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Robert Pinsky is the author of six books of poetry: Jersey Rain; The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996, which won the 1997 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and was a Pulitzer Prize nominee; The Want Bone; History of My Heart; An Explanation of America; and Sadness and Happiness. He has published four books of criticism, including The Sounds of Poetry, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and two books of translation, including The Inferno of Dante, which received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award. His honors include an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, Poetry's Oscar Blumenthal prize, the William Carlos Williams Award, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. He is currently poetry editor of the weekly magazine Slate. He teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University, and served previously as the United States Poet Laureate and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. He lives in Newton Corner, MA.
(Photo courtesy of Scott Davidson)
Interviewer: Lee Rossi
LR: One of my friends calls you the Martin Scorsese of American Poetry, which works I think on a couple of levels, not just that you slightly resemble one another, but that you both have immersed yourself deeply in the history of your medium and often champion works that were once important but are now neglected. Why is history so important to you?
RP: An interesting question. The King of Comedy and Taxi Driver are among my favorite movies. And I will always respect Scorsese additionally for the reverence and practical help he gave to Kurosawa. Also his generous work on film preservation.
On a personal level, maybe my interest in where things come from—your name and mine, the shapes of our heads, this language we are using— has to do with growing up in an historic town, where my family has lived for a few generations. Long Branch, New Jersey is an historic resort, frequented by Grant, Lincoln, Garfield, Woodrow Wilson; also Diamond Jim Brady and Phil Daly.
Less personally, in a more general way, I love the poetry of Yeats, Jonson, Dickinson, Stevens. The dead people have made more great art than we living ones—they have had much more time to do it. And, also over all that time what they wrote has been sorted out from the crummy and the merely okay.
But the real answer is harder to formulate. It has to do with my ambitions as an American poet: our national relation to the past, our relation—as immigrants or inheritors or defiers or arrogators or noo-noos. Or something.
LR: A couple of years ago in L.A., you gave a talk which had as its theme the notion that “Everything comes from somewhere." And you mentioned that a friend of yours—was it Robert Hass?—describes your poems as characterized by “from-someness." Do you see your work as offering an antidote to contemporary culture’s obsession with the ephemeral?
RP: Often, I don’t respond to the ephemera of the present moment: somehow, when something has ripened for at least a decade or two, it gets more interesting to me. Spiro Agnew and Tiny Tim and Carlos Castaneda were less interesting to me then they are now that they have fermented a bit. And they have their equivalents in poetry too, certainly in literary criticism. And when I look at the figures in the magazines and on TV now, I think about which ones will be remembered only by weirdoes like me.
LR: You've been Poet Laureate and as such have taken on a public role and responsibility for poetry. What is the poet's responsibility vis a vis the world of politics and society?
RP: Not to turn away. All citizens have that responsibility. Artists are citizens too, just like optometrists and bartenders and lawyers. We have a right to speak out—possibly to make fools of ourselves, bad examples, as Wordsworth did in his late-in-life sonnets against the ballot box and in favor of capital punishment, possibly to set a good example like Akhmatova.
Maybe we are not obliged or required to write, for example, about American foreign policy. Maybe we would be as wrong as Ezra Pound was wrong. But we are obliged, I believe, not to turn away from American foreign policy. We must use our gaze, not avert it, even if no poem comes of it—a great poet’s gift may be elsewhere—but we should try to see, and to know.
LR: Many in the poetry community complain that most people don't read contemporary poetry. In your view, is this a cultural problem with dire consequences or just the grousing of a bunch of fogies whose time has passed? Why should people read poetry? What might they get from poetry that they don't get from the media or other forms of art?
RP: The new Favorite Poem Project anthology, Invitation to Poetry, provides clear, dramatic evidence that many people read poetry. The book comes with a free DVD tucked into the back, with about twenty-five video segments that amplify the evidence. Some of the poems people write about in the book, and speak about in the video segments, are contemporary.
