Robert Pinsky

Last updated
Robert Pinsky
Robert pinsky 20050515.jpg
Pinsky in 2005
Born (1940-10-20) October 20, 1940 (age 83)
Long Branch, New Jersey, U.S.
Occupationpoet, literary critic, editor, academic
Education Rutgers University, New Brunswick (BA)
Stanford University (MA, PhD)
Period1968–present
Genrepoetry, literary criticism
Notable worksSelected Poems (2011)
Spouse
Ellen Bailey
​
(m. 1961)​
Children3

Robert Pinsky (born October 20, 1940) is an American poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator. He was the first United States Poet Laureate to serve three terms. Recognized worldwide, Pinsky's work has earned numerous accolades. Pinsky is a professor of English and creative writing in the graduate writing program at Boston University. In 2015 the university named him a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor, the highest honor bestowed on senior faculty members who are actively involved in teaching, research, scholarship, and university civic life.

Contents

Biography

Early life and education

Pinsky was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, to Jewish parents, Sylvia (née Eisenberg) and Milford Simon Pinsky, an optician. [1] He attended Long Branch High School. [2] He received a B.A. from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and earned both an M.A. and PhD from Stanford University, where he was a Stegner Fellow in creative writing. [3] He was a student of Francis Fergusson and Paul Fussell at Rutgers and Yvor Winters at Stanford. [4]

Personal life

Pinsky married Ellen Jane Bailey, a clinical psychologist, in 1961. They have three children. [5] Pinsky taught at Wellesley College and at the University of California at Berkeley, and since 1989 has lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University. [6]

Career

Early on, Pinsky was inspired by the flow and tension of jazz and the excitement that it made him feel. As a former saxophonist, he has said that being a musician was a profoundly influential experience that he has tried to reproduce in his poetry. The musicality of poetry was and is extremely important to his work. [7] Additionally, Pinsky revealed in a 1999 interview with Bomb Magazine that he enjoys jazz for its "physical immediacy, improvisation and also the sense that a lifetime of suffering and study and thought and emotion is behind some single phrase." [8]

Pinsky has acknowledged that his poetry would change somewhat depending on the particular subjectivity of each reader. Embracing the idea that people's individuality would fill out the poem, he has said, "The poetry I love is vocal, composed with the poet's voice and I believe its proper culmination is to be read with a reader's imagined or actual voice. The human voice in that sense is not electronically reproduced or amplified; it's the actual living breath inside a body—not necessarily an expert's body or the artist's body. Whoever reads the poem aloud becomes the proper medium for the poem." [8] Pinsky observes 'the kind of poetry I write emphasizes the physical qualities of the words' [9] for poetry to Pinsky, is a vocal art, not necessarily performative, but reading to one self or recalling some lines by memory. [10] Pinsky comments 'all language is necessarily abstract' . [11] No aspect of a poem, he observes, is more singular, more unique, than its rhythm, for there are no rules. [12]

Pinsky (right) with Gerald Stern at the Miami Book Fair International 2011 Stern & Pinsky.jpg
Pinsky (right) with Gerald Stern at the Miami Book Fair International 2011

He received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 1974, and in 1997 he was named the United States Poet Laureate and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress; [13] he was the first poet to be named to three terms. [14] As Poet Laureate, Pinsky founded the Favorite Poem Project, in which thousands of Americans of varying backgrounds, all ages, and from every state share their favorite poems. Pinsky believed that, contrary to stereotype, poetry has a strong presence in the American culture. The project sought to document that presence, giving voice to the American audience for poetry. [15]

The Shakespeare Theatre of Washington, D.C. commissioned Pinsky to write a free adaptation of Friederich Schiller's drama Wallenstein. The Shakespeare Theatre presented the play, starring Stephen Pickering in the title role, directed by Michael Kahn, in 2013. Premiering on April 17 of that year, the play had a sold-out run, in repertory with Coriolanus. [16] Pinsky also wrote the libretto for Death and the Powers, an opera by composer Tod Machover. The opera received its world premiere in Monte Carlo in September 2010 and its U.S. premiere at Boston's Cutler Majestic Theater in March 2011. [17] Pinsky is also the author of the interactive fiction game Mindwheel (1984) developed by Synapse Software and released by Broderbund. [18]

Pinsky guest-starred in an episode of the animated sitcom The Simpsons TV show, "Little Girl in the Big Ten" (2002), and appeared on The Colbert Report in April, 2007, as the judge of a "Meta-Free-Phor-All" between Stephen Colbert and Sean Penn.

