Poetry in America with Elisa New (2018–…): Season 1, Episode 5 - Skyscraper - full transcript

By day, the skyscraper
looms in the smoke and sun,

and has a soul.

Prairie and valley,
streets of the city,

pour people into it,

and they mingle
among its twenty floors,

and are poured out again

back to the streets,
prairies, and valleys.

It is the men and women,
boys and girls,

so poured in and out all day,

that give the building
a soul of dreams

and thoughts and memories.



What gives a building soul?

Because the architect, in
designing it, gave it soul.

Thought about the scale,
and the elements.

The humanistic modulation,
so to speak.

We look at it in wonder
and want to go in it.

A skyscraper is something

that we see every day, but we
never really think about.

Writers show people that thing
that they see every day,

and then give it a soul,
so that people, like, look at it

in a different light.

It's important to remember

that when Sandburg
was writing this poem,

he was also a journalist.

And there's a real flow back and
forth between the poems



and the journalism.

I used to see skyscrapers

much less
with the human context,

but the poet himself
puts the spirit

inside buildings.

The poem is
a story about people.

It's from the perspective
of the building,

which I think is so interesting.

Sandburg's take on skyscrapers

is a lot different than the way
I feel about skyscrapers.

I'm an architect...
I have to think this way,

that there is a body language,
and an intent and a humanism

in a building

that supports the men and women,

boys and girls, who pour in.

It's a different way
of looking at the skyscraper.

I love the opening of the poem,

because I think
that what you can hear

right from the opening line

is the kind of double vision
of the poem.

"By day, the skyscraper looms
in the smoke and sun

and has a soul."

When you think of, like, a word
like "looms,"

and the kind of things
that loom,

it's often shadows that loom,
or it's monsters that loom.

Like, there's a hint of menace.

Right away, he's kind of
reminding you

that this is
an industrial landscape,

with the words "smoke"
as well as the word "sun."

Carl Sandburg's juxtaposition

of "smoke" and "sun"

tells us not only that we are
in the modern industrial world,

but that a Modernist eye
is seeing that world.

Technologies...
The airplane, the skyscraper...

Have given human beings
new vantage points

on the natural
and the manmade world.

And Modernist painters,
sculptors, architects, and poets

are all inventing structures
that carve nature

into new shapes.

In the time
that this poem was written,

we were industrializing,

so it's the sign
for human elevation,

literally, is the skyscraper.

Carl Sandburg's
early 20th-century Chicago

was a laboratory
for Modernist composition.

There, nature and the manmade
were set in dynamic interaction.

When you're on South Michigan,

it really looks like
you're on the ocean.

There's this huge lake
out there that you can't see,

of course, to the other side.

And you sort of feel,
from your perch, kind of,

on the 11th floor,
like, you know,

"Why did they put
this office building,

like, right up on the ocean?"

It's the buildings
and the context.

Those buildings wouldn't
have as much gravitas

if they weren't on the lake.

So there's a bigger story there
that makes it exciting.

Nature was no longer
merely setting.

Its power, in collision
with the built environment,

was now part of the drama.

"Hour by hour,

"the sun and the rain,

"the air and the rust,
and the press of time

"running into centuries,

play on the building
inside and out and use it."

You know, there's a rusty bridge

as you go in
from Kennedy to New York,

and it has a beauty...
The steel girders and the rust...

Compared to a new bridge.

That beauty comes from?

Nature's work on the bridge,
time.

One of the very first
Moderns to appear

in Chicago's newly established
Poetrymagazine,

Carl Sandburg wrote poems

asserting the turbulence
and dissonance of his city.

It's very hard for us

to think our way back
into how shocking

these poems would've been.

Dialmagazine
dismissed them as jargon,

said that they weren't
poems at all.

Other magazines referred to them
as, you know, ugly renderings

of ugly things.

"Elevators slide
on their cables,

"and tubes catch letters
and parcels,

"and iron pipes carry
gas and water in,

and sewage out."

I think he's fascinated by it.

He's fascinated
by how it was built,

he's fascinated by the mechanics
of operating it.

These inventions that came
out of the late 19th century

that make the building possible.

"Wires climb with secrets,

carry light and carry words."

His skyscraper
is about nuts and bolts,

and impersonal engineering,

and connections,
and the elevators,

and the stuff like that.

The cables, the tubes,
the wires.

Yeah, which could be

the ugliest piece of junk
in the world

and still be a skyscraper.

Not very poetic material.

But the way he said it...

It was the pipes, the sewage...

I could just see
the lines of them,

and it feels like moving lines.

"Elevators slide
on their cables,

"and tubes catch
letters and parcels,

"and iron pipes
carry gas and water in,

and sewage out."

For poetry,

do you isolate certain elements

and bring it out in a way

that is not usually seen?

When I look at the pipes, if you
just line the pipes together,

without thinking in the context,

by itself, it's beautiful.

He is trying
to assimilate and integrate

those mechanical inventions
into poetry

in a way that they hadn't been
there before.

- Oh, absolutely.

- And I do think, maybe,
is treating this building

as a composition of parts
that, like the poem, is art.

