Sam Elliott Should Record Carl Sandburg's Poetry

Another fruitful day on the poetry carousel in my American Literature class yesterday has brightened the room a little. Last year, in this same course, I had students discussing poems in their small groups, sharing their points on the board, and then rotating to another poem and adding their comments and reactions to other groups’ responses. Ideally, the most significant points about the poems, the poets, and the period come out based on the students’ own efforts under the teacher’s guidance. And, fortunately, this worked as it did last fall and spring, but, through an inadvertent but cogent observation by a student, who probably regarded it as a facetious remark, I and they saw just a bit more in Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago.”

The student remarked that the poem reminded them of a truck commercial and when I read that I instantly saw the association. The allusion was to the series of Chevrolet truck commercials over the last several years with the gruff voice-overs of the actor Sam Elliott with a driving insistent beat on the background musical soundtrack. The rugged can-do spirit extolled in the commercial to sell trucks is quite like the persona’s mood in “Chicago,” a poem which plainly refers to the commercial success (“Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation”) of the city’s rugged, can-do citizenry. Indeed, the poem that celebrates, among other things, Chicago’s commerce, becomes itself a commercial for that city, which we discussed in class. I suppose none of this will be news to Sandburg scholars, but for a room full of undergraduates unaccustomed to close readings of poetry, it was a significant moment.