Power and poetry for the people

Robert Pinsky has been obsessed with the sounds of spoken words since before he could talk, and his social conscience is now the fuel for his poetic fire, he tells ROSITA BOLAND

AT ONE POINT IN his life, the distinguished American poet and former poet laureate Robert Pinsky, who will give the keynote address at the DLR Poetry Now festival on Thursday, considered being an optician, like his father. “I was an apprentice optician. I adjusted people’s eyeglasses. I grinded lenses. I worked for him when I was in high school,” Pinsky recalls, sitting in the book-lined living room of his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where a Siamese cat sits utterly still, like a sculpture, on the floor beside him.

As an image of a future poet, the teenage apprentice optician is a beguiling one: helping people look at things more closely and clearly; seeing a generic blurred surrounding become magnified and detailed as it settles into a sharper focus than you can manage to see by yourself unaided. In Pinsky’s latest book, Gulf Music, he has a poem titled Glass, in which he writes about his optician father bevelling lenses, and his two grandfathers (one was a bartender and the other washed windows). Glass for the Pinskys was their “ancestral totem substance”.

The poem concludes:

“Obsidian, uncrystallized silicate.

Unstainable or stained.

Mirror glass, hour glass, dust: Delicate,

durable measure.”

Now 68, Robert Pinsky has written many books of “durable measure”. He is a poet with a fierce social conscience, who believes that poetry should be an accepted, organic part of people’s everyday lives, in the way music is. He attended graduate school in Stanford, and later taught at Wellesley, a women’s liberal-arts college in Massachusetts, from 1968 to 1980. He then returned west, to teach for eight years in Berkeley, and since 1988 he has been teaching creative writing to graduate students at Boston University.

In between, he has published several collections of poetry and prose, including the Pulitzer-nominated The Figured Wheel, New and Collected Poems 1966-1996, and his best-selling, highly praised translation of Dante, The Inferno of Dante, A New Verse Translation(1995); appeared as himself on The Simpsons; had a much-publicised three-year tenure as American poet laureate; founded the remarkable Favourite Poem Project, which is possibly the most inclusive US public poetry project ever created; and has been poetry editor at the online magazine Slatesince its inception in 1996.

In person, although silver-haired, Pinsky looks far younger than his 68 years, with a distinctive and arresting face. When he smiles his wide smile, it is a surprise; solemnity seems to be his more innate expression. He is supremely confident and articulate, slightly aloof, and exudes the aura of a man used to being noticed. If you saw him in a public space, such as a hotel lobby, or at a restaurant table, you would look twice and think, “Should I know who that person is?”

Pinsky was born and raised in the resort town of Long Branch, New Jersey, which had had its heyday in the 1880s. “There’s nothing as elegiac as an amusement park in the winter time, the boardwalk in the wintertime.” Although he eventually found an identity playing the saxophone (he still plays the keyboard every day), high school was not a happy experience for him. “Let’s put it this way,” he observes drily, “they thought I was a little too smart and they put me in the dumb class.”

He was the first member of his family to go to college, and decided early on that he wanted to be a poet. During college, he auditioned with some friends for a job playing music in a restaurant. They did a “terrible” audition and did not get the job. “But since I can remember – since before I could actually even speak, in my crib – I was thinking about the sounds of words and the rhythm spoken words made and at college, at the time of that music audition, I had just discovered that there was an art based on that. The art of poetry was based on the peculiarities and the sounds and cadences of speech that I had been thinking about obsessively all my life, but considering it almost a kind of tic, like biting your fingernails. Turns out there was an art based on it. And in a very, very short time, practically on the drive back to college from that audition, my daydreams of being a great musician segued into being a great poet.”

There is a certain irony about the boy who was placed in the “dumb class” as a teenager spending much of his working life teaching in high-profile places of learning. “I think as I have gotten older, certain peculiarities that did not go down so well in the seventh and eighth grade turn out to be okay in my present situation,” he acknowledges. “I prefer improvisation to preparation. I often think in contraries. I like doing things when I’m not supposed to do them and I like to not do things when I am supposed to do them.”

