by Carl Sandburg
As someone who claims to be devoted to poetry, it is a bit embarrassing to be introduced to this major work by Carl Sandburg (his favorite, according to his wife) and to realize that the only Carl Sandburg poem I have read in my whole life, perhaps the first poem I ever read, is The Fog Comes in on Little Cat Feet, maybe because I was born near San Francisco and people there always have a lot to say about fog.
I learned about this book from the ironically titled The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism, by Thomas Frank, and it is currently my nightly just-a-few-pages-of-poetry selection. A book length prose poem written in the depths of the Depression, Sandburg celebrates “the common man” with his imagery of the daily lives of working people, their sayings and tales and songs, their joys and miseries, and the ways in which our country has ground them down under its great capital-driven heel. I often try to pair fiction and non-fiction of the same theme, but it is a new experience to read poetry that enriches the political non-fiction I have been reading lately. Now that I have read more about Sandburg’s life, I will definitely be looking for more of his poetry, and a good biography. He was a major influence on American culture in his day, and certainly deserves to be remembered for more than a pretty good poem about fog.