Robert Pinsky’s Shirt

Photo by Nimble Made on Unsplash

When a writer is emotionally uninvolved with his subject matter, I call that “distance”. The stretching of emotional distance de-emphasizes original motivation and emphasizes craft. This is considered by many to be the sign of a master. What the master lacks in emotional intensity he patches up with odds and ends of knowledge and scraps of imagery, snazzily sewn together like a shawl. In his poem “The Shirt” Robert Pinsky produces a poem containing…