Right.

I began thinking

of the skyscraper
as a being in itself...

Like the mail
shooting through tubes,

and people wiring...
like, phones calling each other

in different, like,
areas of the skyscraper.

I was kind of reminded of veins.

At the same time, though,

I mean, he never lets you forget

that people died in order
to create this building.

I mean, like, when, even in the
next stanza where he says,

"Hour by hour,
the caissons reach down

"to the rock of the Earth
and hold the building

"to a turning planet.

"Hour by hour, the girders
play as ribs and reach out

and hold together
the stone walls and floors."

There is a kind of celebration
of these feats of engineering,

but what he's referring to
is these pneumatic caissons,

that, like, in the building
of the Brooklyn Bridge,

resulted in a lot of disease
and a lot of deaths.

There's kind of a suffering

that goes with it
that's almost Calvinist.

You go into
this rough environment,

you've got to suffer,
but then you bring soul to it.

I think one of the things

that's been forgotten about the
Sandburg of this period

is that he was
a radical Socialist.

This isn't sentimental
American Midwestern Socialism.

This is someone who's calling
for general strikes

and really hoping
for a revolution.

There's a contempt
for capitalism.

He's making you very aware
of the human cost

of this kind of economic system.

The Socialist cause

is, "Everybody's equal and
everybody's the same."

So in that context,

you don't want
the building to stand out.

You don't want it
to have a persona.

This isn't
a glamorous apartment building.

It's an office building

in which people are poured in
in the morning

and emptied out
at the end of the day.

And so it's hard for me
not to hear "pour"

as a kind of pun on "poor."

And yet, this poem

does seem to celebrate a large

and even sublime artifact
of human ingenuity

that's a new fact of nature.

I visited Chicago

for the first time
with my father

in the early '40s.

There was a kind of beauty,
an industrial beauty,

and it was pretty powerful.

The memory of it
is still in my head.

The modern-day equivalent

of early 20th-century Chicago

is 21st-century Beijing.

I grew up in China
in the '60s and '70s.

And there was no skyscraper.

So China's skyscrapers really
appeared in the last 20 years.

When the skyscrapers
came to Beijing

and more and more people
moved into the city,

it creates a very different
dynamic for the city.

It's good.

It has the energy

that the modern city
with that intensity has.

So, I think "pour"

is characteristic of
a certain kind of motion

that we love about the city.

We pour ourselves into stadiums
to see sports events.

For me, that "pour" unites us
with larger forces.

When I read this poem,

I thought the poet himself

saw the skyscraper as a temple.

I might argue

that Carl Sandburg's skyscraper
was a sacred space

that brings a disparate,
heterogeneous population

all together,

that harnesses or marshals
the creativity of many.

- That's not in this poem.

Not in the poem.

- Not for me.

Okay.

- I'll tell you what is
in the poem, though...

The makers of the building.

"Hour by hour,

"the hand of the mason
and the stuff of the mortar

"clinch the pieces and parts
to the shape

an architect voted."

"To the shape
an architect voted."

I should like that, but...

- Do you dislike that,
the architect voting?

- No, I think
that's a crack in his armor.

- Okay.

When the skyscrapers
came to Beijing,

the country migrants
came to the city to build.

So when you go
to a construction site,

you will see
thousands of workers.

"Men who sunk
the pilings and mixed the mortar

"are laid in graves

where the wind whistles
a wild song without words."

"And so are men

"who strung the wires
and fixed the pipes and tubes.

"And those who saw it rise,
floor by floor.

Souls of them all are here."

When people die
in the process of building,

a lot of times, you know,

like, they don't
get memorialized.

A lot of the times, you know,
when it comes to buildings,

things get named after,
like, the benefactors,

and the people that have,

you know, put, like,
monetary value,

instead of the people
who have put, like,

physical, like, life work
into it.

"One man fell from a girder

"and broke his neck
at the end of a straight plunge.

"He is here.

His soul has gone into
the stones of the building."

So at the same time
that he's fascinated

by this modern feat
of engineering,

he's not going to let you forget
for a second

the human toll
and the human cost behind it.

And I think that's what
makes the poem so powerful.

I mean, I think if it was just
simply one or the other...

This is very much
a kind of collage poem.

It really is.

You know, made out of contraries

and thriving on discontinuity.

That's right... and forcing you

to look at these oppositions,

including the oppositions
in his own feelings

and his own emotions

about what he's writing about.

"On the office doors
from tier to tier,

"hundreds of names,

"and each name
standing for a face

"written across with a dead
child, a passionate lover,

a driving ambition
for a million-dollar business."

When people die,

it is the reality that we're
sort of in denial about.

But I think everybody
will come at it

with some references
from their lives.

I mean, when you read that, I
can feel the tears welling up.

You know, I lost a child,
so when I read that,

I thought of her.

"Wires climb with secrets,

"carry light and carry words,

"and tell terrors
and profits and loves.

"Curses of men
grappling plans of business,

and questions of women
in plots of love."

All the human drama

we see on this great
vertical stage.

