PINSKY, Robert (Neal).

American. Born in Long Branch, New Jersey, 20 October 1940. Educated at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, B.A. 1962; Stanford University, California (Wood row Wilson, Stegner, and Fulbright fellow), M.A., Ph.D. 1966. Married Ellen Bailey in 1961; three daughters. Assistant Professor of Humanities, Universi­ty of Chicago, 1967‑68; Professor of English, Wellesley College, Massachusetts, 1968‑80; Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley, from 1980. Currently member of Department of English, Boston University. Visiting Lecturer, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1979‑80; Hurst Professor, Washington University, St. Louis, 1981. Since 1978 poetry editor, New Republic, Washington, D.C. Recipient: Massachusetts Council on the Arts grant, 1974; Oscar Blumenthal prize (Poetry, Chicago), 1978; American Academy award, 1980; Saxifrage prize, 1980; Guggenheim fellowship, 1980; William Carlos Williams award, 1984. Address: Department of English, Boston University, 236 Bay State Road, Boston, Massachusetts 02213, U.S.A.

 

 

PUBLICATIONS

 

 

Verse

 

 

Sadness And Happiness. Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1975.

An Explanation of America. Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, and Manchester, Carcanet, 1979.

Five American Poets, with others. Manchester, Carcanet, 1979. History of My Heart. New York, Ecco Press, 1984.

The Want Bone. New York, Ecco Press,1990.

Jersey Rain. New York, FSG, 2000

 

Novel

 

 

Mindwheel (computerized novel; Steve Hales and William Mataga, programmers). Richmond, Califonia, Synapse Software, 1985.

 

 

Other

 

 

Landor's Poetry. Chicago, University of Chicago Press,1968.

The Situation of Poetry: Contemporary Poetry and Its Traditions. Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1977.

Poetry and the World. New York, Ecco Press, 1988. 

The Sounds of Poetry. New York, FSG, 1998

Translator, with Robert Hass, The Separate Notebooks, by Czeslaw Milosz. New York, Ecco Press, 1984.

 

 

*

 

 

Manuscript Collection: Regenstein Library, University of Chicago.

 

 

Critical Studies: by Hugh Kenner, in Los Angeles Times, 11 February 1976; Robert van Hallberg, in Chicago Review, Spring 1976; William Pritchard, in Times Literary Supplement (London), 11 June 1976; Louis Martz, in Yale Review (New Haven, Connecticut), Autumn 1976; The Didactic Muse by Willard Spiegelman, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1989.

 

 

***

 

 

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's 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 news film 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 myth making 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, is not a phallic image but an oral one, the dried mouth bones 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 adapted Apocryphal Gospel stories of Jesus's 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.

 

The new poems in The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, extend this mastery, and contain poems that may well become American classics, particularly a poem central to a sequence about cities, "Avenue," and an elegy for Elliot Gilbert, called "Impossible to Tell," built around two jokes.  This is new and daring for the elegy, and I like to imagine the author of "Lycidas" being thrilled by its rightness!  The new poems in the volume are not a random assortment.  In a note on "Avenue,"  in reference to the explana­tion of Yom Kippur as the day of "at-one-ment", he says: "All, one: a play of unity and diversity that in turn makes me think of the fragmented, plural American city, held together visibly by words, by the signs and spoken or sung syllables of its streets, where all our 'they' is somehow 'one'."  This motif is woven through the new poems in the volume, many of them dealing with the city as the figure for the multiplicity and "numerousness" of the soul.  And the interwoven web of our humanity in which the matrix of Charlie Parker, Pushkin, Sax (the inventor) and the sax-playing Pinsky unites in the "Ginza Samba."  Pinsky's vision (and it is now right to speak of that) has a lot of the philosophical playfulness of Borges mixed with the air of historical menace of Milosz.

