CALLING ALL PUBLISHERS
One of the great American novelists of the 20th century, Nelson Algren is always associated with Chicago, where he grew up and gained fame as its most ardent chronicler -- Carl Sandburg, Saul Bellow, Richard Wright and James T. Farrell notwithstanding. Algren's notorious love-hate relationship with Chicago went beyond the city's limits. It filled his novels -- "The Man With the Golden Arm," "A Walk on the Wild Side" and "Never Come Morning," to name just three -- and his long-limbed, undersung poetry.
Below are a few excerpts from a 28-page poem, entitled "Ode to Kissassville," which to my knowledge has never been properly published. (To get accurate line breaks, enlarge your screen image to the max.) Filled as it is with sardonic humor, lyrical grace, and an outrage that is more timely than ever, "Ode to Kissassville" would make a wonderful chapbook. It was written more than 40 years ago and centers on Chicago but surely applies to the current state of our Banana Republic.
The poem once appeared as an epilogue in 100 copies of a 1961 reprint edition of his prose poem "Chicago: City on the Make." The edition now in print from the University of Chicago Press, with an introduction from his old friend Studs Terkel, does not include the epilogue.
"Ode to Kissassville" begins:
Hog-Butcher, Stacker-of-Wheat, Freight-Handler, Piano-
Mover, Tall bold slugger set
vivid among the little soft cities and
All-Around-Rotating-Fink-To-The-Nation
Where
else
(Contentedly at rest before the evening telly)
Could I watch PROFILE OF A
SECRET WAR:
TASK FORCE TUFF KEEPING CHICAGO STRONG AND AMERICA
MIGHTY
(WGN-TV assisting the forces of law and order
By entrapping two derelicts
into a feeble attempt at mugging)
What other city could show me eight armed
cops
Beating the living bejesus out of two defenseless winos
In Living
Color?
Show me another city so proud to be alive
That it can fit two citizen-dress men into
false bra's
And tight gowns
Then send them down Skid Row bravely swinging
handbags
And hips rolling.
What New York's police would like to do, Chicago's really
can
In that contented evening hour when we learn to Trap Our Man.
It has stanzas such as this:
The perch -- the alderman reminds us well --
Have disappeared.
The underwater
population now consists
Of bloodworms, sludgeworms
And fingernail clams.
Yet
once, where Marina Towers' twin-atrocities now stand
The Pottawattomies hunted down
both banks
And the river flowed cleaner and more deeply then.
And
this:
Under the terrible burden of destiny
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter
laughs
Who has never lost a battle
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the
pulse
And under his ribs the heart of the people --
Hurray for our side.
If my City
of the Big Shoulders
Stormy, husky, bawling
Yipping, yapping, yessing,
crawling
Would only stop giggling like a farm-boy wearing earrings
On North Wells
Street for the first time
Maybe we could find out what kind of joint we're living in.
And this:
Again that hour when taxies are deadheading home
Before the trolley-buses start to
run
And snowdreams in a lace of mist drift down
And paving-flares make shadows on
old walls
When from asylum, barrack, cell and cheap hotel
All those whose lives were
lived by someone else
Who never had a choice but went on what was left
Return along
long walks where thrusts of wintry grass
By force of love have split the measured
stone.
If by chance a publisher reads this and is prompted, inspired or brave and crazy enough to bring out a "Kissassville" chapbook, please let me know.
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