Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky will be a featured guest at our 5th Annual Albany Book Festival on Saturday, Sept. 17. His event, one of the first of the day, will take place 10:30 a.m. in the Campus Center Assembly Hall. The festival will run 10:30 a.m. through 5 p.m. on the 17th.
Robert Pinsky, poet and public champion of the art and importance of poetry, served two terms as U.S. Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress (1997-2000). He previously visited the Writers Institute in 2005 upon publication of the prose biography, The Life of David, a reweaving of the biblical and rabbinic tales about King David into a single captivating narrative.
The New York Times said of Pinsky, “No other living American poet — no other living American, probably — has done so much to put poetry before the public eye.”
His new memoir is Jersey Breaks: Becoming an American Poet (October 2022), which traces his unlikely journey as a C student from the run-down resort town of Long Branch, NJ, in the late 1940s to becoming one of the nation’s best-known poets. Russell Shorto called the book, “a lyrical coming-of-age story centered around lyricism itself.”
Shirt
by Robert Pinsky
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 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. The code. The infamous blaze At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven. One hundred and forty-six died in the flames 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 — Like Hart Crane’s Bedlamite, “shrill shirt ballooning.” Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme Or a major chord. Prints, plaids, checks, Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans
Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian, To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor, Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers To wear among the dusty clattering looms. Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader,
The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter
Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton
As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields:
George Herbert, your descendant is a Black
Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma
And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit
And feel and its clean smell have satisfied Both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality Down to the buttons of simulated bone,
The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape, The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt. © by Robert Pinsky, The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1996) https://robertpinskypoet.com/
Comments