Poetry in America with Elisa New (2018–…): Season 1, Episode 8 - Shirt - full transcript

When we buy something

like a shoe or a shirt, we're
only thinking of its future...

When we're going to wear,
where we're going to wear it,

what we're going to
wear it with.

But a product like
a handmade garment has a past.

"Shirt."

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



or 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.

I can see the similarities

between creating the shirt
and creating a poem.

What I think
is unique about fashion,

of all product design,
is that it's touched by hand

the whole time.

There's somebody sewing
every single seam,

there's somebody attaching
every single button.

Picking the button, picking
the size, picking the thread,

picking the stitches per inch.

All of us, every day,

put on these shirts,
and don't think anything about



the process or the people

that went into making it.

The whole poem is
about human beings.

That to me is the common thread.

Just as the whole history
of garment making

is in this poem,

the whole literary history...

- I hope the history
of verse making.

In order to explore
what goes into your shirt,

I traveled to New York City
during fashion week.

I asked the designers
of two iconic brands...

The shoe designer
Stuart Weitzman

and Johnson Hartig,
creator of Libertine...

To meet me at Bergdorf Goodman,
where our hostess would be

Betty Halbreich, the store's
legendary personal shopper.

I also went to the
Parsons School of Design

at the New School to talk
to some young designers

and their teacher,
as well as two young poets.

Back in Boston, U.S. poet
laureate Robert Pinsky

was ready to turn his "Shirt"...
His poem... inside out for me.

- The consonants are defining
those and slicing those.

The poem begins, really,
with a list.

And there are many lists that
occur throughout the poem.

Here's the first of them.

"The back, the yoke,
the yardage.

Lapped seams."

When you read those terms,

if you look at your shirt,
you can see them.

Even if you can't
relate the yoke,

which is traditionally the word

that ties animals together
with a wooden harness of sorts.

It ties the shirt together

by the piece that's in the back
to hold the shoulders together

and the sleeves.

Sometimes I really
wonder how many people

actually know what
a yoke on a shirt is.

They don't know what
that little square, rectangle,

or triangle piece of fabric
that some designers

spend time thinking about
where it's going to go

and how it's going
to be stitched in,

and how close to the seam
that stitch needs to be

in order to make it look clean.

And are they going to use
two lines of stitches or one,

and what kind of machine
are they going to use

in order to make that happen?

The presser,

the cutter,

the wringer, the mangle.

The needle, the union,

the treadle,

the bobbin.

There's all kinds of words.

But I like the language
of trades.

A nature poet

knows the names
of birds and plants,

and says, "Oh, that leaf

has a dendritic pattern."

In the shoe business,

we have our drafters,
our cutters, our skivers,

our lasters.

It's precise.

If you come in and find a dress,

and you love it, it doesn't
fit...

And I'm just saying that
very loosely.

What do I do about it?

What do you about it?

I get a lot of whining.

"I really want this dress...
Can you really do something?"

Down comes a woman, and they
come with their pincushion.

They're all from Slovakia
or Hungary or Russia.

There are a lot of Asians,
but also, like, Mexicans,

and a lot of South Americans.

My grandmother used to work

in the clothing factory, too,
when she was a young girl.

180 workers

to make a shoe.

And every one of them
is a family.

I mean, I... 50 years,
I get to know them.

Their sons worked for me,
now, their grandsons

and granddaughters

work in the factories.

People ask me
if I did research for this poem.

Heck no.

My mother and father considered
themselves glamorous people,

stylish people,

so that shopping
had a certain pride to it.

So I know what a yoke is
on a shirt.

A placket?

Yeah, sure.

The placket,
it's the double layer

where they have the buttons.

"The presser,
the cutter, the wringer."

Does he mean
the presser the person,

or the presser the machine?

Does he mean the cutter
the machine,

or the cutter the person?

I think he means both.

I think I was aware when
I put those words together

it was partly playing with

the names of the skills...
Presser, cutter, all those

"E-R" words.

But also that, as well as
having a beauty to it,

there's a dehumanizing quality
to labor as well.

Merging of the person
and the equipment,

and replacing a person by
equipment, remain very intense

social, political,
economic issues.

"The treadle, the bobbin.
The code.

The infamous blaze at
the Triangle Factory in 1911."

The last line of every stanza

raises the stakes.

The beauty of the last lines
are that they propel us

to the next stanza.

It's like the lens
is zooming in.

It starts pretty broad,
with the components of a shirt,

and starts narrowing down to a
physical space, the sweatshop.

In the third stanza, the last
line, "the infamous blaze,"

we've now zoomed in so close

that we're talking about
a specific moment in 1911.

