Robert Pinsky
Robert Pinsky is a prominent American poet, critic, and former U.S. Poet Laureate, known for his innovative approach to poetry and his advocacy for the art form. Born in Long Branch, New Jersey, to Jewish immigrant grandparents, Pinsky's upbringing in a coastal environment deeply influenced his creative imagination. He initially pursued a career in music, playing the tenor saxophone, before transitioning to poetry, where he found his true calling. Pinsky's work is characterized by a blend of personal experience and broader socio-political themes, exemplified in collections such as "Sadness and Happiness" and "An Explanation of America."
His tenure as Poet Laureate from 1997 to 2000 was marked by the launch of the Favorite Poem Project, which aimed to celebrate poetry's relevance in everyday life. In addition to his poetry, Pinsky has authored nonfiction works, taught at various prestigious universities, and has engaged with the public through popular media. His later works, including "Jersey Rain" and "At the Foundling Hospital," reflect a continued commitment to the musicality of language. Pinsky has received numerous accolades throughout his career, solidifying his reputation as a significant figure in contemporary American poetry. In 2023, he published a memoir titled "Jersey Breaks: Becoming an American Poet," further detailing his journey and contributions to literature.
Robert Pinsky
American poet, essayist, and translator best known as US poet laureate under President Bill Clinton
- Born: October 20, 1940
- Place of Birth: Long Branch, New Jersey
Biography
Robert Pinsky is an accomplished poet and critic. He was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, to Milford Pinsky, an optician, and his wife, Sylvia. All four of Pinsky’s grandparents were Jewish immigrants to America from Eastern Europe. The environment of Long Branch, which Pinsky describes as a “decayed resort town,” made a deep impression on the poet-to-be. In an autobiographical essay, “Salt Water,” Pinsky describes how living close to the ocean causes the imagination to be pushed in “extravagant directions.”
Pinsky’s childhood memories are happy, but he was restless and unhappy as an adolescent; he was suspended from school for cutting classes and insubordination. He played the tenor saxophone and daydreamed of achieving fame as a jazz musician and composer. Playing music expressed his craving for freedom and art.
Realizing the limits of his gifts as a musician, Pinsky began to dream of becoming a poet. During his first year of graduate school at Stanford University, he showed his poems to the poet and critic Yvor Winters, who was teaching there. One of Pinsky’s better-known poems, “Essay on Psychiatrists,” includes a tribute to Winters. Undeterred by Winters’s initial criticism, Pinsky arranged a directed reading course with him on the periods of poetry in English. Pinsky marks his meeting with Winters as “a kind of birth.”
“Essay on Psychiatrists,” a seventeen-page poem from Pinsky’s first poetry collection, Sadness and Happiness (1975), displays the discursive style that characterizes much of his poetry. Pinsky traces his employment of long lines and units to his ambition to “use all the aspects” of himself—including comedic and visionary aspects—in his art.
Pinsky’s second book of poetry, An Explanation of America (1979), consists almost entirely of the title poem. Critics have compared its incorporation of both mundane and historical materials on a near-epic scale to Paterson (1946–58) by William Carlos Williams, another poet who influenced Pinsky. In the poem, which critic Willard Spiegelman likens to “a melting pot of others’ voices” within Pinsky’s meditations, the poet and the oldest of his three daughters, to whom the poem is addressed, “repeat the adventure of all American immigrants confronting the vastness of the continent.” Pinsky delivers a lecture whose authoritativeness is modulated with, in Spiegelman’s words, “great tenderness.”
In 1981, Pinsky was sent by the cultural branch of the United States State Department on a tour of several Eastern European countries, where he read his poems and talked informally with writers, scholars, and students about American poetry. Pinsky is convinced that his awareness of the power of language is not simply an “ideology assimilated by the upward-striving, English-speaking descendant of ambitious steerage immigrants from Eastern Europe” but rather comes from inside him.
Pinsky’s poetry has been noted for its tonal shifts and balances and for its mixing of autobiographical anecdotes with political, social, and philosophical commentary. From his mother’s witnessing Fats Waller play a toy piano when she worked at Macy’s department store to his own visit to the site of a concentration camp—incidents informing poems in his third collection, History of My Heart (1984), Pinsky interweaves the personal and public into his work.
Pinsky’s poem “Visions of Daniel,” in his fourth collection, The Want Bone (1990), suggests that the challenge facing the biblical prophet Daniel is emblematic of that confronting twentieth-century poets. The collection, published as the poet approached fifty, shows his concern with the moral dilemmas of the age and demonstrates his skill at counterpoising invention and formality.
In 1984, Pinsky’s computerized novel Mindwheel was published as a formatted disk. Newsweek hailed the work as a “new art form.” Pinsky likened the multiple narratives of his “quest romance” to Dante’s journey in the Divine Comedy (c. 1320). Ten years later, Pinsky would win a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for his translation of The Inferno of Dante, part one of the Divine Comedy. Pinsky’s nonfiction works effectively complement his creative works, which articulate his absorption in the creative tension between innovation and tradition.
From 1997 to 2000, he was the United States poet laureate. As poet laureate, Pinsky launched the Favorite Poem Project, in which ordinary Americans submitted audio recordings of themselves reading their favorite poem aloud. The recordings were archived, and the poems were later anthologized. Through this endeavor to highlight the importance of poetry in American life, Pinsky made the position of poet laureate far more visible and one of advocacy. Pinsky also made appearances on the television comedy The Simpsons and the mock news show The Colbert Report. He has also contributed to major publications like the Washington Post and the New Yorker.
