Shirt by Robert Pinsky
"Shirt" by Robert Pinsky is a poem that explores themes of labor, history, and personal identity through the lens of garment production. The poem begins by depicting the lives of workers in contemporary sweatshops in Korea and Malaysia, illustrating their daily interactions as they navigate difficult working conditions. Pinsky employs industrial language to invoke the mechanics of shirt-making, emphasizing terms associated with the trade. A pivotal moment in the poem occurs with the reference to the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire of 1911, a tragic event that claimed the lives of many immigrant workers due to unsafe conditions. This allusion highlights the historical struggle for labor rights and safety regulations.
Throughout the poem, Pinsky juxtaposes the past and the present, drawing connections between the sacrifice of those who worked in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory and the ongoing realities faced by modern garment workers. He also incorporates elements of literary history, linking his personal narrative to poets like George Herbert and the broader fabric of cultural memory. Ultimately, "Shirt" serves as a meditation on the intricate relationship between our clothing, the history of labor, and the enduring impact of those who toil to create the garments we wear.
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Shirt by Robert Pinsky
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1990 (collected in The Want Bone, 1990)
Type of work: Poem
The Work
“Shirt” is an example of Pinsky using historical occurrences and translating the effects of these occurrences into present-day situations. The first scenes are in sweatshops in Korea and Malaysia, where Pinsky portrays the everyday workers, gossiping over tea or talking politics.
Pinsky uses the language of the factory, mentioning the presser, the cutter, the wringer, the mangle, the needle, the union, the treadle, and the bobbin. What changes this rhythm of listing is a sole phrase: “The Code.” The reader’s attention is drawn back and is set up for the next scene: “The infamous blaze/ At the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in nineteen-eleven.” This allusion is to the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in Manhattan, a sweatshop where, in 1911, a fire broke out and killed more than one hundred immigrant workers. The conditions of sweatshops were difficult to work in, with low wages, long hours, dangerous conditions, and, as Pinsky points out ironically, they were unsafe in the case of fire because the fire “Code” might be dismissed.
The next scene in the poem displays a vision of martyrs from the Triangle Shirtwaist factory falling to their death and is juxtaposed with a reference to Hart Crane’s poem “To Brooklyn Bridge.” This image brings the reader back to the subject of the poem: the shirt. Pinsky makes a more complex list of designs and patterns and shirt-making history and of Scottish and Calico patterns. Then there is George Herbert, the seventeenth century British poet who becomes an ancestor to Irma, a woman in South Carolina who inspected Pinsky’s shirt. Thus, Pinsky returns to himself in the poem as a part of this history, a part of the effects of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory and Herbert, a part of the loss and the gain over time.
Bibliography
Dietz, Maggie, and Robert Pinsky, eds. An Invitation to Poetry: A New Favorite Poem Project Anthology. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004.
Downing, Ben, and Daniel Kunitz. “The Art of Poetry: LXXVI.” Paris Review 144 (Fall, 1997): 180-213.
Pinsky, Robert. Democracy Culture and the Voice of Poetry. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002.
Pinsky, Robert. The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996.
Pinsky, Robert. Poetry and the World. New York: Ecco Press, 1988.