A Very Early Taste of Poetry

by Joseph S. Salemi

The earliest and most important steps in attaining literacy are not usually remembered. I liked drawing with a pencil on paper when I was a toddler, and I would fill up each blank page with rows and rows of the letter “O,” the only one that I had mastered. I knew that adults wrote things on paper, and I wanted very much to do the same.

In 1952, when I was four, I was at my maternal grandparents’ home, busily writing a page of O’s. My grandfather asked to see what I was doing, and when I showed him my paper, he told me that there were many other letters besides O. He patiently drew each one of them for me, and made me copy them out carefully. Within two hours I knew the entire alphabet (in Roman capitals) and could draw each letter when it was named.

That was my start in literacy. When I got to my first-grade class with Mrs. Leonard in 1953, I was already reading simple English texts. My mother read to her two sons constantly, and we loved looking at illustrated books. I guess you could say that I learned to read by osmosis.

With poetry it was different. Poetry I learned by ear, hearing it recited to me by my grandfather and my parents. It never occurred to me to write a poem down, since I just assumed that it was something you heard and memorized. The fact that a poem could be on a page was clear to me when I listened to someone read it aloud from a book, but my primary reaction was to poetry’s sound and structure, and the pure pleasure that they gave.

My earliest taste of verse, however, came not from my grandfather or my parents but from a group of inebriated men who were singing. Here’s how it happened.

My father ran a fruit and vegetable store called the Broadway Fruit Center in Queens County, New York. Two or three times a week, at 4 A.M., he would drive his truck to Washington Market in lower Manhattan to buy fresh produce to stock his store’s bins and display shelves. In 1953 he took me along with him several times, even though I was only five.

The Washington Market had existed since the early 1800s, but with urban renewal in the early 1960s its activities were transferred up to the Bronx. In 1953 it was nearly 150 years old, and as dark and haunting as some antebellum ruin.

I was deeply rattled by the visits we made there, usually from 5 to 6 A.M. The huge market was a sprawling, noisy, labyrinthine place, filled with hurried movement and strong smells. The persons in the market (both buyers and sellers) were all male, all tough working-class, very savage in their speech and cursing, and prone to arguing and bickering over prices. Some were farmers from upstate New York, some were commercial suppliers, and many were proprietors of small grocery or produce businesses like my father. Most had trucks, but many had horse-drawn wagons.

The horse-drawn vehicles scared me. These were pulled by big, heavy-draft animals, close to fifteen hands high, sweating profusely and pissing and shitting directly on the cobblestone streets. At 5 A.M., when it was barely light, the stamping and neighing of these animals were terrifying. All this, along with the smell of fruits and vegetables, added to that of rotting vegetation and wet earth, made an indelible impression on me.

Going to Washington Market at 5 A.M. with my father, and being with him as he walked around buying produce for our store in Queens, was one hell of an experience. My dad was on familiar terms with every guy he spoke to. He had been making trips to Manhattan even back in the 1930s, when he and his father ran the family produce store in Woodside. But I didn’t know anyone, and I felt profoundly out of place.

Kids remember curious things. I recall one morning when an older guy came up to my dad, and said “Sal, look at these—pure candy!” And he opened up a small oblong box of beautiful white mushrooms nestled in excelsior. My father answered “Nah, I can’t use ’em… too expensive for me to make a profit.” Later on that morning he bought oranges, onions, potatoes, and a strange-looking box of Belgian endive (something I had never seen before).

My dad also stocked some unusual—for that time—produce that would only be bought by the older Italian women who came to his store. They were uncommon things like radicchio, broccoli rabe, dandelion greens, finocchio, cardune, and small plum tomatoes. Years later he told me that he never really made any significant profit on those items, but it was good business to offer them because it kept the old Italian ladies coming, and then they would also buy other stuff. How ironic that radicchio and broccoli rabe became trendy items for yuppies in the 1970s, and flew up in price! The plum tomatoes were the traditional ingredient for making tomato sauce in Italy, and it was still being done that way by these older Italian women, who had emigrated to America in the beginning of the twentieth century.

But let’s get to my inebriated introduction to recited poetry.

Besides buyers and sellers, Washington Market also had a large number of laborers for hire. They were of all ages, and usually did heavy-duty tasks like carrying crates and baskets, piling up sacks of onions, or loading purchased goods onto someone’s truck or wagon. They were paid small sums right on the spot for each job done. This kind of work could hardly provide a living, and the men were either temporarily unemployed, or chronic drunks who just needed a few bucks to buy a bottle. One cold morning I heard the following song, loudly bawled by a bunch of these bedraggled, half-drunken guys hanging out by a wagon that sold hot coffee and beers. I guess this was one of my first experiences with extensive verse, recited (or sung) aloud. Here goes:

Jolly Old Bums

Jolly old bums, jolly old bums,
_Jolly old bums are we!
We hang around the corner
_As happy as can be.

The other day we met a man
_We never met before—
He asked us if we wanted a job
_Shoveling iron ore.

We asked him what the wages were;
_He said “Fifty cents a ton.”
We told him to keep his lousy job
_’Cause we were on the bum.

Sleeping in the pushcarts,
_Loafing by the walls,
Watching the roaches and bedbugs
_Having a game of ball.

