Robert Pinsky
“Robert Pinsky’s mind is a constant generator of metaphors. When he looks at one small thing, he sees a city, a country, a cosmos. Like William Blake, he seems to aspire ‘to see a world in a grain of sand.’” --The Washington Post
Pinsky is a great poet of just this sort of synchronized privacy, as well as of the inevitability of common culture, its uncanny return in our most intimate environments (living rooms, bedrooms) and actions (loving, grieving— or, indeed, writing poems). Because this inevitability is only measurable when it pops up in private life, we ind in Pinsky moments of enormous personal import . . . —Dan Chiasson, New York Review of Books
“Robert Pinsky got so famous for reading other people’s poems, his own were nearly overshadowed. His “Selected Poems” reminds us of the nimble, almost balletic mind that makes his work so important.”--The New Yorker, Dec. 29, 2011
Robert Pinsky, the only three-term United States Poet Laureate, brings an innovative energy to all his projects. This year, his acclaimed Selected Poems appeared. Last year his libretto for Tod Machover's opera Death and the Powers: A Robot Pageant premiered in Monaco before coming to Boston's ART. Next year, his adaptation of Friedrich Schiller's Wallenstein will be presented by the Shakespeare Theater of Washington, DC.
As Poet Laureate, he founded the Favorite Poem Project, in which thousands of Americans — of varying backgrounds, all ages, from every state — shared their favorite poems, as documented by the video segments, as seen on PBS and now at http://www.favoritepoem.org.
Connecting all of these undertakings is Pinsky's conviction—clear to anyone who has heard him read a poem— that poetry is a vocal, bodily art, closely allied to music. For that reason, POEMJAZZ, his collaboration with Laurence Hobgood, expresses something at the core of Robert Pinsky's art. Elegant and tough, vividly imaginative, Pinsky’s poems have earned praise for their wild musical energy and ambitious range. His The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 was a Pulitzer Prize nominee and received the Lenore Marshall Award and the Ambassador Book Award of the English Speaking Union. His best-selling translation
The Inferno of Dante received the Los Angeles Times Book Award in poetry. His many honors include the Korean Manhae Prize and the Italian Premio Capri.
Pinsky’s books in prose include The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide and The Life of David, a lively retelling and examination of the David stories, narrating a wealth of legend as well as scripture.
The poetry editor for the online magazine Slate, for seven years Pinsky appeared regularly on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. His poems appear in magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Threepenny Review, American Poetry Review, and frequently in The Best American Poetry anthologies. He teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University. He is one of the few members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters to have appeared Pinsky, on the other hand, has remained that on both “The Simpsons” and “The Colbert oddest of modern beasts, a public poet. During his Report.” tenure as poet laureate in the late ’90s, he was charming and uncompromising in his commitment to the democratic necessity of poetry . . . . Pinsky has a capacious view of creativity that includes religion and politics and in fact extends to the whole clamor of human activity. For Pinsky, the ongoing cultural improvisation of mongrel America is a great existential accomplishment.
Pinsky has become something of a public igure— he pulled off an appearance on Stephen Colbert’s show with real aplomb—who has not sacri iced the complexities of poetic construction for a false, aw- shucks simplicity. His Selected Poems shows how this was always where he wanted to be. It is a generous selection in all senses of that word. It is a tribute to its quality that it is, at 200 pages, still too short. --David Kaufman, Tablet