Since 2000, Farrar, Straus and Giroux have published four books of his poetry Jersey Rain (2000), Gulf Music (2007) Selected Poems (2011) and At the Foundling Hospital (2016). [19] [20] [21]

In 2012, Circumstantial Productions released the CD, PoemJazz by Robert Pinsky and Laurence Hobgood. In 2015, House Hour: PoemJazz II was released. [22] [23]

Pinsky served as editor of the 25th anniversary volume of The Best of American Poetry anthologies called The Best of the Best of American Poetry (2013), and is the former poetry editor of Slate. He edited Singing School (2014), The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall: Poems at the Extremes of Feeling (2019) and The Book of Poetry for Hard Times (2021).

In 2023, W.W. Norton published Pinsky's memoir Jersey Breaks: Becoming an American Poet.

Bibliography

Honors and awards

Pinsky has received honorary doctorates from numerous institutions such as Northwestern University (2000), [24] Binghamton University (2001), [25] the University of Michigan (2001), [26] Lake Forest College (2007), [27] Emerson College (2012), [28] Southern New Hampshire University (2014) [29] University of Massachusetts Dartmouth (2016), [30] and Merrimack College (2016) [31]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Seamus Heaney</span> Irish writer and translator (1939–2013)

Seamus Justin Heaney was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Among his best-known works is Death of a Naturalist (1966), his first major published volume. American poet Robert Lowell described him as "the most important Irish poet since Yeats", and many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have said that he was "the greatest poet of our age". Robert Pinsky has stated that "with his wonderful gift of eye and ear Heaney has the gift of the story-teller." Upon his death in 2013, The Independent described him as "probably the best-known poet in the world".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Wilbur</span> American poet (1921–2017)

Richard Purdy Wilbur was an American poet and literary translator. One of the foremost poets of his generation, Wilbur's work, often employing rhyme, and composed primarily in traditional forms, was marked by its wit, charm, and gentlemanly elegance. He was appointed the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1987 and received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry twice, in 1957 and 1989.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Louise Glück</span> American poet and Nobel laureate (1943–2023)

Louise Elisabeth Glück was an American poet and essayist. She won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, whose judges praised "her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal". Her other awards include the Pulitzer Prize, National Humanities Medal, National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Bollingen Prize. From 2003 to 2004, she was Poet Laureate of the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rita Dove</span> American poet and author (born 1952)

Rita Frances Dove is an American poet and essayist. From 1993 to 1995, she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African American to have been appointed since the position was created by an act of Congress in 1986 from the previous "consultant in poetry" position (1937–86). Dove also received an appointment as "special consultant in poetry" for the Library of Congress's bicentennial year from 1999 to 2000. Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1987, and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 to 2006. Since 1989, she has been teaching at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she held the chair of Commonwealth Professor of English from 1993 to 2020; as of 2020, she holds the chair of Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing.

Robert L. Hass is an American poet. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. He won the 2007 National Book Award and shared the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for the collection Time and Materials: Poems 1997–2005. In 2014 he was awarded the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Donald Hall</span> American writer

Donald Andrew Hall Jr. was an American poet, writer, editor, and literary critic. He was the author of over 50 books across several genres from children's literature, biography, memoir, essays, and including 22 volumes of verse. Hall was a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard University, and Christ Church, Oxford. Early in his career, he became the first poetry editor of The Paris Review (1953–1961), the quarterly literary journal, and was noted for interviewing poets and other authors on their craft.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Al Young</span> American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter (1939–2021)

Albert James Young was an American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and professor. He was named Poet Laureate of California by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger from 2005 to 2008. Young's many books included novels, collections of poetry, essays, and memoirs. His work appeared in literary journals and magazines including Paris Review, Ploughshares, Essence, The New York Times, Chicago Review, Seattle Review, Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz & Literature, Chelsea, Rolling Stone, Gathering of the Tribes, and in anthologies including the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, and the Oxford Anthology of African American Literature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tracy K. Smith</span> American poet

Tracy K. Smith is an American poet and educator. She served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. She has published five collections of poetry, winning the Pulitzer Prize for her 2011 volume Life on Mars. Her memoir, Ordinary Light, was published in 2015.

