The New Anthology of American Poetry: Vol. III: Postmodernisms 1950-Present

ROBERT PINSKY

328 ROBERT PINSKY b. 1940 Robert pinsky has emerged as one of the most persuasive advocates for poetry on the contemporary American scene. While serving an unprecedented three terms as the nation’s Poet Laureate, Pinsky initiated the Favorite Poems Project, which “is dedicated to celebrating, documenting and encouraging poetry’s role in Americans’ lives.” Educated at Rutgers University and Stanford, where he worked with the poet and critic Ivor Winters, Pinsky has an encyclopedic knowledge of poetry. Like many other poets of his generation, he is also drawn to the American jazz masters of the 1950s and 1960s—such as Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, and John Coltrane—and found a model for his own work in the way these jazz stylists interweave quotation with improvisation. One even detects rapid, staccato bebop rhythms braided with more lyrical passages in the opening and later stanzas of Pinsky’s poem “Shirt.” Pinsky was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, then a popular resort town, and was raised in a mixed neighborhood of mostly Jewish and Irish immigrants. He describes his own Jewish upbringing as “nominally Orthodox.” His family struggled to make ends meet, especially after his father lost his job as an optician in 1947 and was for a few years unemployed. Yet Pinsky was drawn to the cultural richness and diversity of his community and appreciated his family’s support of his development, even on their limited means, as “The Green Piano” somewhat humorously reflects. In his poetry, Pinsky often explores the situations of working people and immigrants who face the anxieties associated with poverty, dif- ficult work conditions, and unemployment but manage to find expression and assert their identity. His poems display great linguistic invention that combines seriousness with a frequent, and often subtle, sense of play. further reading Robert Pinsky. The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966–1996. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996. — — — —. Gulf Music: Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007. — — — — and Maggie Dietz. Americans’ Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. Shirt Ø 329 1. Here, and at several points below, the poem names elements from the construction of a shirt. 2. Shirt manufacturing, a major industry once centered on the Garment District in New York City, had moved by the time this poem was written to developing countries such as Malaysia and Korea, and to the American South. 3. Tools of the shirt-making trade. 4. The 1911 fire in the Triangle Shirt Factory in New York, in which 146 garment workers —mostly young women from immigrant families—died when trapped on the eighth and ninth floors, was an important and tragic incident in the history of American labor relations. The poem provides many historical details about the fire. Shirt The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,1 The nearly invisible stitches along the collar Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians2 Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break Or talking money or politics while one fitted This armpiece with its overseam to the band Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter, The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union, The treadle, the bobbin.3 The code. The infamous blaze At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven. One hundred and forty-six died in the flames4 On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes— The witness in a building across the street Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step Up to the windowsill, then held her out Away from the masonry wall and let her drop. And then another. As if he were helping them up To enter a streetcar, and not eternity. A third before he dropped her put her arms Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once He stepped to the sill himself, his jacket flared And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down, Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers— * * * Ø Robert Pinsky 330 5. See Hart Crane’s “To Brooklyn Bridge”: “Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft / A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets, / Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning.” 6. Textile patterns developed in Scottish mills. 7. Supposed author of an ancient Scottish epic; the poem, published in 1760, was in fact a forgery by James MacPherson. 8. George Herbert (1593–1633...