The point at which most Americans would have become familiar with Robert Pinsky’s name is when he was appointed poet laureate in 1997; the first poet to hold the post for three successive years. Former poet laureates include Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Donald Hall, Joseph Brodsky, Billy Collins and Louise Glück.

ONE YEAR earlier, in 1996, Pinsky had become the inaugural poetry editor at Slate(www.slate.com), a job which he still holds. He was one of the first poets to realise how the internet could reach a huge audience, many of whom would probably not consider themselves to be poetry readers in the traditional meaning of the expression. Although the first poem Pinsky published in Slatewas by Seamus Heaney, few established poets initially submitted contributions to the online medium. Now "virtually the same body of people contribute to Slate as would contribute to a print publication".

When Pinsky became poet laureate, one of his primary ambitions was to widen the audience for poetry among ordinary Americans, via digital media. He invited Americans to nominate their favourite poem and send him a letter explaining why. More than 18,000 people responded. “It did suggest that the stereotype of Americans being yahoos or brutes who know nothing about culture is not true. At that time I had working for me a certain number of graduate-student slaves. And these slaves were chained to computers and I asked them to create a database and in that database I asked them to make comments. The criteria was the relationship between the person and the poem.”

Fifty poems were chosen on the basis of "how compelling or interesting the letter was". The result, www.favoritepoem.org, is a fascinating online showcase of 50 different Americans of all ages and backgrounds who were videoed explaining why a certain poem meant something to them, and then reading it aloud. The videos resemble mini-documentaries, slices of diverse lives beautifully revealed, from the young Boston student who chooses Gwendolyn Brooks's We Real Coolto explain why it says something vital to him about a life in which he has already lost several peers to suicide and drug overdoses, to the opera-singing professor of cognitive science in Atlanta who chooses Anna Akhmatova's The Sentenceto talk about the trauma caused in her family by her brother's period of service in Vietnam. (Bill Clinton appears on the site too, but he is not half as interesting as his lesser-known citizens.) The website is now widely used as a teaching tool for poetry, and continues to get thousands of hits a week.

In 2002, Pinsky appeared as himself in an episode of The Simpsons, in a scene when Lisa goes to a poetry reading: a visible measure of how well-known he had become in America. "I'm very proud to have been on The Simpsons," Pinsky admits. "But it's not of great importance to me compared to the fact that my friends are Frank Bidart, Louise Glück and Seamus Heaney, that I get to talk professionally about Emily Dickinson and Ben Jonson. That's large!"

Massachusetts is a state famously loyal to the Democratic Party, and Pinsky is clearly relieved there has been a change in the White House. “I continue to be thrilled by the intelligence, the sense of proportion and the conviction of President Obama. I admire him tremendously,” he states frankly.

Pinsky's latest book , Gulf Music, "was written with anger toward the Bush administration," he says. "The gulf of the title I had in mind was the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Mexico where Hurricane Katrina and the mismanagement of dealing with that took place, and a philosophical gulf is involved as well. It's a book about honouring the ancestors and trying to find something in the old ones, in the ancestors, that is a counterweight to condoning torture, infringing on civil liberties, failing to care for the needy and so forth. I tried not to neglect not only the anger, I also tried to include the confusion I felt when I read the newspaper every day."

So what does Robert Pinsky see as the function of poetry in 2009? “The function of poetry to some extent is what it has always been – to give people an art in which each individual person’s body is the medium. The column of air in each reader shaped into the sounds of the poem – even if it is only the person imagining making those sounds, saying those words – makes poetry a uniquely intimate, personal and individual scale.”

Robert Pinsky delivers the keynote address at the DLR Poetry Now festival on Thursday at 8.30pm in the Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin.