19 pages • 38 minutes read
Joseph O. LegaspiThe Red Sweater
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context
Legaspi is a contemporary poet who has not specifically identified with one particular literary movement. He is, however, part of a constellation of poets with ties to confessional poetry. His mentor, Philip Levine, was himself mentored by John Berryman, a major influence on the confessional poets. Confessional poetry dealt with private, emotional experiences surrounding often autobiographical subjects without accepting social censorship. Confessional poets paid attention to language and focused intently on craftsmanship and prosody, while taking a groundbreaking approach to the poetic self that often shocked readers and pushed boundaries.
Legaspi’s highly personal subjects and attention to language shares characteristics with modern post-confessional poets. Like Levine, and Sharon Olds—another named influence—Legaspi’s work demonstrates an interest in exploring the complexities of identity, emotional honesty, direct language, relaxed rhythms, and close attention to the details of everyday life. Because of Legaspi’s ties to confessional poetry, and the autobiographical nature of Imago, this reading of the poem takes the speaker of the poem to be Legaspi himself.
Rhetorical Context
The poem, the speaker, and the poet’s experience exist in a complex rhetorical and cultural context. In “The Red Sweater” the speaker looks at a sweater and imagines the work that went into buying it. His mother had to work twenty hours at a “fast-food joint” (Line 5) to earn enough to purchase the piece for her son. The poem shares some details about her work.
A report from 2021 asserts, “The fast-food industry is a large, heavily franchised industry rife with poor working conditions, including low pay, few benefits, heavy reliance on public support programs, and frequent violations of workplace laws” (Madland, David. “Raising Standards for Fast-Food Workers in California.” 2021. Center for American Progress). The same report says, “sixty percent of fast-food workers in California are Latinx, more than 80 percent are nonwhite, two-thirds are women, and 20 percent have children.”
Legaspi’s poem, first published in 2007, occupies a rhetorical situation that shares significant common ground with the contemporary economic landscape. Working conditions and duties on the job likely have remained the same, and wages have not improved much, even when they are above minimum wage.
The California minimum wage in 1984, the year Legaspi’s family immigrated to the United States, was $3.35. Minimum wage did not increase again until 1988—a year within the scope of his high school years—when it went up to $4.25. At the time of the poem’s publication in 2007, the wage had been raised to $7.50—an 11.1 percent increase from the last time it had seen an increase five years prior. In 2022, the wage is eleven dollars an hour—just over twenty-nine thousand a year.
“The Red Sweater” does not address the specifics of pay, nor does it identify the specific restaurant where his mother works. It does look at how much time and work must be put in for a working family to afford something “everybody / in school is wearing” (Lines 2-3) It explores the effort and sacrifice fitting in may take through a desirable object, while it also celebrates the fruits of that labor and exhibits gratitude for it.