An Invitation to Poetry is published by Norton, the third such anthology they have published. They publish the books because they can make money selling them. The first book, Americans’ Favorite Poems, is in something like its seventeenth or eighteenth printing.
It is true that other media now serve a certain sort of middlebrow or sentimental taste that used to read immensely popular poetry like “The Old Oaken Bucket," or Edgar Guest—he had his own radio show!—all the stuff Cather delightedly laughs at in The Song of the Lark. Song lyrics and self-help books and cult literature, etc. supply those needs.
The art of Wallace Stevens outlasts the art of Laurence Welk. If the poets you are quoting write poems as good as “The Idea of Order at Key West," they may have readers after many a paltry, foolish, painted thing that troubles the Arts and Living Pages has been forgotten.
LR: Since you brought up anthologies—for the past 30 years, we've heard that women and people of color are underrepresented in the standard literary anthologies. One response has been to make the standard anthologies somewhat more inclusive—some call it tokenism. Another has been the appearance of many specialized anthologies, anthologies of women poets, African-American poets, Asian-Pacific poets, etc., etc. Of course, this trend has not gone unnoticed by those who were happy with the way things used to be. These literary conservatives—I'm thinking of the New Criterion, for example—deplore this trend as simply "identity marketing" and maintain that excellence should be the only yardstick for publication. Do you think that such anthologies serve a useful function, and secondly does poetry have a role to play in establishing or buttressing the identity of individuals and groups?
RP: If publishers bring out poetry anthologies, of different kinds and different levels of seriousness, and people buy them, then I don't see much worth arguing about.
The most devoted readers tend to go beyond anthologies and read poems in the contexts poets have chosen for them. Good anthologies are scouting reports, among other things—guides to what you might want to go into more deeply. A step in my early commitment to the art was wanting to read Dickinson, Stevens, Williams, Yeats, Herbert as writers of more than just the anthology poems.
Let there be as many kinds of anthologies as have a market. Maniacs like me will be looking for the best works of art, and you never know where you might find them,
Or to put it from the poet's point of view: if some young fanatic first discovers my work in an anthology of Jersey Shore Poetry or an anthology of Male Secular Jews—I won't complain. But the person I have in mind will want to read The Want Bone or Jersey Rain.
LR: Back in the 90's you produced a wonderful translation of the Inferno, and just this year you published a life of King David. Why translate a 600-year-old poem or retell a story that's been told for two millennia?
RP: For fun. For pleasure. Because that poem and that story of stories have not survived all this time because Great Professors shoot them at us from cannons, or force them on us like medicine for children, but because they are absorbing, engaging, moving, terrifying, gratifying.
In other words … because they are good.
LR: When you read your poems to an audience, you caress every sound in every syllable, a method that is strikingly distinct from the often mumbled and inaudible delivery of many poets. Yet it is also quite different from the impassioned, inflammatory presentation of the Vachel Lindsay/Allen Ginsberg school of bardic elocution. Why is sound in poetry so important to you, and how would you distinguish your emphasis on the auditory aspect of poetry?
RP: In his best mood and vein Allen Ginsberg read poetry very well—not trying to be an actor or shaman, but as a poet. I once heard him recite “Lycidas" from memory, and he gave beautiful emphasis to the vowels and consonants. Sometimes he was, painfully, a ham. But he was also a great poet, and sometimes he read his work and other poetry in a way I admire. I’ve never heard Lindsay, but I guess I can imagine it.
When I say the words of a poem, I try to respect the vowels and consonants and the shapes of the sentences and the idiom because they are what I have, as a musician has sounds and rhythms. They are what poetry itself has, in my sense of it.
The readers in those videos—untrained, not experts, not actors— often read very well because they hear the poem they read, and they love what they hear. Watch the video of, say, the Jamaican immigrant Seph Rodney reading Sylvia Plath’s “Nick and the Candlestick" and you will know what I mean.
