What's New at TNP: The TNP Poetry Project

What's New at TNP: The TNP Poetry Project

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The TNP Blog

Herbie Hancock, Charlie Rose and others to lend their talents to The Nantucket Poetry Project 06.25.14

"Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar."

-Percy Bysshe Shelley

Charlie Rose, jazz pianist Herbie Hancock and hip-hop artist Nas are all participating in the TNP Labs production of Robert Pinsky's poem "Shirt." This is the first installment of The Nantucket Poetry Project, a collaboration with Harvard professor Elisa New that aims to bring poetry to life through video and other multimedia formats.

Our vision is simple. We believe that great poetry is meant to be read aloud, and whenever we gather together to do this, our culture is enriched. We also believe that poetry lends itself to multiple interpretations and can find exciting expressions through various forms of media - from music to dance to video art. And so we are assembling a group of world-class artists, thinkers and performers whose interpretations will bring to life the many diverse texturtes in "Shirt," in the form of a short film.

Pinsky, the former U.S. Poet Laureate, is one of the most beloved contemporary American poets.
"Shirt," a poem from Pinsky's 1990 collection The Want Bone, is a remarkable illustration of Percy Shelley's concept of defamiliarization, referenced above. The poem makes us rethink our relationship to an everyday object by focusing our attention on the physical processes of making a shirt. It also imaginatively evokes the shirt's laborers - from the cotton planters and pickers to Korean workers in sweatshops to the women who perished in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911.

As Cornell professor Roger Gilbert has observed, Pinsky makes us see the shirt "both as a material presence and as a ghostly embodiment of invisible forces and lives."

In short, a shirt is not quite what you think it is. It is the product of a deeper social history. Our understanding of this history is wonderfully reconfigured by Robert Pinsky's poetic mind, and also, we hope, by a chorus of diverse voices that will be expressed in the short film. 
"Shirt" will premiere at The Nantucket Project on September 28. 

The full poem can be read here.

The Nantucket Poetry Project is a collaboration between The Nantucket Project and Elisa New, the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard University where she teaches classic American literature from Anne Bradstreet through Marilynne Robinson and from the Puritans to the present day.