Michael Steven Harper was an American poet and English professor at Brown University, who was the Poet Laureate of Rhode Island from 1988 to 1993. His poetry was influenced by jazz and history.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joy Harjo</span> American Poet Laureate

Joy Harjo is an American poet, musician, playwright, and author. She served as the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold that honor. She was also only the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to have served three terms. Harjo is a member of the Muscogee Nation and belongs to Oce Vpofv. She is an important figure in the second wave of the literary Native American Renaissance of the late 20th century. She studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts, completed her undergraduate degree at University of New Mexico in 1976, and earned an MFA degree at the University of Iowa in its creative writing program.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Natasha Trethewey</span> American poet

Natasha Trethewey is an American poet who served as United States Poet Laureate from 2012 to 2014. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her 2006 collection Native Guard, and is a former Poet Laureate of Mississippi.

Mark Wunderlich, is an American poet. He was born in Winona, Minnesota, and grew up in a rural setting near the town of Fountain City, Wisconsin. He attended Concordia College's Institute for German Studies before transferring to the University of Wisconsin, where he studied English and German literature. After moving to New York City he attended Columbia University, where he received an MFA degree.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Blanco</span> Spanish American poet and professor

Richard Blanco is an American poet, public speaker, author and civil engineer. He is the fifth poet to read at a United States presidential inauguration, having read the poem "One Today" for Barack Obama's second inauguration. He is the first immigrant, the first Latino, the first openly gay person and at the time the youngest person to be the U.S. inaugural poet. In 2023, Blanco was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Biden from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Erin Belieu is an American poet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dolores Kendrick</span> American poet

Dolores Kendrick was an American poet, and served as the second Poet Laureate of the District of Columbia. Her book The Women of Plums: Poems in the Voices of Slave Women won the Anisfield-Wolf Award.

PoemJazz is an album by poet, essayist, literary critic, translator and America's 39th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress Robert Pinsky, and Grammy-Award-winning pianist, composer, and arranger Laurence Hobgood.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laurence Hobgood</span> Musical artist

Laurence Hobgood is an American contemporary jazz pianist, composer, arranger, producer, lyricist and educator. Perhaps best known for his twenty-year collaboration with vocalist Kurt Elling, he is identified by many as a key player in the imaginative updating of the "American Songbook", particularly in his arranging for vocalists.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robin Coste Lewis</span> American poet

Robin Coste Lewis is an American poet, artist, and scholar. She is known primarily for her debut poetry collection, Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2015––the first time a poetry debut by an African-American had ever won the prize in the National Book Foundation's history, and the first time any debut had won the award since 1974. Critics called the collection "A masterpiece", "Surpassing imagination, maturity, and aesthetic dazzle", "remarkable hopefulness ... in the face of what would make most rage and/or collapse", "formally polished, emotionally raw, and wholly exquisite". Voyage of the Sable Venus was also a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, the Hurston-Wright Award, and the California Book Award. The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Buzz Feed, and Entropy Magazine all named Voyage one of the best poetry collections of the year. Flavorwire named the collection one of the 10 must-read books about art. And Literary Hub named Voyage one of the "Most Important Books of the Last Twenty Years". In 2018, MoMA commissioned both Lewis and Kevin Young to write a series of poems to accompany Robert Rauschenberg's drawings in the book Thirty-Four Illustrations of Dante's Inferno. Lewis is also the author of Inhabitants and Visitors, a chapbook published by Clockshop and the Huntington Library and Museum. Her next book, To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness, was published by Knopf in 2022.

A list of the published work by or about American poet Robert Pinsky.

Danielle Legros Georges is a Haitian-born American poet, essayist and academic. She is a professor of creative writing in the Lesley University MFA Program in Creative Writing. Her areas of focus include contemporary American poetry, African-American poetry, Caribbean literature and studies, literary translation, and the arts in education. She is the creative editor of sx salon, a digital forum for innovative critical and creative explorations of Caribbean literature.

