Robert Pinsky

Growing up in a historic, perpetually declining American resort town, with families of year-round Hispanic and South Asian newcomers beginning to arrive, I could see that nearly everybody feels like an outsider, one way or another.
from Jersey Breaks by Robert Pinsky

In 1998 my husband gifted me The Figured Wheel by Robert Pinsky, Poet Laureate of the United States. But the real impetus for reading Pinsky’s memoir was 1) I am always interested in writers and their stories, and 2) a friend show more grew up in Long Branch, NJ, and her family married into Pinsky’s family and as a girl she called him ‘cousin’. I could learn about her hometown and about the poet at the same time!

I loved reading about Pinsky’s discovery of literature and poetry, the magic of words. The books that captivated him as a child, the poets in his personal canon. And, I enjoyed his stories about his colorful family, growing up Jewish Orthodox with a grandfather who worked for a famous crime kingpin.

How could the book I loved trick me that way? With so few words? Then, I felt wonder. How was something so real created in such a small space? How had the writer built so much inside my mind? A kind of question I keep trying to answer.
from Jersey Breaks by Robert Pinsky

I understood Pinksy’s marveling on the magic of stories. As a girl, I realized that a book affected my emotions and spurred my imagination. Writers were powerful. I have spent my life trying to understanding how they do it.

“Language-drunk,” he describes himself, drawn from the saxophone to Yeats Sailing to Byzantium, a conversion to poetry; he explains, “But what I try to do in my poems is almost exactly what I wanted to do with the horn.”

The book is far ranging, incorporating Pinksy’s family, teachers, other poets, insight into his own poetry. He explains what drives his poetry, the music of language, the rhythm and drive of words.

One of my favorite chapters addresses the vagaries of fame, how for some, fame is short term and fades while those ignored later rise to acclaim. We are driven to work for excellence, but fame does not always result.

His work with deaf and blind poets was so interesting. The hand sign for poetry is “a fountain-like burst of five fingers opening out from the heart,” he shares.

…Poetry does not merely put particular feeling and ideas into language, it creates an experience that reminds us of something beyond any particular feelings and ideas.
from Jersey Breaks by Robert Pinsky

Granted, I would have gained more from some parts of the book had I read all of his contemporary poets that he discusses. But I found it an interesting read. And, I have taken that gifted book off the shelf to revisit his poems.

I received a free egalley from the publisher through Net Galley. My review is fair and unbiased. show less

This is a collection of lectures Robert Pinsky delivered at Rice University in 2009, discussing the ways in which American small towns, symbolized by their main streets named Main Street or Broadway, have been represented in literature and the movies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Mark Twain, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, and movie directors Preston Sturges and Alfred Hitchcock are discussed.

Pinsky gives us a clear and thoughtful exposition of the ways in which the authors' show more perspectives on and attitude to the small towns where most of them grew up differs, as well as the perhaps surprising complexities of those small towns and life within them. It's often a surprisingly dark view that's found in their stories, showcasing the ability of American small towns to be stiflingly repressive of anything even mildly outside the mainstream, insular, conformist, banal, upholding the status quo simply because it is the status quo. Yet alongside those tendencies resides a sense of fair play, and protectiveness towards "their own." Willa Cather's Thea Kronberg can't fulfill her musical ambitions in her hometown of Moonstone, but it's in Moonstone that, child and young woman, she gets the education and training that enables her to take her first steps along that path.

It's an interesting and multi-layered look at the American small town in American literature, both the good and the bad.

Recommended.

I received this book free as part of the University of Chicago's "one free ebook a month" program. show less

