Robert Pinsky

By Barry Goldensohn

If there is a consistent ground rule for Robert Pinsky's poems, early to recent, it is that apparent simplicity is the invitation to troubling complexity. It is an attractive movement of the mind: finding exceptions to simple rules, unexpected textures to smooth surfaces, division and ambivalence to simple feelings. And the strategies are abundance, surprise and variations on a theme. In the first poem in his first book (Sadness and Happiness),"Poem about People", what begins as genial and compassionate people-watching,

Balding young men in work shoes

And green work pants, beer belly

And white T-shirt, the porky walk

Back to the truck, polite; possible

To feel briefly like Jesus,

A gust of diffuse tenderness...

turns to a friend's painful divorce to a movie clip that in turn leads to a burning vision of desperate personal shame:

...the sensitive

Young Jewish soldier nearly drowns

Trying to rescue the thrashing

Anti-semitic bully, swimming across

The river raked by nazi fire,

The awful part is the part truth:

Hate my whole kind, but me,

Love me for myself.

Not a predictable sequence. The most ambitious poems in the book are meditative sequences that are in the form of theme and variations: "Tennis", the title poem "Sadness and Happiness" and "Essay on Psychiatrists." The latter includes comic social scenes, satire, a discussion of Pentheus and Dionysus as psychiatrists, Yvor Winters' defense of madness in poets, and concludes that we are all psychiatrists fumbling our way between stars. It is a poem designed to make psychiatrists uneasy, being itself uneasy about their claims to power over the secret life. And psychiatrists might say, predictably, that jealousy for their mastery of the sexual secret underlies the poem.

An Explanation of America is just that. Its classical antecedent is not Juvenal-Johnson-Lowell's "Vanity of Human Wishes", but Horace's Epistle I,xvi, from his Sabine farm, which Pinsky translates as part of his text. It is philosophical discourse, not satire. The poem is addressed to his oldest daughter, much of it quite genuinely--the mode of address is not merely a trope in some of the poem's very challenging passages. She is often a real presence in the poem and appears to be too iconoclastic, intelligent and searching to be satisfied with easy answers. She is a critic of "that tyrant and sycophantic lout, the Majority" and

...Political Science bores you,

You prefer the truth, and with a Jesuit firmness

Return to your slogan: "Voting is not fair."

A sense of the poem's complexity and uneasiness of feeling is implicit in this list:

I want for you to see the things I see

And more, Colonial Diners, Disney, films

Of concentration camps, the napalmed child

Trotting through famous newsfilm in her diaper

And tattered flaps of skin, Deep Throat, the rest.

This is not an America free of cruelty, nor with the last entry, is the monologue to the daughter easy about domesticated sexuality. The explanation is not tidy or even terribly analytic. It is impressionistic, rather, and concludes with a sense of America as dreamlike, "So large, and strangely broken, and unforseen."

Pinsky's commitment to discursive poetry is seen in his next book, History of my Heart, where he adopts his method defiantly, in the face of the dominant current approach to his subject, which is the shaping of his feelings. Instead of confession or epiphanies of the atomistic ego or intimations of moral instructions that thwart childhood narcissism, Pinsky offers explanation that is complex, ironic and allusive. In the title poem of this volume history becomes family mythmaking in his mother's fantasy of meeting Fats Waller that was drawn from a movie, the way language creates experience in an account of a first sexual tryst ("To see eyes melting so I could think This is it,/ They're melting!"), and in a cluster of images we are presented with the overarching erotic revery that

Makes the one who feels seem beautiful to the beholder

Witnessing the idea of the giving of desire--nothing more wanted

Than the little singing notes of wanting--the heart

Yearning further into giving itself into the air, breath

Strained into song emptying the golden bell it comes from,

The pure source poured altogether out and away.

It should be clear that the explanatory and discursive mode has not eliminated lyricism. It has in fact restored to the lyric the modes of discourse that have been rare in this century. This strategy is continued in the remainder of the book. In "The Unseen", set in a tour of a concentration camp, he addresses the absent God:

O discredited Lord of Hosts, your servant gapes

Obediently to swallow various doings of us, the most

Capable of all your former creatures--we have no shape,

We are poured out like water, but still

We try to take in what won't be turned from in despair.

This is not cold exposition but intelligent discourse about the heart's history in History. In his poem "The Cold" he retrieves that exhausted fashionable word and moves the philosophical cold outdoors, as weather, where it belongs:

Or like me, working in a room alone,

Watching out from a window...

...not having been out in hours

I come up close idly to feel the cold,

Forgetting for a minute what I was doing.

The Want Bone, in Pinsky's most recent book, is not a phallic image but an oral one, the dried mouthbones of a shark, an emblem of its desire to live. It is death longing for life and love, food and family. Pastiche and assemblage have joined the technique of variations on a theme in this book with a deliberate derangement of his apparent subjects and greater tension between centripetal and centrifugal forces in the poems. We find an explicit celebration and savoring of the richness of words, their anarchic history. There is more play with language in this book than in the previous ones, and he has composed mock Biblical stories of Jesus childhood and embroidered the story of the prophet Daniel. In a prose section Jesus in the form of a ciclogriff befriends Isolde to learn about love. Tristan is violent and a bard, and therefore Jesus himself cannot save him nor Isolde either, who is boundlessly committed to him. We saw it coming, but the charm is in the telling. This is a book of a poet approaching 50, determined to expand his art. He maintains from his earliest days a sense of the well shaped line, stanza and poem. Pinsky strays far from the iambic, but never entirely out of range. His rhymes, typically off-rhymes, are inventive and formal without being insistent--he is one of the most sophisticated technicians of his generation and may well prove one of its finest poets.

Someone looking for connections between Pinsky and his graduate school mentor, the important and charismatic critic-poet Yvor Winters, would strain to find them. Pinsky is a poet-critic, and the priority of poetry is important. Early in his career he lost Winters' tone of fastidious, moralistic criticism that did not suffer opposition gladly, and he has restored William Carlos Williams to the Winters canon and expanded it to include all sorts of decadent New Yorkers. While there is a vivid heroic portrait of Winters in the long poem "Essay on Psychiatrists" from Sadness and Happiness, what survives of that influence in Pinsky's poetry is a struggle with traditional forms and a diction that favors aestheticised philosophical cold and certitude in only a few early poems. Pinsky's criticism likewise has grown free of Winters' influence. It is urbane, international, and lacks the odor of orthodoxy.