 

Pinsky includes a poem composed for a Halloween celebration, "The Rhyme of Reb Nachman," among his selection of translations,  and a poem by Milosz, "Incantation," among his own poems, in part at least because his translation of "The World" was rejected as such by Milosz as an English poem in its own right, and not sufficiently subordinated to the Polish.  An odd justification enabling an odd situation indeed, and yet entirely appropriate to the overlapping boundaries the Pinsky's new work celebrates.

 

Pinsky's translation of The Inferno of Dante is the most idiomatic and vigorous adaptation of terza rima in English.  His strategy of using consonantal rhyme in place of exact rhyme has enabled him to avoid much of the artificiality of earlier translations and to approximate Dante's famous compression--so much so, in fact, that Dante's tercets seldom last three lines in Pinsky's English and the direct link in Italian between syntax and stanza structure is abandoned.  Almost all of Pinsky's tercets are enjambed, unlike the original.

 

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's 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's influence. It is urbane, international, and lacks the odor of orthodoxy.

 

Pinsky has taken his elevation to the Poet Laureateship of the United States with deep seriousness, and he has taken on the task of establishing some record of "best loved poems" of the American people, of a fluid and dynamic vernacular canon.  His approach is to exclude the customary canon shapers, the poets and scholars, in order to discover a popular demotic consensus.  This is part of a somewhat quixotic overall project of recovering or discovering or defining the historical memory of a pluralist culture of improvised traditions that is separable from the commercial project of pop culture.  His presence on the Public Broadcasting Newshour every week and made poetry present to a wide audience.

 

The Sound of Poetry is a guide to prosody for students that focusses on accent and sound pattern without scantion or the customary classifications of accentual-syllabic poetry.  The starting point is vocal reality rather than traditional prosody, although discussion of meter and the sounds it explains runs throughout.  However it is restricted, and gives way to a non-technical empirical approach.  He is, in effect, paraphrasing technical prosody for technophobes, at the same time that his sustained attention to sound reveals patterns that were not attended to before.

 

His new book, Jersey Rain, reflects in its turn a determination to expand his art, as all of his previous books have.  The move in this case is toward a high style, a solemnity, a high seriousness in the Arnoldian sense, not that he didn't have it before.  But it was accompanied by a subversive metaphysical wit, like the jokes in his elegies, his sly satirical flashes.  These qualities are rarer in this book.  The move is similar to what we have seen in a number of important American writers, like Eliot, Faulkner, Williams and Hemingway, later in their careers.  The poems are still rooted in his vernacular strength that flourishes in delicate tension with his formality, which is itself subtle and not self-assertive, and might be missed by young, infatuated readers, as they might not have noticed the loosened formality of Yeats, Bishop, Lowell or Stevens. Consider these lines that conclude "Autumn Quartet"--a birthday poem:

 

     Among the epic bravos, a civic man.

     The centaurs showed him truth in fabulation,

     In every living city the haunted ruin.

 

Their reach is impressive, seeing Odysseus as artist, explorer and destroyer--the latter usually reserved for Achilles.  And he takes his place in a row of heroes that includes Lincoln, Washington, Leopold Bloom and Jackie Robinson.

 

"Ode to Meaning" is an elegy with no jokes: it's reach is straight­forwardly metaphysical, and its tone and music elevated.  It begins:

 

     Dire one and desired one,

     Savior and sentencer--

 

and concludes:

 

                   If I

     Dare to disparage

     Your harp of shadows I taste

     Wormwood and motor oil, I pour

     Ashes on my head.  You are the wound. You

     Be the medicine.

 

The meaning invoked here has become deeply interwoven with death and its meaning.  The poem is very different from the improvisa­tional and digressive prose piece, "An Alphabet of my Dead"--one of the few works in this collection that points backward towards his earlier work.  It is nostalgic and full of a sense of real loss, but lacks the grief-driven desperation for meaning of the "Ode."  It is this latter quality that characterizes this book.

 

--Barry Goldensohn