Editor's Note

This new edition of Chris Llewellyn’s Fragments from the Fire has been published to commemorate the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire of March 25, 1911, one of the deadliest industrial disasters in New York City’s history. One hundred years after this fire, in March 2011, thousands of people gathered across the country to honor the 146 garment workers who died at Triangle. In New York City, a fire department bell tolled as each victim’s name was read aloud—the first time in a century that all of the workers who perished in the fire were identified by name.

Many of the commemorative events around the country featured rallies, speeches, music, art, and—not surprisingly—readings from earlier editions of Llewellyn’s Fragments. Critical to the West Coast centenary events, for example, was the publication of Walking through the River of Fire, an anthology featuring “fire poems,” including those from Fragments. In Washington, D.C., the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Workers invited Llewellyn to read from Fragments for the memorial event at the Library of Congress, which was open to the community at large. Llewellyn’s poems were also dramatically staged and performed for the commemoration ceremony in Pittsburgh, PA, which was collaboratively organized for the public by labor leaders and graduate students. Fragments from the Fire, a remarkable polyvocal book of poems, continues to speak to the deplorable working conditions that characterize the garment industry in this new millennium as it re-imagines the Triangle Fire of 1911.

Like the 1987 and 1993 publications of Fragments from the Fire, this 2016 edition expresses solidarity with the workers who died at Triangle and inscribes memories about the fire, its cultural context, and the social and political significance of its aftermath. This latest edition, however, offers contemporary audiences a new reading experience: the poet has revised select poems and has included new materials based on careful review of documents that have become available since the initial publication of her book. These revisions and additions reflect the poet’s continued and renewed attention to the book’s structure, to historical information and emotional truth, and to her contributions to contemporary conversations about poetics.

Readers of this edition will notice, for instance, that select scriptural passages are now clearly highlighted as epigraphic section dividers throughout the book, and the final poem—Yosano Akiko’s “The Day When Mountains Moved”—is newly introduced with an excerpt from the book of Joel. The 1910 photo of “Shirtwaist Strikers, New York,” which calls to mind the “Uprising of the 20,000,” now immediately follows the poem “White Light” in which the speaker explains why “it’s not easy to teach [garment girls] union.”

The author has also chosen to modify several poems to achieve greater historical accuracy: some of the names of victims have been revised throughout the book, namely in “Scraps,” “Four from Sonia,” “Survivor’s Cento,” and “Sear,” to reflect the spellings on documents that are now available through the ILR School’s Kheel Center at Cornell University. Too, the poem “At Rest in Greenwood” is now titled, “At Rest in Green Woods,” a subtle shift to indicate that the final resting place of the poem’s speaker, Jennie Franco, is not in Greenwood Cemetery, as the original title would suggest (in fact, she is buried in New York City’s Calvary Cemetery). Importantly, the space between the words “green” and “woods” offers this corrective as it honors the poem’s publication history and maintains the symbolism of the original title.

Further, the subject of the imagined limerick in “Scraps” has been changed from “Joseph Asch” to “Max Blanck.” While culpable for the loss of life in the Triangle Fire, Asch was the owner of the building that housed the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, whereas Max Blanck was one of the owners of the company. Garment workers would have been more likely to refer to Blanck as the “cruel boss,” rather than Asch, since Blanck and his business partner Isaac Harris were known pejoratively throughout the industry as the “Shirtwaist Kings.”

The first stanza of “Jury of Peers” has also been revised to include the names of all twelve jurors who served at the trial of Isaac Harris and Max Blanck, and immediately following this poem we now view Florence Leebov’s striking photograph, “Garment Girls, June 1911,” which had been removed from the text of the 1993 edition. Further, multiple lines of the second verse of “Potter’s Field” have been modified based on the author’s review of the transcript of People v. Harris and Blanck, though the details of Thomas Horton’s heroic story, poetically re-imagined in this poem, still remain elusive to this day.

The author has elected to include two additional photographs in this new edition. An image of the “empty hearse, mountain of blossoms” from the funeral procession for the unnamed fire victims now precedes the poem, “Funeral for the Nameless.” Further, a photograph of garment workers posing for a portrait, arms and hands clutching each other tightly, now follows Llewellyn’s frequently-anthologized “March 25, 1911.” This poem dramatizes the final moments of two Triangle Fire victims, Della Costello and Sophie Salemi, whose story was originally told in prose form in Leon Stein’s ground-breaking book from 1962, The Triangle Fire. We wish to clarify, however, that the identity of “Della Costello” is most likely Giuseppina “Josie” Del Castillo, who, in 1911, lived near Santina “Sophie” Salemi on Cherry Street. Too, the final period of this poem has been removed to highlight the political and spiritual weight of the garment girls’ martyrdom.

This new edition concludes with two supplemental essays. The first, “Summoning the Shade: Poetry as Vocation, Advocation, and Evocation,” has been gracefully authored by Llewellyn; originally published in a collection of essays about Muriel Rukeyser in 1999 and again in 2001, this essay serves as Llewellyn’s statement of her own political/spiritual poetics of evocation and advocation.  The second essay, “Sweatshops and Resistance in the 20th and 21st Centuries,” accounts for the rise of the global sweatshop—and concerted action against sweatshop conditions—in the late twentieth century, when Llewellyn’s poems were first published. 

Finally, we encourage readers to consult and reflect upon the Coda to this edition, which includes a list of names and ages of all 146 victims of the Triangle Fire. This information is courtesy of the work of labor journalist and genealogist Michael Hirsch, who analyzed hundreds of historical records to prepare for the centennial commemoration in 2011. An interactive version of Hirsch’s work is accessible through the Kheel Center’s online exhibit at trianglefire.ilr.cornell.edu. Our hope is that the supplemental materials offered at the end of this edition support the teaching and study of Fragments and other labor poems, and that they inspire further research into the history of sweatshops and resistance in the US and abroad.

Fragments from the Fire, one of the finest poetic accounts of the Triangle Fire and its aftermath, continues to restore, transmit, and form working-class memories even in 2016, thirty years after it won the Walt Whitman Award in 1986.  The life of and lives within this book invite us—working women, men, and young people—to recognize patterns of global economic injustice. They inspire us to stand in solidarity with one another as we struggle for better working conditions and encourage us to continue to share working-class memories—the tragedies, the victories, and the lessons learned—with new generations. In doing so, we form and inform an international working-class collective that has, and always has had, the power to awaken and move mountains.

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