Robert Pinsky’s Shirt
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 vast empty territories of distance.
The poem begins:
“The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams
The nearly invisible stitches along the collar
Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians
Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break. . .”
How seamlessly he goes from technically rambling about a shirt to laughing in his cuff about sweatshop workers. I guess he can’t read the tag to find out where it was made. Maybe it doesn’t have a tag. Maybe the workers forgot to attach the tag because they were too busy gossiping.
Next he mentions the “infamous blaze/At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.”
I assume this was a clothing factory. Is he having visions? He has facts such as “One hundred and forty-six died in the flames”, tragic for the people involved, but what bloodless…
