“BAD OLD DAYS” A CENTURY APART

Kenneth Rexroth and Me

All literature at its best is an invitation to a conversation, a potential dialogue with an engaged reader. When I read the poem “The Bad Old Days” by Kenneth Rexroth, I felt an irrepressible urge to improvise a response. No doubt, as literature finds its niche in our lives and the lives of future generations, this will be its dynamic—call and response, question and answer, and the exchange of narratives.

This is the second poem I have read by Kenneth Rexroth. I appreciate his blunt, conversational style and his explosive phrases. Hyperbole is the counterfeit coin of literary criticism, but when it comes to describing Rexroth’s poetry, “blistering” is an understatement.

“The Bad Old Days” struck a personal chord. When I was a boy of nine or ten, I shopped for groceries with my mother every Friday evening. I loved the sensation of abundance and replenishment as we filled our cart—and later our fridge and cupboard—those Friday nights. Because by the end of the week, food was scarce in our house.

One evening as we pushed our cart through the produce section, I noticed the other shoppers for the first time. They were a gaunt and exhausted lot, drained of color and energy—on the last pulse of their elan vital. I was horrified at this candid glimpse of humanity. Instinct must have told me that I was seeing a preview of my future. The enthusiasm I had for shopping drained from me like the blood from these people’s pallid faces and was supplanted by dread.

I was never discreet about my feelings. I thought I could talk to my mother about anything, so I blurted out to her, “Who are these people? They look so sad.”

My mother’s mouth tightened and her face clenched in anger at the dread and pity in my voice and my childish naiveté. “I’m one of these people,” she said. “We work hard for a living and we’re tired.”

Now my dread had company—guilt over what I said and anger at myself for ruining my favorite weeknight. But something worse transpired at that moment. I felt that my mother was deciding something about me and that my life would never be the same.

In some cultures, boys and girls are initiated to the adult world by traditional rituals, but on that evening in the supermarket, I initiated myself. A few months later my mom insisted that I get a job. For my first gig I took over a neighborhood boy’s morning paper route for one weekend. However, the true test was getting paid for it. I knocked on his door many times and had to plead with his mother to fork over the $10 they owed me. It was my crash course in why the supermarket shoppers looked so grim, but I still never wanted to be like them.

 The Bad Old Days by Kenneth Rexroth

The summer of nineteen eighteen   

I read The Jungle and The

Research Magnificent. That fall   

My father died and my aunt   

Took me to Chicago to live.   

The first thing I did was to take   

A streetcar to the stockyards.   

In the winter afternoon,   

Gritty and fetid, I walked

Through the filthy snow, through the   

Squalid streets, looking shyly   

Into the people’s faces,

Those who were home in the daytime.   

Debauched and exhausted faces,   

Starved and looted brains, faces   

Like the faces in the senile   

And insane wards of charity   

Hospitals. Predatory

Faces of little children.

Then as the soiled twilight darkened,   

Under the green gas lamps, and the   

Sputtering purple arc lamps,   

The faces of the men coming

Home from work, some still alive with   

The last pulse of hope or courage,   

Some sly and bitter, some smart and   

Silly, most of them already   

Broken and empty, no life,   

Only blinding tiredness, worse   

Than any tired animal.   

The sour smells of a thousand   

Suppers of fried potatoes and   

Fried cabbage bled into the street.   

I was giddy and sick, and out   

Of my misery I felt rising   

A terrible anger and out

Of the anger, an absolute vow.   

Today the evil is clean

And prosperous, but it is   

Everywhere, you don’t have to   

Take a streetcar to find it,

And it is the same evil.

And the misery, and the

Anger, and the vow are the same.