It's an unusual poem for me in that
I can tell you quite a lot about the making of the poem.
I happen to be able to remember the genesis of that poem.
I started out wanting to write a poem about an imaginary artist.
I invented this woman who was a sculptor.
And when she's small, her mother does piecework
at home on a treadle sewing machine.
And one of my grandfathers was a sort of jack--
the one who was not the bootlegger, the gentler man--
he was a window washer.
He would fix a clock.
He used to cut hair for the other old men at the shul.
They looked awful.
He never quite had a profession or success in life.
Amongst the things he did, almost well enough,
was tailoring.
And a sewing machine--
those old sewing machines are very sculptural.
They're very beautiful.
There's this gilt [INAUDIBLE] on that black arm.
And the arm is like a human limb.
It has almost a muscle, the way it tapers and expands.
And the combination of the wood and the black metal,
and then that industrial design, the way the wheel, and the gear,
and the black ironwork of the treadle--
it's all very beautiful.
It is sculptural.
And in my imagination, this woman
is making works that are based on her mother's sewing machine.
And the deprivation of her childhood
and the caretaking of them, somehow it's
all in the sculpture.
This is rather too elaborate a plan for a poem.
I never wrote that poem.
But in the course of writing the poem,
I started thinking about the vocabulary for the parts
of those machines.
And poems-- as in that famous dialogue between who is it,
Degas and Valéry, Degas and Mallarmé where Degas says,
we should collaborate on some poems, Stéphane,
because I get a lot of good ideas for poems.
And Mallarmé says, what a shame, poems aren't made out of ideas.
They're made out of words.
So the idea for the poem is not the poem.
The poem starts being a poem when the sounds of the words
mean something to you.
And I had in mind, what are the parts?
There's a bobbin.
There's a needle, a treadle--
needle, treadle.
What might go with bobbin the way needle goes with treadle?
Union.
And then I remembered the Shirtwaist fire.
In the poem, I sort of plagiarize.
I lift whole phrases from an account--
it's one of those wonderful things that might have happened,
but might not have happened.
There's a newspaper reporter who says
an eyewitness, in a building across the street,
saw a young man.
No one has ever found that eyewitness.
No one has ever determined whether that happened or not.
I actually met a survivor of the fire.
She was 100 years old when I met her--
Rose Friedman.
And as an interesting footnote, she told me how she survived.
She survived, she said, I followed the bosses.
Certain guys went up a certain stairway, and then down--
she followed, she walked where they went.
This is a little tip for you all.
Follow the bosses.
There's a wonderful book by Hobsbawm-- an English guy--
called The Invention of Tradition, in which he says,
things people think are ancient and that pretend to be very,
very ancient-- like the regalia and ceremony for the investiture
of the King or Queen of England--
invented in the 19th century--
capitalistic fabrications.
And according to him, the kilt--
he says the Highland Scots were not
viewed as quite human by the English and the Lowland Scots.
They were considered a kind of semi-human animal.
And that's why after the Battle of Culloden,
they could kill the children and women without a bat--
They were dangerous vermin.
Then they tried to tame these animals to work in the mills.
[GRUNTS]-- Highland Scots.
And they wore these big bathrobes.
They were accustomed to wearing big woolen robes.
Well, the robe would get stuck in the machinery.
Then you get body parts in the machinery.
You could lose hours.
You could lose half a day getting the body parts out
of the machinery.
So they designed little mini skirts for them
so they wouldn't get stuck in the mill machinery.
And we always sentimentalize people that we oppress
or exterminate.
That's why we're very sentimental
about the Native American, who loved the ecology, never hurt
the environment.
First of all, there's so many different nations.
And were they really that nice to the environment?
Were the grass fires good or not?
It's a sentimentalization.
That's why there's, today, Yiddish theater in Germany,
performed in Yiddish by mostly Gentile actors.
After we exterminate you, we sentimentalize you.
So the Prince of Wales sees the little skirts.
He says, oh, those are cool.
I want my regiment to wear those.
And the idea that each clan has a separate tartan--
according to Hobsbawm, no.
They made all kinds of patterns.
It was marketing.
It was a 19th century marketing genius who said, oh,
that's the McGregor, this is the McCallum,
so that then if you have any Scots descent or a Scots
surname, you can go into a snob clothing store somewhere like
Princeton, New Jersey and say, oh, well I'm a McCallum.
So I would like those jockey shorts
with the McCallum pattern.
It's all made up.
So there was the Triangle Shirtwaist fire account.
There was The Invention of Tradition,
which then reminded me of the invention of Aschen,
who was sort of an 18th century Carlos Castaneda.
It's this ancient sage, who wasn't really an ancient sage,
and poet.
And making is a big part of the interest of that poem.
It mentioned several poets, and by implication, how one is made.
One is made of one's ancestors, but figurative, as well as
literal.
That is I am made by Jewish people,
but I'm also made by George Herbert and everybody
else who makes my language and my speech.
So ancestry comes into it as well.
And you may not be able to tell it at the moment,
but I like clothes.
You see before you a straight man who likes to shop.
People ask me, did I do research for the poem "Shirt?"
No, I know what a placket is--
Jack's shirt has a placket on it, and Gail's does not--
and bar tacking, and what a yoke is.
I think poets, generally, tend to be interested in names
of parts of things.
Even though that's quite a modern light,
the casement there, it has mullions.
The vertical parts there are [INAUDIBLE].
And it doesn't have a parting bead because it doesn't move.
But it does have a jamb--
J-A-M-B. It has a head jamb and side jambs.
And because its steel, it doesn't have big casing--
but blah, blah, blah.