Pinsky’s book is a seemingly simple, five-chapter (“Accent and Duration,” “Syntax and Line,” “Technical Terms and Vocal Realities,” “Like and Unlike Sounds,” and “Blank Verse and Free Verse”) guide “to help the reader hear more of what is going on in poems, and by hearing more to gain in enjoyment and understanding” (3). He says he will avoid accent marks (6) and indeed uses no symbols for stressed or unstressed syllables, caesuras, or divisions between feet. The show more unspoken rule is that he will not interpret lines when he quotes them, but merely point out the features of sound.
Pinsky’s idea is that we already know how subtle accents and sound changes convey meaning in ordinary discourse. And he argues that there are no rules outside of practice; therefore the best guides to poetry are the poems: Yeats for traditional metrics, William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens for “so-called free verse,” Emily Dickinson for short lines, Hardy for the use of ballad meter. “No instruction manual can teach as much as careful attention to the sounds in even one great poem” (7).
For Pinsky, the sounds of poetry are at once more complex and more simple than the “rules” of prosody would suggest. “There are no rules” (7) he begins. “Accent is relative . . . sometimes reinforced by quantity [duration] and sometimes not” and the reader is capable of hearing how a poet uses accent: “it is not a matter of some mysterious gift, but of habits, vocabulary and a kind of attention” (17). Syntax plays against line in the same way that actual stress patterns play against regular metrical pattern expectations. “I think one can learn a lot by typing a poem up as a block, trying to arrange it in lines that you think bring out the rhythms in the most effective way possible” (49).
A special pleasure is Pinsky’s use of examples; some recur, such as Frost’s “To Earthward” and Stevens’s “The Snow Man.”
Terminology, Pinsky thinks, should try to describe meter and not rhythm—the sound of an actual line, which is unique.
Pinsky makes similar points about like sounds: aside from repetition—the ultimate in like sounds—rhyme and other sound likenesses are matters of both unlikeness and likeness. “Rhyme . . . is a matter of degree, and not necessarily an either/or toggle” (81). One of his examples is Frost’s “An Old Man’s Winter Night” which has so many rhymes and sound likenesses that read aloud, it belies its blank verse form.
In the last chapter Pinsky goes through examples of three and two-foot lines that come together as pentameters (Frost’s “To Earthward” again) and the opposite situation in order to show a relation between pentameter and free verse. He quotes Pound: “to break the pentameter, that was the first heave” (98). But “the cadences and patterns of like sound persist” in free verse. He ends by pointing at poetry’s beginnings: “Rhyme and emphatic rhythms help us to memorize. Verse in this way is a technology for memory, using the sounds of language, created by a human body, as writing uses marks” (115). show less

Was King David pious? Was he a holy man who was divinely inspired to compose the biblical book of Psalms, the charismatic ideal leader whose offspring would never cease to lead Israel because he was so good, whose descendant would be the messiah who would save the world, a man chosen because of David’s praiseworthy behavior? Or was he, like all men and women, sometimes good, sometimes ruthless, sometimes embarrassingly bad? Did he commit adultery with Bat Sheba, the wife of Uriah the show more Hittite and have Uriah murdered, as the prophet Nathan berated him? Did he raise children who killed their brothers, one of whom raped his sister, and at least one of whom, Solomon, built temples for idol worship? Was he responsible for the death of his infant child when it was born and for the death of tens of thousands of his people in a plague?

Or, as the majority of people claim, did he do no wrong. Did Bat Sheba have a divorce decree that made David’s liaison with her legal, and besides, did Uriah force David to give him Bat Sheba as a wife by blackmailing him when he was killing the giant Goliath, and therefore the marriage was illegal, as the Talmud contends? Robert Pinsky portrays David as a human being as the plain meaning of the biblical text in this beautifully written, lyrical, presentation of his life.

Pinsky is not alone in seeing the human fault-filled David. Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz in his Biblical Images tells his readers that they shouldn’t expect an idealized portrayal of biblical figures because: “The great men and women who serve as examples and models for all generations are not described only in terms of glowing admiration. Their failings, failures, and difficulties are described.”

Pinsky describes the events in David’s life and comments on them. He also highlights difficulties in Scripture; how, for example, there are sometimes two accounts of an episode with different details in each of them, such as I Samuel 26:10-25 and 24:1-22, where David has an opportunity to kill King Saul who was chasing him to kill him, but David spared his life. Scholars conclude that there is an early source (chapter 26) supplemented by a later one (24). And there are other kinds of problematical texts that Pinsky addresses. Since David had served as King Saul’s aid in playing music when the king became depressed, why didn’t he recognize David when he asked permission to fight the giant Goliath?

Pinsky tells facts most people don’t know. David’s sling, for example, was a well-known, efficient weapon in those days and for centuries thereafter. “The slinger was more mobile than the archer, and with a greater accurate range, some say with a more damaging projectile. The Romans had medical tongs designed specifically for removing the stones or lead bullets shot by sling to penetrate a soldier’s body, as David’s stone penetrated the skull of Goliath.”

Why then do many Jews and non-Jews see David as an unsullied hero? David was not the only biblical figure who was totally reinvented and injected with a new gregarious legendary personality, made pure, and sanctified totally out of character. There is, among others, the prophet Elijah, who during his biblical life was an impatient, youthful, anti-government, vigorous personality – he ran after his king and kept up with his fleeting horses. God, says the Bible, was so displeased with Elijah’s overzealous anger against his people’s idol worship that he ended his prophetic mission and killed him – in the metaphor of Elijah rising to heaven in a fiery chariot. Yet, legends resurrected Elijah as an old man with a flowing beard dedicated to helping the distressed, and preparing to solve human problems by bringing the messiah. Why were David and Elijah transformed?

The new David and Elijah represent the needs of the new tormented, weak, and exiled generations for caring, not debased, ever-successful heroes. Thus the focus on David switches from his mundane and shocking acts to his successes. He united the tribes of Israel in the past, fought for his people, and never lost a battle, and his descendant can lead Israel and do so now. show less