Robert Pinsky: I think skepticism toward things like titles, good reviews, what the world calls distinctions, recognitions, can become mechanical, but it’s a good armor too.
Robert Pinsky: At the airport, everybody else was listening to the clatter of CNN in the background and announcements about other flights, and I was getting some work done.
The last thing a young artist should do in poetry or any other field is think about what’s in style, what’s current, what are the trends. Think instead of what you like to read, what do you admire, what you like to listen to in music.
William Butler Yates wrote, “There is no singing school, but studying monuments of its own magnificence.”
The best argument for teaching poetry is to put a three-year-old or a four-year-old and read Dr. Seuss, or Robert Louis Stevenson, and to feel how the child and you are engaging in something that’s really basic to the animal, which is passing on in these rhythmic ways, something that came from somewhere.
We use our own body to make poetry. There is no fiddle, there is no paint, it’s the air that comes out of your body shaped in ways that have evolved and that are controlled by our brain.
On the occasion of National Poetry Month, Big Think spoke to Robert Pinsky, the 39th Poet Laureate of the United States, about the value of using poetic language in everyday life. Pinsky […]
Robert Pinsky takes his poem “The City” and transforms it into a Tweet.
Robert Pinsky reads his recently published poem, The City.
Each phase of life brings new information about life, Pinsky says gratefully.
The forgetting I notice most as I get older is really a form of memory: The undergrowth of things unknown to you young, that I have forgotten.
As I drew nearer to the end of all desire..
The lifers, Pinsky says, are the ones who write the best poetry.
Pinsky explains why people love cliché.
In the early winter dusk the broken city dark seeps from the tunnels.
It is the medium on a human scale, Pinsky says.
The multiplicity of memory.
When poetry is written in soap.
The closer you get to beauty, the harder it is to describe.
Text is all around us, Pinsky says.
