Vox Populi
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Joan E. Bauer: They Left Chicago Behind
Saul Bellow called Chicago: a prairie city with a waterfront the trees he remembers, elms & cottonwoods. He was an intellectual, not so Gene & Dora, my husband’s parents, each the youngest & most put-upon in their big & quarrelsome families. Perhaps Gene & Dora read Dreiser & Dos Passos, probably not Marx & Engels or André Gide. They were distantly related to Bellow. They had aspirations for college, for more than a factory job, but after the war, Gene wasn’t the same. By 1953, Dora was selling girdles door-to-door so they could flee Chicago’s snow & stockyards & tenements for California. That year, Saul Bellow, teaching at Princeton, entertained John Berryman & Edmund Wilson. Years later, my husband Paul said he couldn’t understand why his cousin Saul described their Aunt Zelda in Herzog as a crass & two-faced hausfrau with gold slacks & shiny plastic shoes. Paul would say: Honest, that wasn’t who she was.
Copyright 2022. Previously published in Chiron Review.
Joan E. Bauer is the author of three full-length poetry collections, The Almost Sound of Drowning (Main Street Rag, 2008), The Camera Artist (Turning Point, 2021) and the forthcoming Fig Season (Turning Point, 2023). She divides her time between Pittsburgh and Los Angeles.
Downtown Chicago (Chamber of Commerce)
Vox Populi 
I’ve been “Stuck” in Chicago for 15 years so this really resonates! Though I love Bellow, I know whereof she speaks. Especially as an insider. I really appreciate this great poem!
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Thanks, Alison. I love it too.
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I just read everything Joan Bauer has had posted. (I love this feature of Vox Populi), and grateful for the prism of her intellect (and experience) with those figures, from Angela Davis, Fellini, Anna, “Uncle Saul” and Aunt Zelda, to Bao Ninh, shining through. I’m amazed as it says, She divides her time between Pittsburgh and LA,” which seems an amazing thing in itself. I’m grateful to learn of and hear her voice. Who are the Jackasses saying poetry is dead? I read this instead of that.
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Thanks, Sean. As I’ve said elsewhere, I love Joan Bauer’s poetry because she makes history sing. I’ve been a fan of hers for a long time.
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And the recurring rumors that American poetry is dead have been greatly exaggerated. Obviously the people who say so have not been reading Vox Populi, one of many magazines publishing excellent poetry.
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