The score was forty—nothing,
_The roaches were ahead—
The bedbugs hit a homer
_And knocked me out of bed.

Seven o’clock in the morning
_The midget came around.
She had a rotten tomato
_That nearly weighed a pound.

The coffee tastes like tobacco juice,
_The bread is hard and stale.
And that’s the way they treat the boys
_In Staten Island jail!

Hearing grown men sing in loud, raucous voices scared me, and their intoxication was also unnerving. But I couldn’t help being fascinated by this song of theirs, which they sang several times as they hung around waiting to be hired for some small job.

On our ride back home, I asked my father about the men and their song. He smiled and said “They’re just a bunch of bums who help lift things, and they always sing that song when they’re not at work.” And then he recited the lyrics to me, singing with the same melody and intonation as the men. Pretty soon the lyrics were fixed in my mind, and I began to sing the song at home. My mother was appalled.

Arthur Mortensen, the webmaster at Expansive Poetry Online, located a number of versions of this song (some whole, some partial, some markedly different). It’s clear that it is an old composition that has passed through many hands and been sung by many voices. There even was an upscale, fancy version of it recorded by the singer Polly Bergen in 1958.

One thing that intrigued this five-year-old about the song was its mystery. What were “bums”? What did it mean to be “on the bum”? What did “shoveling iron ore” refer to? What was “tobacco juice”? And who was this female midget, walking around with a huge rotten tomato? I knew Staten Island because we had several relatives who lived there, but it was a rather sleepy semi-rural place back in 1953 and I couldn’t imagine why they had a jail.

But this is one of the important things about any poem: it has to be intriguing and interesting! And “Jolly Old Bums” presented me with strange images: insects playing baseball, someone being knocked out of bed, sleeping in a pushcart. Of course the mystery was there because I was so young at the time. But that’s one of the reasons why nursery rhymes from Mother Goose are beloved by children—they often present material that is strange and inexplicable on the surface.

Even more important were the meter and its stresses. The first line is composed of two choriambs:

_/___ x_ x___ /____ / _x__ x___/
JOL- ly old BUMS, || JOL-ly old BUMS…

When you have a pounding rhythm like that, it commands attention. In fact the entire song demands a very solid stress on every accented syllable, almost like the hard but measured blows of a fighter practicing on a punching bag. This rhythm held my attention, and was probably the reason that I found it so easy to memorize the lyrics.

Another thing about the song is harder to explain, and that is its insouciance.

This is a hard word to define precisely—it can mean carefree unconcern, flippancy, freedom from worry (sans souci in French), or a general lack of interest in what the reaction of others may be to something you say or do. “Jolly Old Bums” is pure insouciance. It is about bums who don’t give a damn about anything, who refuse jobs, who sleep and loaf, and who are content to observe small facets of life (midgets with tomatoes, bad food in jail, vermin in one’s bedding).

Note that the second and third quatrains are a small, self-contained narrative. They just tell how the bums were offered a job and refused it. But the refusal is done with contempt and disdain, showing the speakers to be men of self-respect, with a strong sense of what their labor is worth. They tell the man to “keep his lousy job.” That is true insouciance.

The fourth and fifth quatrains offer another narrative—that of the baseball game between bedbugs and roaches. This is ostensibly comic, but its real purpose is to be overtly offensive and “in-your-face,” to use a modern idiom. No one likes roaches and bedbugs, so speaking of them in a familiar, friendly way is challenging and possibly upsetting to some readers. And the final quatrain about the Staten Island jail is one of complaint, but one spoken with happy and fierce defiance, as if to say “We’ve been to that jail, and we know how bad the damned place is!” Notice also the grammatical parallelism of the fourth quatrain, which is composed solely of present participles governing noun phrases. That makes for a tight, clipped narrative. There is no main verb to tell us so, but it is perfectly clear that this is to be understood as a self-description of the bums.

I may not have understood everything in the song back in 1953, but I knew one thing for sure—these bums were independent, unafraid, willing to shout out loud what they were thinking, and totally oblivious to what others may have thought about them. And the way they hammered out their words like blows on an anvil (very much like early Latin Saturnian verse) made the whole business irresistible. I loved its force, its energy, its willingness to ruffle feathers, and its sheer “I-don’t-give-a-bloody-damn” attitude. I learned early that one of poetry’s tasks was to kick ass.

If this experience provided any other preliminary lessons for me, they were most likely these: 1) A really effective poem has to grab you by the throat, and it doesn’t matter how the poet manages it. 2) Sound and rhythm are crucial in a poem, and you had better make the reader aware of both of them. 3) If you are worried about reader-response to your poem, you are already on the way to failure. I probably did not formulate those three maxims until much later on, but the seeds of them were planted in my mind at the Washington Market.

Note:

The photograph illustrating this essay is from about 1926. It shows the entrance to my paternal grandfather’s grocery and produce store in Yorkville, Manhattan. The figure on the left is my grandfather Giuseppe Salemi (1879-1970) with his eldest son, my Uncle Damiano (1909-1989).

Joseph S. Salemi has published five books of poetry, and his poems, translations and scholarly articles have appeared in over one hundred publications world-wide.  He is the editor of the literary magazine TRINACRIA and writes for Expansive Poetry On-line. He teaches in the Department of Humanities at New York University and in the Department of Classical Languages at Hunter College.