Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Bob Hicok’s "1935" is an elegy to the past, a portrait of labor, migration, and the quiet resilience of a man who follows work as if it were an instinct. Dedicated to the poet’s grandfather, Lester Hicok, the poem captures the transient life of an American worker during the Great Depression, where the pursuit of employment dictated movement and dictated survival. Through repetition, spare language, and a tone that balances respect with stark realism, Hicok conjures both an individual life and a broader historical condition.

The poem’s refrain—"He rode in the back with apples and wind."—immediately sets the tone of movement, necessity, and a kind of rough intimacy with the landscape. This opening line contains a deep contrast: apples, a symbol of sustenance, and wind, an element of constant motion and uncertainty. The back of a truck is not only a literal space of transport but a metaphor for a life lived in reaction to forces beyond one’s control. The wind, like economic hardship, dictates direction. The apples, like the worker himself, are commodities in motion.

The second line introduces the economic desperation of the time: "Rumor was a blast furnace in Battle Creek needed to be fed." This phrase is repeated throughout the poem, illustrating the way information about work traveled by word-of-mouth, often unreliable but still powerful enough to spur migration. Work is reduced to its most basic elements: a furnace that must be fed, men who stand in line, a foreman with a clipboard who holds the power to grant or deny a meal. There is no mention of dignity, no romance in this struggle—only the raw, mechanized need for labor.

The poem’s structure reinforces this repetition and circularity. "In Battle Creek he’d stand with fifty or a thousand men." The ambiguity of numbers reflects the anonymity of the workforce. These men are reduced to bodies waiting, shuffling, smoking, hiding behind their hats, their individuality erased by economic necessity. The choice of verbs—"shuffle and smoke," "talk while others hid in their hats"—captures both weariness and a quiet resilience, a refusal to let desperation manifest too openly. The "man with a clipboard" holds the power of decision, and his "nod meant food." The stakes of employment are stripped of illusion: work equals sustenance, and without it, hunger.

The imagery of riding "on a coil of chain-link fence" adds another layer of meaning. A fence represents both enclosure and exclusion, security and division. This image suggests that even in movement, even in pursuit of labor, there is a tension between access and denial, between being let in and being kept out. The warmth of the truck contrasts with the cold reception at the job site—"He found that their eyes didn’t want him." Even among the desperate, competition breeds rejection. The furnace is "happy and fat," meaning that the need for labor has been met, and those arriving too late are simply cast back into uncertainty.

Hicok captures the repetition of labor migration with a rhythm that mimics the journey itself. The phrases—"He rode in the back," "The rumor was work," "In Battle Creek he’d stand."—cycle through the poem like the unrelenting search for survival. Each arrival at a new location mirrors the last: a man in a truck, men waiting, a chance dictated by forces beyond their control. The poem closes with a shift from the collective experience to the personal, linking history with lineage: "This is how my grandfather lived. / In the back with a pig." The final detail, the pig, introduces a wry, almost absurd element—an acknowledgment of the indignities of poverty, the surreal conditions under which people traveled and lived.

Hicok’s tone throughout the poem is restrained, resisting sentimentality. There is no grandiose suffering here, no appeal to nostalgia. Instead, the poem’s strength lies in its quiet witness to endurance. The repetition creates a sense of inevitability—the rhythm of labor migration, the grind of economic desperation, the movement without resolution. In the end, the grandfather is not a hero, not a tragic figure, but simply a man surviving, moving forward because he must.

"1935" is a tribute to both an individual and a generation. It captures the way work was not just a necessity but a condition of being, how rumors of labor dictated the rhythms of life, and how uncertainty shaped a man’s existence. Hicok, by recounting his grandfather’s story, acknowledges the quiet sacrifices of those who came before him, rendering their experience in a form as unembellished and unflinching as the life it describes.

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