Robert Pinsky

 

 

 

 

 

 

07 Feb. 2005

 

American Poet Laureate to Read at MPC

Robert Pinsky

 

Robert Pinsky met with interested MPC students in the Karas Room of the Library prior to the reading in the MPC Theatre on Monday, February 7, 2005. Students asked questions about Poet Pinsky’s behind stories, and Pinsky gave delight answers to the audience. The first impression was a people’s spokesman who he can read and express ordinary people’s mind and feelings. When he started to talk about how he got into writing poem, it gradually flowed into his poetry reading, as if rap singer’s rapping the lyrics following the rhythm as he mentioned he wanted to be a jazz musician when he was a little.

 

When he addressed how he felt about the poetry roles in our lives, his reading was full of vigor and vitality that inspired the audience to immediately want to be a poet. In his interview “The Voice of a Poet” on the Monterey County Weekly, he said, “I don’t want to overstate the importance of poetry. It cannot replace sober history or the Op-Ed page.” He has the sense that using suitable rhymes fits right in his words, and it became a poem. He can express directly what he has in his mind through his lips naturally. It seems as if he was born to be a poet.

 

Also, his poetic spirit is well described in "The Student Newspaper of MPC, Scratch Paper" article, “Pinsky… believes in literature and poetry as necessary elements of democracy. When a literary text has entered into us, been spoken by us, we are less isolated and more connected to all the manifold ways humans live and feel.”

 

 From meeting with Pinsky, I can picture the different perspective of poetry reading that can be used for  a medium to a reader’s voice and can be imagined actual scenes through reading as rhythm inspired by nature. It's just like wind blows, and then leaf trembles in the breeze.

 

 

 

 

 

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United States Poet Laureate (1997–2000) Translator, Essayist, and Teacher

Robert Pinsky was Poet Laureate of the United States for an unprecedented three terms (1997-2000). He is poetry editor of the online journal Slate and writes the weekly “Poet’s Choice” column for the Washington Post. He has also been a regular contributor to The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. He teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University. His The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1965-1995 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and also received the Lenore Marshall Award and the Ambassador Book Award of the English Speaking Union. He has received the Shelley Memorial Award, the Harold Washington Literary Award and the PEN Voelcker Award. His collection of essays, Poetry and the World, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle award in criticism. He is also co-translator of The Separate Notebooks, poems by Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz. The Inferno of Dante, Robert Pinsky’s verse translation, was awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Award in poetry and the Howard Morton Landon Prize for translation. A Book-of-the-Month-Club Editor’s Choice, The Inferno of Dante appeared on the Best Sellers lists of the Boston Globe and New York Newsday. It has been celebrated by Stephen Greenblatt as “the premier modern text for English-language readers to experience Dante’s power.” Robert Pinsky’s latest collection of poems is Jersey Rain. In 2004 Norton published the anthology An Invitation to Poetry, a collection of poems featured in Robert Pinsky’s Favorite Poem Project. The anthology includes a DVD featuring twenty-seven of the FPP’s video segments, as broadcast on The NewsHour. His Tanner Lectures at Princeton, Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry, have been published as a book by Princeton University Press. In fall 2005, Schocken Books will publish The Life of David, a retelling and interpretation of the Biblical and legendary stories. Robert Pinsky’s work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies including The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, The Harper American Literature, The Harvard Book of Contemporary Poetry and The Vintage Book of Contemporary Poetry, Best Poems of 1990, Best Poems of 1991, Best Poems of 1992, etc. He was elected in 1999 to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and is among the few members of that Academy who has also appeared in a cameo role on television’s “The Simpsons.” 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 TLS, 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.” James Longenbach wrote,“since the death of Robert Lowell in 1977, no single figure has dominated American poetry the way Lowell, or before him Eliot, once did. But among the many writers who have come of age in our fin de siecle, none has succeeded more completely as poet, critic, and translator than Robert Pinsky.” ••• “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.” — Robert Lowell                 http://www.barclayagency.com/pinsky.html