The Street

Pinsky is quoted as saying, “My work often skitters or jumps or sometimes somersaults from autobiographical material to historical material” (Ehrlich, Lara. "Robert Pinsky: America's Poet." Arts & Sciences, 2017). “The Street” is emblematic of this tendency. The beginning alludes to class struggles, juxtaposing the work of the "Wainwrights" (Line 5), or wagonmakers, and other working-class people with the “Emperor[’s]” (Line 7) needs for a luxurious funeral for his child, before focusing on an anecdote, presumably from Pinsky's own childhood.

Many of Pinsky’s other poems make use of this kind of leap from the political to the personal. In his famous poem, “The Shirt,” the speaker discusses the shirt he is wearing as a jumping-off point from which he examines the world economic structure and history of making shirts in the industrial age. Though starting with a small object, Pinsky eventually tells the story of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, in which 146 workers were immolated or jumped to their deaths. In his book-length poem, “An Explanation of America,” the speaker addresses his eight-year-old daughter on the subject of the country.

The interest of America as a topic has made some critics call Pinsky the