Payday at the Triangle
by Ruth Daigon,
Small Poetry Press, ISBN:
1-891298-10-01.

he famous shirtwaist factory fire, which took place in 1911 in lower Manhattan and left 145 dead and an entire metropolitan area in shock and outrage, is still ammunition in the ongoing struggle for labor rights, and especially for women workers. Ruth Daigon's Payday at the Triangle, just released, is an exciting example of the fact that a good poet can write poetry about anything.

The preponderant majority of the victims were from recently-arrived immigrant families, girls and men employed by the owners of the Triangle Waist Company, after a strike in which former employees had become unionized, demanding better working conditions. An ironic twist was that the building was essentially fireproof, the fire raging through the crowded aisles between sewing machines and the lines of blouses hung above them. With no means of escape (the back door was locked) dozens of young women leaped to their deaths out windows on the upper floors or were crushed and fatally burned in the attempt to reach safety.

Daigon, in her Acknowledgements, thanked the Kheel Center at Cornell Univesity for permission to reprint articles and photos. Those who would like more information on this still-remembered tragedy can find a considerable amount of fascinating information at any extension of http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/ on the internet.

Okay, so it's a tear jerker. But it's not just a tear jerker, which is, of course, what redeems it. The pathos of this event and the details of its human anguish are almost unendurable, but Daigon manages to rescue it from the danger of mawkish sentimentality by adopting a stance that comes through as half journalism (fortified by clippings from news items and news photos of the day) and half a kind of group diary. Appearing superficially to be a random collection of news releases and personal interest stories from the newspapers of 1911, the book is brilliantly organized by the artful juxtaposition of real news clippings and persona poems in the voices of various victims, some of whom were survivors, some speaking eerily from the grave.

Of particular persuasiveness are snippets from some of the poems, bringing the reader into an almost personal sharing of grief with the speakers:

 "Hyman Meschel, clerk":
 " . . .
 In the hospital, wounds treated, blanketed and warm,
 I breathe in the fresh smell of sheets
 Eyes slowly see the light
 Memory opens wide
 and no one hears my hoarse whispers
 My sister where's my sister . . .
 
 
 From "Conversations Among the Dead":
 " . . . we wish we wish
 to sit on the grass breathing green on Central Park Sundays
 to look long and see what we will never see again
 sun-soaked mornings kissprints in the dark
 smiling mothers yes, quick with light
 we want to lie in our narrow beds children again
 guarded by a white moon
 . . . we want we want
 to thread and stitch next to the others
 eat bread drink milk
 sip words like spoonfuls of honey
 to sit side by side with our sisters
 brushed and braided weaving bracelets of hair
 but we fall through spirals of flight
 ash sifting down on earth
 we offer you the cindered remains of our lives
 take them

© Sandy McKinney