Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky
Robert Pinsky (b. 1940), at a 2005 event.
Born	20 October 1940 (1940-10-20) (age 68). Long Branch, New Jersey United States
Occupation	poet, literary critic, editor, academic
Nationality	American
Writing period	1968-present
Genres	poetry, literary criticism
Notable work(s)	Landor's Poetry (1968)
Influences Samuel Taylor Coleridge Matthew Arnold T. S. Eliot W. H. Auden

Robert Pinsky (born October 20, 1940) is an American poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator. From 1997 to 2000, he served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Pinsky is the author of nineteen books, most of which are collections of his own poetry. His published work also includes critically acclaimed translations, including a collection of poems by Czesław Miłosz and Dante Alighieri. He teaches at Boston University. [1]

Biography

Early on, Pinsky was inspired by the flow and tension of jazz and the excitement that it made him feel. He said it was an incredible experience that he has tried to reproduce in his poetry. The musicality of poetry was and is extremely important to his work.^[1]

He received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 1974, and in 1997 he was named the United States Poet Laureate and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. He now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University.

As Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky founded the Favorite Poem Project, in which thousands of Americans of varying backgrounds, all ages, and from every state share their favorite poems. Pinsky believed that, contrary to stereotype, poetry has a strong presence in the American culture. The project sought to document that presence, giving voice to the American audience for poetry.^{[citation needed]}

Pinsky is also the author of the interactive fiction game Mindwheel (1984) developed by Synapse Software and released by Broderbund. ^[2]

Pinsky guest-starred in a 2002 episode of the animated sitcom The Simpsons, "Little Girl in the Big Ten", and appeared on The Colbert Report in April, 2007, as the judge of a "Meta-Free-Phor-All" between Stephen Colbert and Sean Penn.

Literary Praise

Robert Pinsky giving a reading at the 2008 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.

Pinsky is praised for "his grasp of traditional metrical forms and his ability to evoke timeless meaning within the strictures of contemporary idioms." Critics applaud, "his ability to imbue simple images—a Brownie troop square dance, cold weather, the music of Fats Waller—with underlying meaning to create order out of the accidental events people encounter in their lives." Commentators admire Pinsky's, "ambitiousness, his juxtaposition of the personal with the universal, the present with the past, the simple with the complex, and it has been noted that his intellectual style presents challenges to readers, obliging them to unravel the complexity behind the clarity of language and imagery."^{[citation needed]}

About Robert Pinsky's first book of poems Robert Lowell wrote, "It is refreshing to find a poet who is intellectually interesting and technically first-rate. Robert Pinsky belongs to that rarest category of talent, a poet-critic."

In the Times Literary Supplement, William Pritchard^{[citation needed]} called "Sadness and Happiness", "the best work by any younger poet within recent memory."

Louis Martz called Pinsky^{[citation needed]}"the most exhilarating new poet that I have read since A. R. Ammons entered upon the scene. In his peculiar and original combination of abstract utterance and vivid image Pinsky points the way toward the future of poetry."

"The Inferno of Dante" has been celebrated by Stephen Greenblatt^{[citation needed]} as, "the premier modern text for English-language readers to experience Dante's power."

"In his poems Pinsky talks, with democratic warmth and intimacy, to the common things of this world. His extraordinary poems remind us that he has always embodied the very ideal he proposes for what a poet can do," Lloyd Schwarz, The Boston Phoenix^{[citation needed]}

"Robert Pinsky's poetry is noted for its combination of vivid imagery and clear, discursive language that explores such themes as truth, the history of nations and individuals, and the transcendent aspects of simple acts. Pinsky strives to create an organized view of the world, often confronting and trying to explain the past to bring order to the present. Recurring subjects in his work include the Holocaust, religion, and childhood. Pinsky's moral tone and mastery of poetic meter often are compared to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English poets, and the insights conveyed in his analytical works on poetry have led critics to place him in the tradition of other poet-critics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden."^{[citation needed]}

Published works

Poetry

• Sadness and Happiness (1975)
• An Explanation of America (1980)
• History of My Heart (1984)
• Dying (1984)
• The Want Bone (1990)
• Shirt (1990)
• The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 (1996)
• Jersey Rain (2000)
• Samurai Song (2001)
• Gulf Music: Poems (2007)
• Impossible to tell(...)

Prose

• Landor's Poetry (1968)
• The Situation of Poetry (1977)
• Poetry and the World (1988)
• The Sounds of Poetry (1998)
• Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry (2002)
• The Life of David (2006)
• Thousands of Broadways: Dreams and Nightmares of the American Small Town (2009)

Interactive fiction

• Mindwheel (1984)

As translator

• The Separate Notebooks by Czesław Miłosz, with Renata Gorczynski and Robert Hass (1984)
• The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation (1995)

As editor

• Handbook of Heartbreak (1998)
• Americans' Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology, with Maggie Dietz (1999)
• Poems to Read (2002)
• An Invitation to Poetry (2004)
• Essential Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud (2009)

Honors and awards

• Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1997-2000)
• National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (1974)
• Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University
• Saxifrage Prize (1980) for An Explanation of America
• William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America
• Nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism (1988) for Poetry and the World
• Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1996) for The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996
• Ambassador Book Award in Poetry of the English Speaking Union
• Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize (1997) for The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996
• Los Angeles Times Book Award (1994) for The Inferno of Dante
• Book-of-the-Month Editor's Choice (1994) for The Inferno of Dante
• Academy of American Poets' Translation Award (1994) for The Inferno of Dante

Notes and references

Notes and citations

Books and printed materials

• The Art of Poetry LXXVI: Robert Pinsky" The Paris Review No. 144 (1997), 180-213 (interview)

Online Resources

• Boston University Press Release
• Cortland Review Interview with Robert Pinsky
• Modern American Poetry on Robert Pinsky
• The Academy of American Poets on Robert Pinsky

External links

• PoemsOutLoud.net: Robert Pinsky's Blog for National Poetry Month, April 2009
• Interview with Robert Pinsky for Guernica Magazine
• The Favorite Poem Project Site
• IPA: Robert Pinsky reads a selection of his poetry
• Poet Robert Pinsky Takes on King David in a public radio interview on ThoughtCast!
• Robert Pinsky is the special guest judge for the Sean Penn vs. Stephen Colbert's "Meta-Free-Phor-All: Shall I Nail Thee to a Summer's Day?" Metaphor-Off
• Watch Robert Pinsky read "Book" at Open-Door Poetry