8TH ANNUAL NAPOMO 30/30/30 ::DAY 2:: TREVOR LISA on NELSON ALGREN
Welcome to the OS’s 8th Annual NAPOMO 30/30/30 Series! This year, contributors far and wide were gathered by four incredible curators, who are also our 2019 Chapbook Poets — to learn more about this year’s amazing curators and their forthcoming chapbooks , please click here! You can also navigate to the series archive, of over 200 entries, here!
This week’s curator is Magdalena Zurawski, author of the Don’t Be Scared
1
I’m not from anywhere. I have no sense of regional identity, no cuisine to call my own, no accent. The theme of my adolescence was that I was always moving — I went from New Jersey to Philadelphia to Charlotte to Atlanta from ages seven to seventeen. With age, I’ve come to understand that none of this was strictly work-related on my parents’ part; we were moved more by a kind of galvanized suburban scramble, scouring around for lower living costs. We moved in the summers, we moved during the school year once. This seemed normal.
I now live in Chicago, a place I came to with my girlfriend by way of Athens, Georgia about three years ago, with vague notions of wanting to be a “city person” in some capacity. It might be safe at this point to say that Chicago is my home; however, if — as I’ve been told by friends — “home” is a state of nestling into the habits and attitudes of a place, it’s still outside of my knowledge how one enters that space. I have absolutely no sense of what it means to be “at home” somewhere. But after reading Nelson Algren’s 1951 book-length prose poem Chicago: City on the Make, I feel like the only place I’ve ever lived — the only place I will ever live — is Algren’s Chicago.
I say this because I’m an American, and I think being jerked around the country for no reason other than property taxes, like I was, is a uniquely American phenomenon.
2
Algren’s poem is populated by drifters, which is perhaps why it speaks so clearly to me:
“The useless, helpless nobodies nobody knows: that go as the snow goes, where the wind blows, there and there and there, down any old cat-and-ashcan alley at all” (68).
The story of how I came across the poem doesn’t matter. It could have been mailed to me, I could have found it wet and face-down on the sidewalk. It’s a poem that saw me for who I am and seemed to both mock and legitimize me.
You can belong to New Orleans. You can belong to Boston or San Francisco. You might conceivably — however clandestinely — belong to Philadelphia. But you can’t belong to Chicago any more than you can belong to the flying saucer called Los Angeles. For it isn’t so much a city as it is a drafty hustler’s junction in which to hustle awhile and move on out of the draft. (46)
As someone who doesn’t “belong” anywhere, I find something reassuring in the distance he builds between the city and the citizen. A city that expressly isn’t interested in my being here — where I am suspended in mid-air — offers a kind of odd acceptance that I’ve never known from a place.
But just because the city won’t accept you doesn’t mean that you can’t love it.
Yet on nights when, under all the arc-lamps, the little men of the rain come running, you’ll know at last that, long long ago, something went wrong between St. Columbanus and North Troy Street. And Chicago divided your heart. Leaving you loving the joint for keeps. Yet knowing it never can love you. (49)
3
The power of Algren’s poem arises from scope. He uses Chicago’s history of flagrant corruption to localize a treatise on American capitalism as a whole. He’s ruthless in this regard; at the outset of the poem, he summarizes the city’s early days thus:
To the east were moving waters, as far as eye could follow. To the west a sea of grass as far as wind might reach.
Waters restlessly, with every motion, slipping out of used colors for new. So that each fresh wind off the lake washed the prairie grasses with used sea-colors: the prairie moved in the light like a secondhand sea.
Till between the waters and the wind came the marked-down derelicts with the dollar signs for eyes.
Looking for any prairie portage at all that hadn’t yet built a jail.
Beside any old secondhand sea.
………………………………………………………………………
They hustled the land, they hustled the Indian, they hustled by night and they hustled by day.
………………………………………………………………………
Paid the Pottawattomies off in cash in the cool of the Indian evening: and had the cash back to the dime by the break of the Indian dawn.
……………………………………………………………………….
They’d do anything under the sun except work for a living, and we remember them reverently, with Balaban and Katz, under such subtitles as “Founding Fathers,” “Dauntless Pioneers” or “Far-Visioned Conquerors.”
Meaning merely they were out to make a fast buck off whoever was standing nearest.
They never conquered as well as they hustled — their arithmetic was sharper than their hunting knives (10–12).
His Chicago is quite literally stolen property. Opening with the settlers’ shady dealings on the prairie with the Pottawattamie allows Algren to situate all of his subsequent characters on ground that is morally compromised. This is a theme he follows throughout the poem, that Chicago is a bastion for “hustlers,” a place founded by cheaters and “derelicts with the dollar signs for eyes.” Their viciousness is only further accentuated by the romantic possibility and openness he creates by eliciting the “prairie mov[ing] in the light like a secondhand sea” at the poem’s beginning. It’s a gorgeous image. No wonder the hustlers were drawn to it.
