It’s Fine Press Friday!
This week we present Shirt, a poem by Robert Pinsky, illustrated and printed by Caryl Seidenberg in 2002, at her Vixen Press in Winnetka, Illinois. The typeface is Calson, and the foreword by Louise Glück is set in Monotype Dante. There were 135 copies in the edition, our copy was signed by Pinsky, Seidenberg, and Glück. The illustrations by Seidenberg are drawings from which she made photopolymer plates. Seidenberg first reached out to Pinsky about collaborating in the 1990s while he was poet-in-residence at Northwestern University. She hoped to print limited-edition publications of his poems, and their first book together was The Rhyme of Reb Nachman, which was published in 1998.
Robert Pinsky wrote “Shirt” in the late 1980s. It first appeared in The New Yorker in 1989 and has since been included in several poetry anthologies. The poem explores the human cost of garment manufacturing by focusing on the hidden lives involved in mass production. A major theme of the poem is the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in New York City that claimed 146 lives, partly due to there not being any fire escapes for a safe exit. It also focuses on the materiality of the shirt, and how an article of clothing becomes personal to the owner even if it exists in multiple.
Pinsky was named Poet Laureate of the United States in 1997, a position that he served in for three years. During his tenure he founded The Favorite Poem Project, in which “18,000 Americans wrote to the project volunteering to share their favorite poems — Americans from ages 5 to 97, from every state, representing a range of occupations, kinds of education, and backgrounds.”
In 2014 The Nantucket Poetry Project produced a reading and visualization of “Shirt” which can be found here.
--Sarah, Special Collections Undergraduate Assistant
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