“the day it rained children”

This phrase from the poet Chris Lewellyn describes the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Today is the 98th anniversary of that conflagration.

Lewellyn has written a Walt-Whitman-Award winning collection on the fire, Fragments from the Fire.

In her essay on poetry inspired by the Triangle Fire, Janet Zandy examines work by Lewellyn, Mary Fell, Carol Tarlen and other contemporary poets. She says:

United States working-class literature is often labor and site specific; Colorado miners’ poetry, the Lowell mill girls’ Offering, and the automobile assembly line poetry coming out of Detroit are but a few examples. Poetry about the Triangle Fire presents a different vein of working-class literature, one that, although located in a specific historical place and time, involves writers who are from varying regions of the country, are of different races and ethnicities, and do not necessarily come from a family background of garment workers. What these poets have in common is a sense of kinship with the women who lost their young lives and a sense of outrage over the injustice done to them. . . . I am suggesting that the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire of March 25, 1911 and the newspaper accounts, photographs, and narratives contemporaneous with the fire, tap a collective memory of class oppression and injustice–especially for women.

The first formal poem written about the fire was not by a woman but by the Yiddish poet Morris Rosenfeld, known as the “poet laureate of the slum and the sweatshop.” Called Rosenfeld’s Requiem, it appeared in the Jewish Daily Forward and it begins like this:

Neither battle nor fiendish pogrom
Fills this great city with sorrow;
Nor does the earth shudder or lightning rend the heavens,
No clouds darken, no cannon’s roar shatters the air.
Only hell’s fire engulfs these slave stalls
And Mammon devours our sons and daughters.
Wrapt in scarlet flames, they drop to death from his maw
And death receives them all.
Sisters mine, oh my sisters; brethren
Hear my sorrow:

Zandy describes this poem as “formal threnody, a five part dirge, in which the poet takes the persona of bard or spokesman for the inarticulate and outraged workers. Unfortunately, it also turns those victims of the “capitalistic Minotaur” (Zandy’s term) into mere symbols. We lose all sense of the individuality of the girls. Thus, I think, this poem loses out to detailed prose reports.

These prose reports show us girls mistaken for bales of cloth as they lept from eighth, ninth, and tenth floors. They tell us that only 15 minutes elapsed from the first fire alarm to the last burning building. Of doors locked to keep these emigrant girls from stealing. They tell us that the proprietors of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company collected $64,925 or $445 for each dead girl, while the families for the most part got nothing. And that these same proprietors were acquitted of charges of first and second degree manslaughter by a jury of their peers, indlucing a shirt manufacturer and an importer, one of whom claimed that

the girls who worked there were not as intelligent as those in other walks of life and were therefore the more susceptible to panic

Zandy show us a lot of this blaming of the victim:

The witnesses for the prosecution were young women dressed in their best clothes, struggling with a language not their own and the trappings of officaldom. When Celia Walker described how she escaped by jumping from machine table to machine table, Steur asked, “Was your skirt as tight as the skirt you’ve got on now?” In cross-examining sixteen-year-old Ethel Monick, Steuer commented, “You do like to argue some, don’t you, little girl?”

Contemporary poetry about the fire has more in common with these prose reports:

And almost always in the fire poetry, there are the conversations with dead sisters across time, naming their names, reconstituting their faces, and voices. The emphasis is not a polemic solidarity, but on human relationships describe in terms of imagined physicality. . . . Contemporary interpretations of women’s poetry tend to emphasize sites of domestic and ideological enclosure. As we have already learned, the doors were locked at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company and for these women workers entrapment was not metaphoric. In terms of the class conscious poetry that has evolved out of the fire, the theme of entrapment is more than a literary trope; it takes on a heightened, historical meaning. When survival is the subject, separations between the intellectual and the physical dissolve

Jane Zandy is the editor of Calling Home: Working-Class Women’s Writings (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1990).

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