Chicago never outgrows its beginnings, and never leaves the prairie. Forty-odd pages into the poem, he comes back to the image in this areal shot of the city:
But Hustlertown keeps spreading itself all over the prairie grass, always wider and whiter: the high broken horizon of its towers overlooks this inland sea with more dignity than Athens’ and more majesty than Troy’s. Yet the caissons below the towers somehow never secure a strong natural grip on the prairie grasses.” (48)
Growth for growth’s sake, he seems to suggest, is a kind of compensation for the past. A method of asserting your presence. He never lets you forget the past because it speaks to the city’s ethos.
“Most native of American cities,” Algren calls it “where the chrome-colored convertible cuts through traffic ahead of the Polish peddler’s pushcart” (48).
Everything in the city is in motion. Everyone is “on the make.”
Chicago spent most of its childhood years as a stockyard, a logistics hub. It’s a place that was built to move capital, and when a city is founded on nothing outside of the market’s laws, political corruption is a natural consequence. Algren lends some perspective to the present American situation when he says “nobody but an outlaw could maintain a semblance of law and order on the common highway” (14). Under the neoliberal capitalist economy — where capital is untethered, free to move about the globe promiscuously — who better to maintain “the common highway” than dishonest plutocrats, the ones who have internalized the patterns and motions of it all?
4
Algren spends a good deal of Chicago devoted to the city’s big political reaches, which become its unifying moments.
“For the masses who do the city’s labor also keep the city’s heart” (68).
This is precisely where “place” emerges in the poem, though to say that he wrote a political poem would be oversimplifying the matter.
“City of the big shoulders” was how the white-haired poet put it. Maybe meaning that the shoulders had to get that wide because they had so many bone-deep grudges to settle. The big dark grudge cast by the four standing in white muslin robes, hands cuffed behind, at the gallows’ head. For the hope of the eight-hour day (62).
The “four standing in white muslin robes” are the Haymarket Martyrs, radical labor activists who were wrongly accused — convicted, and hung — for conspiracy when violence broke out at a largely peaceful protest in 1886. Someone (to this day nobody knows who) threw a bomb and a group of protesters were rounded up on the basis of ethnicity and political affiliation. To conservatives, the bomb represented a foreign-born anarchy that needed to be stomped out. The event drew international attention from artists and political activists, and played an undeniable role in establishing the eight-hour work day. International Workers’ Day — Labo(u)r Day, in some countries — is held annually on May 1st, to commemorate the event.
“Most radical of American cities,” Algren calls it, “the One-Big-Union town” (64). This kind of progressivism could only have happened in a place where the workers openly quarrel with their oppressors.
Town of the great Lincolnian liberals, the ones who stuck out their stubborn necks in the ceaseless battle between the rights of Owners and the rights of Man, the stiff-necked wonders who could be broken but couldn’t be bent. (66)
The poem’s dealing with politics makes me think of the philosophy of Hannah Arendt. She was something of a Chicagoan herself, having taught at Northwestern University and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago in the 60’s. As she lays out in The Human Condition, one of the central forms of human activity is “Action,” or our ability to come together and act in concert. She discusses this in regard to the labor movements of the early 20th century in Europe:
The enormous power potential these movements acquired in a relatively short time and often under very adverse circumstances sprang from the fact that despite all the talk and theory they were they only group on the political scene which not only defended its economic interests but fought a full-fledged political battle…it was the only organization in which men acted qua men — and not qua members of society (219).
One of the cornerstone’s of her thinking is that politics is tied to people not as poets“citizens,” but as Anthropos — as “mankind” — which is concerned less with the standards prescient at a given moment than the overall conditions of objective morality and human fulfillment. Her politics — built on the unifying nature of free speech — doesn’t settle, and continually reaches out for goals. “Action” is deeply embedded in Chicago’s history of resistance.
5
Yet once you’ve come to be part of this particular patch, you’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real. (23)
Chicago is “real” because Chicago is America. The poem forces me to reflect on the state of the American city — on the state of America, in general — to look beyond my urge to bemoan neoliberal capitalism and see what arises when people organize. Algren’s Chicago is alive to the texture of life; despite all of its misgivings, the city is a battleground for ideology, a place where people find themselves compelled to try to change the status quo. It’s hard not to attach yourself to that.
And lately, I seem to have less difficulty answering people when they ask me “where are you from?” I’m from Chicago, I say. I’ve always been here.
Works Cited:
Algren, Nelson. Chicago: City on the Make. 5th Edition, The University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 2nd Edition, The University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Trevor Lisa is a fiction writer living in Chicago. He studied creative writing at the University of Georgia. He has spent the better part of the last three years working on a novel about fascism, college football, and multi-level marketing schemes. He is also the author of the chapbook “Make The Pure Products of America Go Crazy Again.”
