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.

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

“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^[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

1. 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.
2. 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?