Insufficient Definitions
paired with “Place Name: Oracabessa”
Editor’s Note: The poem in this chapter is considered a transformative fair use. Please see the annotations section in How to Use this Book for an explanation of the author’s pedagogy on creating conversation within a text.
Hashtags
#close reading, #comparison, #poetry, #discussion, #30 minutes, #ways of knowing, #colonialism
Inviting students to move from close reading to guiding ideas in the essay as a whole, this activity could be used as either an in-class discussion or as an extended writing prompt.
Introduction
DU: Like Robert Pinsky’s “Shirt,” Miller’s poems explore the larger worlds and histories of any one object or name. Miller’s poems explore the breadth of unusual names of places in Jamaica like the town of “Me-no-sen-you-no-come.”
As we saw above, Miller’s project is to attune the reader to a wider world of sound and perspective – sounds, ways of seeing, and languages buried by coloniality and dominant, singular soundscapes. When teaching poetry, Miller instructs his students to attend to how names, objects, or categories are always already insufficiently defined and thus require sharper, embodied, on-the-ground, and contextual ways of listening. Much is buried in the town name of “Oracabessa” just as there is a long tale behind the construction of the shirt in Pinsky’s poem.
Read Robert Pinsky’s “Shirt” with your students as a way to deepen your understanding of “Oracabessa.”
Guide
Read: Companion Poem
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[1]
Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break
Or talking money or politics while one fitted[2]
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.[3]
One hundred and forty-six died in the flames[4]
On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes—[5]
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.[6]
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[7]—
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[8], 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.
Write: Translating Poetry
- Take 10-15 minutes to “translate” both “Oracabessa” and “Shirt” into a narrative (With character, plot, and setting). What points of comparison did you find in each telling? Share your narrative with your partners, taking note of how each person sees the poems and what themes emerge.
- As you were narrativizing the poem, some portions were hard to move into prose. Choose a tercet and consider how elements of that tercet are insufficiently defined in the narrative translation you wrote in step 1. What can be said best in poetry compared to narrative? What can poetry do that a narrative cannot?
- DU: How are the major ideas of the poem introduced in these first few lines? ↵
- DU: Why do you think the poetic "I" details the everyday happenings of this imagined sweatshop? ↵
- DU: What do you make of this startling transition from someone putting on the shirt and then this reference to the famous "Triangle Shirtwaist Fire" of 1911 in Washington, DC? ↵
- DU: https://www.sheilaomalley.com/?p=35627 Share with students this historical reference. ↵
- DU: What's interesting about the line that there were no hydrants, or fire escapes on the night floor? ↵
- DU: How are these lines consistent with the main ideas of the poem? Be specific. ↵
- DU: What's the effect of this detail? ↵
- DU: What's the effect of telling these stories in Scotland and then in the American South? ↵
analysis that is grounded in textual details as evidence and material for interpretation
See:
Tracing Citations (exploration)
Body as Metaphoric Space (exploration)
Poetry and Science: Epistemology through Language (exploration)
Aphoristic Translation (exploration)
Parsing Themes (exploration)
Reading the “Fine Print” (exploration)
Juxtapositions of Silence (exploration)
Self Reflection, Collective Change (exploration)
Insufficient Definitions (exploration)
Dialogue Over Time: A New Boogaloo: “How Beautiful We Really Are” (exploration)
Against the Grain: Listening for Controversy (exploration)
analysis that evaluates similarities and differences between two or more examples
See:
Against the Grain: Listening for Controversy (exploration)
Body as Metaphoric Space (exploration)
Collage: Found, Donated, Repeated with Difference (exploration)
Indigenous Perspectives of Western Science (exploration)
Insufficient Definitions (exploration)
Juxtapositions of Silence (exploration)
Poetry and Science: Epistemology through Language (exploration)
Reading the “Fine Print” (exploration)
written or spoken form that typically uses metered language and structure to highlight sound and rhythm
See:
“The Contract Says: We’d Like the Conversation to be Bilingual”
“Place Name: Oracabessa”
“Puerto Rican Obituary”
“Three Ways to Speak English”
Insufficient Definitions (exploration)
Tracing Citations (exploration)
Translations Across and Within Languages (exploration)
activity designed for active exchange with peers, may be small group or large group
See:
Against the Grain: Listening for Controversy (exploration)
Aphoristic Translation (exploration)
Body as Metaphoric Space (exploration)
Building an Opinion (exploration)
Critical Learning Reflection (exploration)
Insufficient Definitions (exploration)
Parsing Themes (exploration)
The Point of Education? (exploration)
Reading the “Fine Print” (exploration)
activity designed to take about 30 minutes to complete
See:
Body as Metaphoric Space (exploration)
Dialogue Over Time: A New Boogaloo: “How Beautiful We Really Are” (exploration)
Indigenous Perspectives of Western Science (exploration)
Insufficient Definitions (exploration)
Juxtapositions of Silence (exploration)
Parsing Themes (exploration)
The Point of Education? (exploration)
Tracing Citations (exploration)
See:
"Asters and Goldenrod"
“Grammar, Identity, and the Dark Side of the Subjunctive”
“Place Name: Oracabessa”
“Vão/Vòng A Conversation with Katrina Dodson"
Against the Grain: Listening for Controversy (exploration)
Critical Learning Reflection (exploration)
Indigenous Perspectives of Western Science (exploration)
Insufficient Definitions (exploration)
The Point of Education? (exploration)
Poetry and Science: Epistemology through Language (exploration)
See:
“As a Child in Haiti, I Was Taught to Despise My Language and Myself”
"Connecting the Dots"
“Three Ways to Speak English”
“Place Name: Oracabessa”
Insufficient Definitions (exploration)
Dialogue Over Time: A New Boogaloo: “How Beautiful We Really Are” (exploration)
Historical Contexts (exploration)