This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
Most of us first learn about Chicago from a poem in tenth grade. "Hog Butcher for the World," the poem shouts, "Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads...Stormy, husky, brawling..."
For many, that poem is also our first taste of "free verse." It has no meter, no message at the end, the lines don't rhyme, and the subject is far removed from the love, hearts, and flowers we have already come to expect of poems by tenth grade. Why is this a poem, we ask.
Its author has an answer we Rock Islanders like. Carl Sandburg grew up in Galesburg, Illinois, just south of here. He's one of us. "Poetry," he once wrote, "is the achievement of the synthesis of biscuits and hyacinths." How can that be? Biscuits are the humblest and simplest of all breads, while hyacinths are among the most exotic and perfume-y of all spring flowers.
"Exactly," Sandburg might reply, for he believed that the best poets took the things of this earth—our utensil and tools, our homes and workplaces, and even our everyday words and phrases (the biscuits of our lives)—and revealed through them the beauty of ordinary things—the hyacinth in the biscuit. Real beauty, not mere ornamentation: the real beauty of fog, of grass, of a caboose, and of Chicago.
And it works, doesn't it? Chicago is the most biscuit-y of cities in that poem. Remember the "painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys," or the faces of women and children marked by wanton hunger, or "the gunman kill and go free to kill again?" The words themselves are crude and disjointed. But out of this a hard, hyacinth beauty blooms, and we agree with the poet who asks readers "to show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and course and strong."
And when, after tenth grade, we eventually come to visit Chicago, and stand at Randolph and State Streets listening to the "shoveling, wrecking, planning, building, and breaking," we feel we have come home.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