LR: In an interview with Tom Sleigh you compare Frank O'Hara's mode of composition with your own, both of which you call "improvising." Your point, I think, was that you both use your voice "to test out every phrase and line." But despite that similarity, his voice seems very different from yours, more quirky and idiosyncratic, whereas yours covers vast expanses of cultural and historical space. How long does it take for a poem like "Shirt" or "The Refinery" to come together?
RP: Of course you are right about the differences, but I do admire the range of references, the sheer curiosity about all the different parts of the world, and how those parts might fit together or not, in poems by O’Hara like “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island." I think you may underestimate how much O’Hara “covers vast expanses of cultural and historical space." And maybe how weird I am?
I’m a fast writer and a slow reviser—my stream of consciousness is very much like “Shirt" or “The Refinery." I drive by the Richmond, CA refinery all lit up at night, or I read that the kilt may not be ancient at all … and my mind starts imagining Lord Exxon—corporations are legally persons—or thinking about how new or ancient any garment or type of garment might be. That kind of association is a strong habit with me, a great weedy vine that curls around everything I see and do. Sometimes I chop off some of the vine and try to weave a poem out of it.
LR: How do you know when a poem is finished?
RP: It’s a physical sensation when you say it aloud: similar to rubbing your hand over a piece of wood you are sandpapering.
LR: My friend Jack Grapes has a poem called "I Like My Own Poems Best." Which of your own poems do you like best, which say what you want to say most compellingly, most hauntingly.
RP: After I have written them, they are for other people. I am pleased when people like them, that means a lot to me. As the opposite makes me feel bad. But my own imagination is engaged with the poem I just finished, or the one I hope to write. I have a soft spot for An Explanation of America because it is addressed to one of my children. Also, some of the poems in Jersey Rain because they involve, indirectly, the illness and successful treatment of someone I care about.
LR: When did you know you were a poet?
RP: Frost says that you shouldn’t ever call yourself a poet, that other people judge of that and say it about you or not. But in a poem he calls himself “a bard," doesn’t he? Like him to set a high standard and then goof around it a bit.
After trying in my teens to be a musician, trying to write plays, daydreaming about all sorts of arts—architecture and industrial design at one point—I read certain poems. I heard something I thought I could learn to do. Eliot, Ginsberg, Donne, Williams, Yeats, Blake, a mish-mosh of stuff. Like the music I admired, the poetry gave me a sort of nervous shiver, I couldn’t sit still, I had to hear it again and again. But unlike the music the poetry gave me a feeling of maybe I can do this. With music, I came to realize, it was I wish I could do this.
LR: I've heard you say that if you hadn't become a poet, you would have been a musician. What music? Jazz? Classical? Which instrument?
RP: I played tenor saxophone, still hack at it sometimes, also keyboard. The only thing that held me back was a lack of talent.
LR: Can you comment on the relationship between poetry and music? Did we lose our sense of the musical in poetry when we stopped writing in meter and rhyme?
RP: Not if we are Stevens or Williams or Bishop, we didn’t. The sounds of the words in their poems is as beautiful, as effective, as artful and alert to patterns, as poems in meter. Stevens not only wrote gorgeous iambic pentameter in “Sunday Morning" and “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm," he could write beautifully in rhyme, as in “The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad." Sometimes he wrote early drafts of a poem in rhyme and meter then gradually twisted and melted and hammered it so it became “free" verse, like Picasso working a plate of a bull down to a few strokes.
That’s related to why his free verse is so gorgeous and unmistakably verse.
In the generation of poets that began writing in rhyme and meter, then abandoned it—born around 1927—the same ones who could write gorgeous pentameter wrote wonderful free verse. James Wright’s poems in rhyme and meter are terrific, for example.
It’s worth looking at those early poems of that generation, and thinking about this.
Poetry, as far as I’m concerned, will always be somewhere along the scale between singing and talking.
LR: You've taught writing for a long time. What do you want your students to learn from you?
RP: I want them to learn how to use great art to make art. Yeats says there is no singing school but studying—studying monuments of singing’s magnificence. Not pretty good things, but monuments.
