is the shit Anderson is talking about.
When this poem was written the streets were filled with Czechs, Polacks, Italians, European Jews, you name it. Chicago was a boom town, the fire and the rebuilding, the stock yards hiring men to work, and work hard, the brick works, canneries, tanneries and steel mills took these immigrants and put them to work.
I live in Pilsen, a predominately now a Mexican immigrant neighborhood. I have lived in Skokie, unbelievably a town of new arrivals (in my area at least), always the working man’s North Shore, and I have lived in Roger’s Park, in a building with Africans and Bosnians. If you want community, you need your car dug out, a mattress carried up the stairs, or to sit with your neighbors eating a good piece of grilled chicken and drinking a beer, turn to new arrivals, and learn from them.
The commonality, the reason I bring up this snow storm, is that Anderson is writing in a time and place that I see everyday. Workers working, working the hardest jobs, and going back home to be part of a community. Forget trying to synthesize it into some psycho-sociological definition, Anderson specifically tells us not to. We don’t need that in Chicago.
We don’t need your finery of New York, your intellectual snobbery, your Tammany hall, we got neighbors that we need to create with, we got shit to do. And the less we think about it, the more we will get done.
Post a Comment