"146 died in the flames
on the ninth floor.

No hydrants, no fire escapes."

No one knows why it started,

and it could have been
pencils or shoes.

It didn't... it wasn't
because it was garments.

It was down
in Greenwich Village...

I think the building's
still there.

And the three top floors
caught on fire.

In those days,

workers were not
well thought of,

so to keep them in
and make sure they weren't

out smoking for 15 minutes,
but get their job done,

everything was locked.

I mean, it wasn't just
that there were no fire escapes,

or hydrants...
You couldn't even get out.

They had them locked.

Wow... I mean, gosh.

Imagine, these girls
can't get out of...

you know, there's-there's no
door... there's no door.

It's just unreal.

And they're young girls,
they're young girls.

His thrust is
the people in that factory.

Not the window and not the fire,
and whatever.

It's every individual that
worked at every machine.

"The witness in
the 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."

If there
wasn't beauty, it would be

very depressing to get through

that really painful moment.

Umm... poets find beauty
in everything.

That longing
as human beings that we have

to connect with someone
even as we're facing death

or facing something perilous,
that we still are eager

for that human connection.

And so, I just...
I thought that was beautiful.

Wanting to feel love,
or wanting to feel touch.

The kiss
is especially beautiful,

because there's
a kind of romance,

like a ten-second romance.

And, being a young girl,
it could have been the only kiss

that she ever had
in her whole life, so she had...

she had a little romance before
she fell to her death.

With great ceremony

and a kind of chivalry,

this last girl
puts her arms around...

- And kissed him.

There's a mutual kindness
and ceremony,

so that it may include
a sexual meaning,

but it also has a meaning

of mutual comfort
and reassurance.

"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 grey trousers,

"like Hart Crane's Bedlamite,

'shrill shirt ballooning.'"

A great American poet
is Hart Crane, and his poem

to Brooklyn Bridge,
a poem very important to me.

And that moment when he says
"A Bedlamite falls,

shrill shirt ballooning," it's
a great phrase, in my opinion.

Shrill, the whiteness
of his shirt.

There's almost
a tragicomic whistle

that we hear in that
shrill shirt ballooning.

I was speaking
to someone yesterday,

and I showed her this poem.

She's a lawyer.

And we started to talk about it,
and she said, "Betty,

I know you don't remember
Frances Perkins."

I said, "Of course I remember
Frances Perkins."

She was Franklin Roosevelt's
first woman Secretary of Labor.

She live in New York,
and when he was governor,

she had passed this factory
when it was on fire,

so the story goes,
and thought that...

the people they were throwing
out, she thought were

bales of fabric.

This happened,
and it's not right, you know?

And people were hurt,
and the reason they were hurt

is because of poor conditions.

This incident
actually caused a change

in our American fabric.

We are now able to have breaks
if we're working in a factory.

Like, we can have fire hydrants,
we can have escape routes.

We sort of cleaned that up
in America.

We... we've evolved,
and we have sane workplaces.

But you know what
we haven't evolved into?

We don't even think about

where we moved those sweatshops,
because they are still

on this planet.

Being very conscientious
about how we make things,

it's devastatingly sad

to think that people
have, you know, lost their lives

making these things
that we put on

and don't think anything about.

"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."

You've begun to allow us
to think both about

the making of a garment

and the making of a poem.

These two crafts as they speak
to each other.

- There are some useful words
that, involve, you know,

material, fabric,
texture, pattern.

Pinsky has chosen unrhymed
iambic pentameter,

with its regular alternation
of unstressed

and stressed syllables for
this poem's metrical baseline.

But only loosely.

Like poets before him,
he lets the irregularity

of natural speech pull against
the theoretical form,

like the imperfections
in a hand-loomed fabric.

Playful shadings of image and
sound add even more texture.

Bar-tacking is
a little, little stitch.

It's just like
a quarter of an inch of stitches

really, really close
that hold something in place,

like the edge of a pocket.

Bar-tacks could be

on different angles.

A lot of people use them

and add a little color.

"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."

Strict rhymes, with their
alternating patterns of sound,

strengthen the form of a poem,

not unlike the way
major chords do in music.

But both, too, depend on
shadings and variations

that lend complexity.

The pattern is made out
of matching and symmetry.

And the pleasure of that

crosses art forms.

Yes.

- From fashion to poetry to...

To the universe is
patterns and repetitions.

I think that's houndstooth
you have on there.

- Yeah, it is.
This is houndstooth.

Let's see, let's see.

Yeah, you have
houndstooth cuffs.

The way we draw it
is we draw a little square,

black, and then we draw
the other square black,

and then we connect two squares

with a diagonal line.