I want them to be able to learn from Keats or Neruda or Cavafy or Eliot or Akira Kurosawa or Dexter Gordon or whatever each of them, individually, considers magnificent. To understand that there are no rules, but that principles can be derived from great work.
LR: What is the best way to learn to write poetry?
RP: To read the way a cook eats, or a filmmaker watches movies or a musician listens to music.
To keep writing, no matter how humiliating or unsatisfactory the writing may be.
To listen alertly to great poetry. To study language and languages. To seek what is magnificent, and know as much as possible about how you decided what was magnificent. And how that quality was achieved.
To follow the compass that tells you that you are headed the right way when, as Dickinson says, you feel the top of your head about to come off.
LR: What's the best assignment you've ever given your students.
RP: Writing: Write something you think is impossible to write.
Reading: Type up or write out with your own hand thirty-five pages of poetry that represents the art for you. Get some of it by heart.
LR: How is translating Dante different from writing your own poetry?
RP: It is exactly the same, with the single exception that you don’t have to think of what to say next.
LR: Who do you read and admire?
RP: I have said. Yeats, Dickinson, Ben Jonson ....
But that is not what you mean. I have been teasing, and I suppose somewhat playing a role, as I often do, by talking about the past as I have. As a corrective maybe, to something blandly pleased with itself in contemporary poetry, something that tends to be satisfied with only itself and its moment as a standard. Sometimes I feel that compared to the musicians and visual artists we don’t live as intimately and casually with the past of our art as they do, maybe to our loss.
You really mean, contemporary, living poets. Well, I write a weekly column for the Washington Post Book World at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/04/19/LI2005041903440.html, and I choose the poems that appear each week in Slate at www.slate.com. The Poetry Daily site picks up the Book World column. Those sites and my books about poetry demonstrate what I like and admire in contemporary work.
The poems I quote and write about in Poetry and the World or The Sounds of Poetry, what I publish in Slate or write about for the Post, what I have read on The NewsHour—those are online too, at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/poems/poems.html—those are examples of what I read and admire.
This week I read a couple of terrific books by young puppies, Dan Chiasson’s Natural History and Peter Campion’s Other People. There are many in this category of—to me—Unbelievably Young: Cate Marvin. Elise Partridge.
LR: In that L.A. reading I mentioned earlier, you quipped, "Almost all the great poems in English were written by dead people." Which are the great poems written by living people?
RP: As you can see by my first answer, sometimes we say things more than once. And in more than one way, we may hope.
I think there are many great poems by living poets.
By “great" I guess I mean a work of art that takes me over somewhat, that has infiltrated my own imagination, so I think about it over and over, will in some sense always be reading it. Of the many recent poems that have affected me that way, I will limit myself to two you may not know about: James McMichael’s book-length poem Four Good Things and Gail Mazur’s translation/imitation of Michelangelo’s poem about working on the Sistine chapel, in her New and Selected, “Zeppo’s Second Wife."
If changing how I think or feel is a sign of greatness, then those are great. Two from among a few dozen such poems by living poets.
LR: How would you characterize the feeling quality of your work? Are you a poet of celebration, like Whitman or Kenneth Koch, or a brooding gothic type like Poe? At times you seem like the former, at times like the latter. Or is feeling in your poems secondary to the ideas, to the investigation of the interconnectedness of past and present, the here and the elsewhere?
RP: Not celebration exactly or primarily, and not brooding exactly or primarily, but longing of a particular kind. Wanting. The feeling in everything I write, for me, is a yearning for more—sensing the encircling, binding hoop that Long Branch or my mother or Shiva or Loki put around the Universe, and wanting to break out of that circle or cycle, to find something more.
LR: Thank you, Mr. Pinsky, for an informative and thought-provoking conversation. I'm especially struck by how much you've done to bring poetry to a wider audience. I'm not sure that one can or even should be a "poetry activist," but your work, I suspect, has gained many new readers for poetry without "cheapening the brand."
RP: And thanks back to you!
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