Pinsky has taught at the University of Chicago, Wellesley College, the University of California at Berkeley, and Boston University where he teaches in the mid-2020s. In the 2010s, Pinsky led massive open online courses on poetry through Boston University.
In addition, Pinsky continues to write and publish volumes of his own verse, including Jersey Rain (2000), Gulf Music (2007), Selected Poems (2011), and At the Foundling Hospital (2016). His later poetic work, while ranging broadly in tone, remains focused on the musicality of language inspired by his early love of jazz. Pinsky has also produced several books of literary interpretation, edited anthologies, and other works of nonfiction. In 2023, Pinsky published Jersey Breaks: Becoming an American Poet, a memoir.
For his work, Pinsky has received several honors and awards, including the 1984 William Carlos Williams Prize for History of My Heart and the 2004 PEN/Voelcker Award. His retrospective collection The Figured Wheel was also a 1997 Pulitzer Prize finalist, and At the Foundling Hospital was short-listed for the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award.
Author Works
Poetry:
Sadness and Happiness, 1975
An Explanation of America, 1979
History of My Heart, 1984
The Want Bone, 1990
The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996, 1996
Jersey Rain, 2000
First Things to Hand, 2006
Gulf Music, 2007
Selected Poems, 2012
At the Foundling Hospital, 2016
Long Fiction:
Mindwheel, 1984 (computerized novel)
Nonfiction:
Landor’s Poetry, 1968 (dissertation)
The Situation of Poetry, 1976
Poetry and the World, 1988
Image and Text: A Dialogue with Robert Pinsky and Michael Mazur, 1994
The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide, 1998
Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry, 2002
The Life of David, 2005
Thousands of Broadways: Dreams and Nightmares of the American Small Town, 2009
Jersey Breaks: Becoming an American Poet, 2023
Translations:
The Separate Notebooks, 1983 (of Czesław Miłosz)
The Inferno of Dante, 1994
Friedrich Schiller's Wallenstein, 2013
Edited Texts:
The Handbook of Heartbreak: 101 Poems of Lost Love and Sorrow, 1998
Americans’ Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology, 2000 (with Maggie Dietz)
Poems to Read: A New Favorite Poem Project Anthology, 2002 (with Maggie Dietz)
An Invitation to Poetry: A New Favorite Poem Project Anthology, 2004 (with Maggie Dietz)
William Carlos Williams: Selected Poems, 2004
Essential Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud, 2009
The Best of the Best American Poetry: 25th Anniversary Edition, 2013
Singing School: Learning to Write (and Read) Poetry by Studying with the Masters, 2013
Miscellaneous
Poem Jazz, 2012 (with Laurence Hobgood)
Poem Jazz II: House Hour, 2015 (with Laurence Hobgood)
Bibliography
"About Robert Pinsky." Robert Pinsky: Poet, Translator, Essayist, 2017, robertpinskypoet.com/bio. Accessed 16 Mar. 2017.
Fay-LeBlanc, Gibson. “Thrilling Difficulty – Guernica.” Guernica Magazine, 1 Nov. 2007, www.guernicamag.com/thrilling‗difficulty. Accessed 12 July 2024.
Freedman, Jonathan. “How Now, Middlebrow?” Raritan, vol. 20, winter 2001, pp. 169-180.
Glück, Louise. “Story Tellers.” American Poetry Review, July/Aug. 1997, pp. 9-12.
Lehman, David, editor. Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms: 85 Leading Contemporary Poets Select and Comment on Their Poems. 1987. Rev. and expanded ed. New York: Macmillan, 1996.
Longenbach, James. “Robert Pinsky and the Language of Our Time.” Salmagundi, vol. 103, summer 1994, pp. 155-177.
Miller, Greg. “Spirituality and American Poetry.” Tikkun, vol. 18, Jan./Feb. 2003, pp. 68-70.
Molesworth, Charles. “Proving Irony by Compassion: The Poetry of Robert Pinsky.” The Hollins Critic, vol. 21, Dec. 1984, pp. 1-18.
Mroz, Jacqueline. “Poet Robert Pinsky Recounts Long Branch Youth in 'Jersey Breaks.'” New Jersey Monthly Magazine, 14 Oct. 2022, njmonthly.com/articles/arts-entertainment/robert-pinsky-traces-poetry-roots-to-vivid-long-branch-youth-in-new-memoir. Accessed 12 July 2024.
Parini, Jay. “Explaining America: The Poetry of Robert Pinsky.” Chicago Review, vol. 33, summer 1981, pp. 16-26.
Pollitt, Katha. “World of Wonders.” The New York Times Book Review, vol. 18, Aug. 1996, p. 9.
Tangorra, Joanne. “New Software from Synapse Takes Poetic License.” Publishers Weekly, vol. 227, 19 Apr. 1985, p. 50.
Vitale, Tom. “Pinsky's 'Singing School': Poetry For The Verse Averse.” NPR, 6 Aug. 2013, www.npr.org/2013/08/06/209256446/pinskys-singing-school-poetry-for-the-verse-averse. Accessed 12 July 2024.