It requires a lot of diligence
in the cutting.

JIAN: It is pretty elegant,

but it's hard to actually

be made into a garment,
because you have to match up

all the, like, prints.

It's delicate, it's intricate,
it's very difficult.

I don't need people to notice
that the poem

is in iambic pentameter...
It's in unrhymed blank verse.

It's invisible stitching.

- I hope they don't notice...
I hope it just somehow

sounds good, or feels good.

I know that I did the stitching
to make it come out

in what I hope is subtle,
muted blank verse.

"Prints, plaids, checks,
Houndstooth,

Tattersall, Madras."

Madras comes from India.

The trade is global
for economic reasons,

but also because

these textiles give us
the look of faraway places.

- Exactly.

You know, the curiosity cabinet,
the exotic,

the unknown, the new,
and the wonderful.

When I think of
the prints, the plaids,

it makes me think of
the beauty of, you know,

the variety that
we have as designers

to make into a cloth.

Plaids and stuff come
from Scotland and England.

I think a lot of it comes
from England, to be honest.

Houndstooth are
old English fabrics

that the huntsmen's jackets
were made out of.

Particular plaids
were associated

with different regions
in the Scottish Highlands,

and people wore these clothes
as, in a way, uniforms,

and declarations of identity,

and now they come down to us,
and we have... when we wear

certain kinds of plaid,
we feel like we're being Scots.

Or outdoorsmen.

It certainly does
conjure up these

really nostalgic,
romantic images.

You know, clan plaids.

I guess I imagine
these heather fields in Scotland

and castles.

It's all just pure romance.

I honestly didn't know
that mill owners in Scotland

just made up these clan names.

"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."

You know, we always
sentimentalize people

we feel guilty about.

The kilt is a bit like that.

They really practiced
a kind of extermination

on the Highland Scots,

the English and
the Lowland Scots did.

So out of a kind of
mixture of guilt and recompense

and denial, they started...

They gave them a romantic...

- Oh, the tartans and the kilts
and so forth.

You have
the history of colonialism

that takes the English
to Scotland, to India,

to the United States,
where slaves

in calico head rags sweated.

"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."

So the shirt

is a product of slavery,
and there's just no

getting away from that.

"George Herbert, your descendant
is a Black Lady

"in South Carolina,
her name is Irma,

and she inspected my shirt."

Is George Herbert part of
the history of colonialism?

Of course.

That's why I'm speaking
the same language that he did.

At the risk of asking a poet
to explain his allusions,

I wonder if you could talk about
the allusions to other poets.

- Well, Ralph Ellison says
you choose your ancestors.

At some point,
I chose Hart Crane,

and I chose George Herbert.

George Herbert

is my great-great-great-great-
great-grandfather.

Not really.

Your poetic...
he's your poetic ancestor?

- I love his poems.

They're made so beautifully.

The invisible stitches
are very well handled.

I marvel that I am
his descendant in art.

"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."

So, who's Irma?

You know, South Carolina.

I imagine, you know,
Irma working in

a very hot factory,

and she's tired, and she's, you
know, inspecting these shirts.

The fact that he
capitalized black

and he capitalized lady,
that says to me that

even though this
history of slavery existed,

she still deserves a name,
and her name is Irma.

When I see something
that is perfectly stitched,

or perfectly designed,
I usually find the tag.

That makes me wonder,
like, where and how?

I remember, even as a kid,
being fascinated

by those numbers
in the back of a collar.

I always wondered what they were
there for, and who did them.

I remember Laura Signorelli.

Inspected by?

She changed it and said...
can we use this?

"I'm the last person
to inspect your shoes.

I hope you enjoy them and are
satisfied with them as I am."

And she signed her full name.

She's sort of
in charge of this shirt

at this moment, and she's kind
of taking ownership of that.

And she wants to make sure
that he looks good.

And so, once again,
it creates that human connection

that we see in
the beginning of the poem.

You want to feel

something has been handed to you
by another human being,

which takes me back
to that kiss.

That there is an intimate
moment of connection

when you buy a garment that was
made by a person's hands.

That's what I said.

The human being in every line
of this poem

is what ties it together.

I think it's sort of
a nice way to end the poem.

It's kind of kind,
and telling you that

it is really what
he feels in his heart.

I think this is very heartfelt,

this poem.

I hope the poem
is trying to meditate

through what is right
next to my skin...

All the history, good and bad
and in between and unthinkable

and weird and beautiful,
all history.

I put it on every day.

And I may complain or moralize,
but I also say,

"Oh, I hope I look good."

"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."