- And the people, right?

He spent a lot of time,

talked about the terrors,
the loves, the curses of men,

and the question of women
in plots of love.

Right away,
I was thinking about,

"Oh, what could be that?"

You know,
what could be the plots?

What could be the terrors?

"Ten-dollar-a-week stenographers

"take letters
from corporation officers,

lawyers, efficiency engineers."

She makes ten dollars a week.

Right.

For then,
it was considered little.

And so he wanted
to point it out...

A stenographer's pay was low.

And then the cleaners.

"Pails clang.

"Scrubbers work,
talking in foreign tongues."

I hadn't realized

in the beginning of the 20th
century in America,

the cleaners
were already new immigrants.

- Yes.

- So it's not so different
from today...

You go into a building
after work,

and the cleaners
are typically the people

who are speaking
foreign languages.

- What we get is the honoring
of those cleaners.

"Broom and water and mop

"clean from the floors
human dust and spit

and machine grime of the day."

There's a largeness...

That's right, yeah.

- ...to this small activity.

That reminds you,

don't forget the work
of these people

who make it possible,

even though it's easy

to marginalize them
and forget them.

Like, their work
is just as important.

"Hands of clocks

"turn to noon hours,

"and each floor empties
its men and women

"who go away and eat

and come back to work."

It's almost like

they're machines
that are going off

to be refueled at lunchtime
so that they can come back

and do even more work
in the afternoon.

It's very joyless.

And I, with my more
benign reading of the poem,

read that in a way
that there's a rhythm

and a cadence to modern life,

that, by the way,
seems completely recognizable

to all of us.

I kind of have this image

of the skyscraper sighing.

When it sighs,
all the people go out,

they, you know, eat,
and it breathes back in,

all the people come
back up the elevators.

There's no reference to beauty

and feeling of the building.

Sandburg's clear.

He's telling you that there's
no soul in the bloody thing

until the people get there.

But I think we want
the building to have soul

when you look at it.

You want to go in and love it

and be there
because you love it,

and then the soul
is double... double-charged.

The architects are so important

in their imagination

of how a building
will eventually be created.

I always get attracted
by someone's ideas

who are most emotional.

And that emotion is
some component of the soul.

In a way, it's sculpture, right?

Either something
you dismiss in 30 seconds

and say it's, oh,
another one of those,

or does it engage you
because it's got

a beautiful window pattern, or
a sculptural form or something,

that talks to the city it's in?

It's like when you see
a great painting,

and you really resonate with it,

it keeps you for days,
sometimes a week, you know,

if you really get into it.

It's better than
a shot of tequila.

"One by one,
the floors are emptied.

"The uniformed elevator men
are gone.

"Darkness on the hallways.

"Voices echo.

"Silence holds.

"Watchmen walk slow
from floor to floor

and try the doors."

I think there's something
peaceful about the guards

who are walking floor to floor,

and checking to make sure
everything's in its place...

That's their job,
that's their livelihood.

That's beautiful.

"Revolvers bulge
from their hip pockets.

"Steel safes stand in corners.

Money is stacked in them."

"Money is stacked in them."

That's...

That's sad.

The building, at night, is
turned over to these guards,

these night watchmen,
who are kind of literally

guarding, you know,
with their revolvers,

the results of capitalism.

"Spelled in electric
fire on the roof

"are words telling miles
of houses and people

where to buy a thing for money."

"Spelled in electric fire
on the roof are words

"telling miles of houses
and people

where to buy a thing for money."

Just the image of
burning electric fire

atop a skyscraper.

It's reached up
all its 20 stories

to display this message
from the top.

It's being broadcast
for all these people.

"A young watchman
leans at a window

"and sees the lights

"of barges butting their way

"across a harbor.

"Nets of red and white lanterns
in a railroad yard,

"and a span of glooms,
splashed with lines of white

and blurs of crosses in clusters
over the sleeping city."

Well, it's
a very romantic notion

of this single, lone person
who's the guardian of the night

for that building.

It's a powerful image.

That young watchman,
who, in a lot of ways,

is the only individuated figure
in the poem,

it's hard not to connect him
with the poet,

with the author of the poem.
- Absolutely.

This young watchman is Sandburg,
you know, living in Chicago,

kind of putting all the details
of this together, and...

Well, that is what a poet is.

A poet is a close observer.
- He's a watchman.

And what he surveys
is this gorgeous panorama.

The romance of the city
in the evening with the lights,

and we all feel that.

I look out a window in Manhattan
and I see

the Woolworth Building
and the Empire State Building,

and I get all excited about it.

And we all love it.

- We love it, that's right.

And we pay extra to live in
a place so we can look at it.

For all of this beauty

that's going on
in the city at night,

he still includes the phrase
"a span of glooms."

It's an incredibly skillful poem

that really, just kind of
line by line,

section by section,

is moving in multiple
directions simultaneously

with, I think, you know,
a very powerful vision

of what it means to live
in a city in, you know, the...

- In the 20th century, yeah.

"By night,

"the skyscraper looms
in the smoke and the stars

and has a soul."