References

  1. ↑ "Sylvia Pinsky Obituary". Sun Sentinel.
  2. ↑ D'Amato, Anthony (May 7, 2010). "Jersey: 'The Most American State?' – What does a three-term United States Poet Laureate have to say about growing up in New Jersey? Find out in this month's Q & A with Robert Pinsky". New Jersey Monthly . Retrieved September 6, 2011. "My aunts and uncles and cousins and parents all attended Long Branch High School, as did my brother and sister and I."
  3. ↑ Lurie, M.N.; Siegel, M.; Mappen, M. (2004). Encyclopedia of New Jersey. Rutgers University Press. p. 640. ISBN   978-0-8135-3325-4 . Retrieved 22 June 2019.
  4. ↑ Longenbach, James (1997-11-27). Stanford citation. Oxford University Press. ISBN   978-0-19-535635-9.
  5. ↑ "Robert Pinsky". PSU.edu. Archived from the original on 2013-05-15.
  6. ↑ "Pinsky teaches poetry to the world"
  7. ↑ "Robert Pinsky, New Page 1". Cary Academy. Archived from the original on 2007-09-27.
  8. 1 2 Sleigh, Tom (Summer 1998). "Robert Pinsky". BOMB Magazine . Archived from the original on May 26, 2012. Retrieved June 19, 2012.
  9. ↑ Cavalieri, Grace. "The Poet and the Poem". WPFW-FM (1996-96 season) (Interview).
  10. ↑ Ben Downing; Daniel Kunitz (Fall 1997). "Robert Pinsky, The Art of Poetry No. 76". The Paris Review. No. 144.
  11. ↑ Hartman, Charles Free Verse – an essay on Prosody Princeton University Press, Princeton 1980 ISBN   978-0-8101-1316-9
  12. ↑ Pinsky, Robert (1998). The Sounds of Poetry -A Brief Guide. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN   0-374-26695-6.
  13. ↑ "The bizzaro history of the poet laureate" Archived 2016-11-05 at the Wayback Machine . Toronto Star, July 7, 2016. Bruce Demara.
  14. ↑ "Robert Pinsky". Today. Library of Congress. 1999.
  15. ↑ McKinley, Jesse (April 3, 1998). "People (Not All Famous) As the Greatest Poem". The New York Times . Retrieved September 6, 2011.
  16. ↑ "Robert Pinsky adapts Wallenstein for Shakespeare Theater". Washington Post. April 18, 2013.
  17. ↑ Eichler, Jeremy (March 21, 2011). "Second Life: 'Death and the Powers' from ART". Boston Globe . Archived from the original on August 11, 2011. Retrieved September 6, 2011.
  18. ↑ "Interactive Fiction". Electronic Book Review. Archived from the original on 2007-11-11. Retrieved 2007-11-15.
  19. ↑ Pinsky, Robert. Selected Poems. MacMillan.
  20. ↑ Jollimore, Troy (March 17, 2011). "Robert Pinsky's Selected Poems Reviewed". Washington Post.
  21. ↑ Pinsky, Robert (January 12, 2012). "Wild Ride Through America". New York Books.
  22. ↑ Hobgood, Laurence. "Robert Pinsky". Boston.com.
  23. ↑ "Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky". Boston.com. February 23, 2012. Archived from the original on August 8, 2012.
  24. ↑ Glass, Lisa (April 25, 2000). "Poet laureate to give commencement, receive honorary degree". The Daily Northwestern. Retrieved July 13, 2017.
  25. ↑ "Honorary Degree Recipients". Binghamton University. Archived from the original on February 3, 2018. Retrieved July 13, 2017.
  26. ↑ "Six honorary degrees to be awarded this spring". University of Michigan. March 14, 2001. Retrieved July 13, 2017.
  27. ↑ "Honorary Degree Recipients". Lake Forest College. Archived from the original on July 7, 2017. Retrieved July 13, 2017.
  28. ↑ Tiedemann, Andy (April 24, 2012). "Emerson announces four honorary degree recipients". Emerson College. Retrieved July 13, 2017.
  29. ↑ Boutselis, Pamme (May 1, 2014). "2014 Commencement Speakers Announced". Southern New Hampshire University. Retrieved July 13, 2017.
  30. ↑ Sullivan, Joseph (April 27, 2016). "UMassD announces 2016 Commencement honorees". UMass Dartmouth. Retrieved July 13, 2017.
  31. ↑ "2016 Commencement Speakers and Honorary Degree Information". Merrimack College. May 16, 2016. Retrieved July 13, 2017.

Books and printed materials

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.