Robert Pinsky

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Robert Pinsky 15 May 2005

Robert Pinsky (born October 20, 1940) is an American poet and former Poet Laureate of the United States (1997-2000). "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."

1 Life
2 Interviews
3 Career
4 Criticism
5 Works
6 Trivia
7 References
8 External links

[edit] Life

Pinsky was born in Long Branch, New Jersey. During Pinsky's childhood he says, that his life was great, he had enough food, didn’t really live in poverty, and he had friends, some. “Thats the beautiful part of my life, having friends and having enough food. My life was full of fear. My father got fired from his rather low-paying job when I was seven years old, in 1947, and we had no money.”

In Pinsky’s life, he lived in a run down apartment, being the older of his two siblings, which made the house even more small. Pinsky’s life was humiliating because he lived in the part of town where there were drunks and lots of murderers. His mother said that, “We lived in a slum…It wasn’t where middle class people were supposed to be staying."

Robert was very insecure about all of that. Of course, worse came to worse, his mother, who had already been, “rather a strange and difficult person,” Pinsky says, fell on her head. Pinsky’s mother had a concussion and she was in the hospital for a couple of months. Pinsky had a grandmother that lived four doors down and cooked for the Pinsky family most of the time, because the Pinsky’s were too busy or too poor, or too lazy. These problems in his family inspired him to write more and jazz really helped him explain what he felt.

Pinsky loved jazz, because the flow of it and how it made him feel. He said it was incredible, because jazz was so different, which he wanted to be throughout his life. Pinsky decided to start poetry because he wanted to explore new bounds. (http://project1.caryacademy.org/echoes/poet_Robert_Pinsky/defaultrobert%20pinsky.htm)

He attended Long Branch High School before earning his B.A. from Rutgers University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford University, where he held a Stegner Fellowship in creative writing. At Rutgers University he formed friendships with a group of budding young writers and poets who published work in the school's journal, The Anthologist. Shunning creative writing programs, they considered their apprenticeships as artists to be outside the domain of school and teachers' judgments. At Stanford he studied under the noted poet and critic Yvor Winters, and his classmates included the poets Robert Hass and John Matthias. He taught at Wellesley College and the University of California, Berkeley before going to Boston University. He is currently poetry editor of the weekly Internet magazine Slate.

Pinsky teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University, and in 1997 was named the united States poet Laureate and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of congress. He now lives in Newton Corner, Massachusetts.

As Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky became a public ambassador for poetry, founding 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 had a strong presence in the American cultural. The project sought to document that presence, giving voice to the American audience for poetry.

[edit] Interviews

[[1]]Interview with Pinsky on Religious Background
[[2]] Interview with Pinsky by J.M. Spalding

[edit] Career

Pinsky's collection of essays, Landor's Poetry was published in 1968 and followed by other essay collections in 1977- The Situation of Poetry and Poetry and the World (1988), which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. He received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 1974 and in 1975 published his collection of poems, Sadness and Happiness. It contains both long and short poems but is noted in particular for the seventeen-page "Essay on Psychiatrists." Offering a variety of literary and cultural references, the poem is said to typify Pinsky's use of discursive poetic forms. Similarly, in the book-length poem An Explanation of America, one of his most ambitious and admired works, the poet teaches his daughter about the past so that she may shape her future. The title poem in History of My Heart is an autobiographical narrative on memory and desire that draws on many of Pinsky's childhood, adolescent, and adult experiences. In "The Want Bone" he employs, "a pastiche technique characterized by overt word play in order to symbolize and examine the lust for life and the desire for sensual experience. The volume includes mock biblical stories on the childhood of Jesus and an extended prose section in which Jesus, in disguise, enters the story of Tristan and Isolde in order to learn about love."

Poetry collections: An Explanation of America (1980) which won the Saxifrage Prize; History of My Heart (1984), awarded the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America; The Want Bone (1990); and, The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, and was awarded the Ambassador Book Award in Poetry of the English Speaking Union and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Professor Pinsky is renowned for his translation work, most notably The Inferno of Dante (1994) which won the Los Angeles Times Book Award in poetry, the Academy of American Poets' translation award, and was a Book-of-the-Month-Club Editor's Choice. He has received many other literary awards and honors.

Pinsky is also the author of the interactive fiction game Mindwheel (1984) developed by Synapse and released by Broderbund. He is known for his innovative, personal style, and his use of contemporary themes. Pinsky is a professor at Boston University, where he teaches in the graduate creative writing program.

[edit] Criticism

Pinsky is often 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."

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." Writing in the Times Literary Supplement, William Pritchard called "Sadness and Happiness", "the best work by any younger poet within recent memory." Louis Martz wrote of Pinsky "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 as, "the premier mofern text for English-language readers to experience Dante's power." Hugh Kenner has described Pinsky's ambition as "nothing less than the recovery for language of a whole domain of mute and familiar experience," (http://www.bu.edu/favoritepoem/contact/rp_bio.html, 2). “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). “Among the many writers who have come of age in our fin de siecle, none has succeeded more completely as a poet, critic and translator than Robert Pinsky,” (James Longenbach, The Nation). (http://www.bu.edu/favoritepoem/contact/rp_bio.html, 2)

[edit] Works

In fall 2007, FSG will publish Pinsky’s next collection of poetry, entitled Gulf Music. [3]

2006 First Things to Hand
2004 Invitation to Poetry
2002 Poems to Read
2002 Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry
2000 Jersey Rain
1999 Americans' Favorite Poems
1998 The Sounds of Poetry
1998 The Handbook of Heartbreak
1995 The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation
1995 The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996
1990 The Want Bone
1988 Poetry and the World
1984 History Of My Heart
1984 The Separate Notebooks, Poems by Czeslaw Milosz
1980 An Explanation of America
1977 The Situation of Poetry
1975 Sadness and Happiness
1968 Landor's Poetry - poems and prose in Antaeus, The New Yorker, Modern Philology, Critical Inquiry, Representations, The Paris Review, The Harvard Book of Contemporary Poetry, The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, The Norton Anthology of American Literature

[edit] Trivia

Robert Pinsky was a guest star in The Simpsons episode "Little Girl in the Big Ten". In the episode, Lisa poses as a college student and attends a reading by Pinsky. After the reading he describes the President (presumably Bill Clinton, but personified as the "crusty old dean" stereotype often used by the program), shouting from the White House, demanding a poem that he hadn't handed in, like a piece of homework. Pinsky relates that he pulled a poem "out of my ass."