Robert Pinsky Totally Explained

Everything about Robert Pinsky totally explained

Robert Pinsky (born October 20 1940) is an American poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator. From 1997 – 2000, he served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Pinsky is the author of nineteen books, most of which are collections of his own poetry. His published work also includes critically acclaimed translations, including a collection of poems by Czeslaw Milosz and Dante Alighieri. He teaches at Boston University (External Link

Biography

Early on, Pinsky was inspired by the flow and tension of jazz and the excitement that it made him feel. He said it was an incredible experience that he's tried to reproduce in his poetry. The musicality of poetry was and is extremely important to his work. .
   He received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 1974, and in 1997 was named the United States Poet Laureate and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. He now lives in Newton Corner, Massachusetts, and teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University.
   As Poet Laureate, Robert 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.
Pinsky is also the author of the interactive fiction game Mindwheel (1984) developed by Synapse Industries and released by Broderbund.
   Pinsky guest-starred in a 2002 episode of the animated sitcom, The Simpsons entitled Little Girl in the Big Ten, and appeared on The Colbert Report in April, 2007 as the judge of a "Meta-Free-Phor-All" between Stephen Colbert and Sean Penn.

Literary Criticism

Pinsky is often praised for "his grasp of traditional metrical forms and his ability to evoke timeless meaning within the strictures of contemporary idioms." Critics applaud, "his ability to imbue simple images—a Brownie troop square dance, cold weather, the music of Fats Waller—with underlying meaning to create order out of the accidental events people encounter in their lives." Commentators admire Pinsky's, "ambitiousness, his juxtaposition of the personal with the universal, the present with the past, the simple with the complex, and it has been noted that his intellectual style presents challenges to readers, obliging them to unravel the complexity behind the clarity of language and imagery."
   About Robert Pinsky's first book of poems Robert Lowell wrote, "It is refreshing to find a poet who is intellectually interesting and technically first-rate. Robert Pinsky belongs to that rarest category of talent, a poet-critic."
   In the Times Literary Supplement, William Pritchard called "Sadness and Happiness", "the best work by any younger poet within recent memory."
   Louis Martz called Pinsky "the most exhilarating new poet that I've read since A. R. Ammons entered upon the scene. In his peculiar and original combination of abstract utterance and vivid image Pinsky points the way toward the future of poetry."
   "The Inferno of Dante" has been celebrated by Stephen Greenblatt as, "the premier modern text for English-language readers to experience Dante's power."
   “In his poems Pinsky talks, with democratic warmth and intimacy, to the common things of this world. His extraordinary poems remind us that he's always embodied the very ideal he proposes for what a poet can do,” Lloyd Schwarz, The Boston Phoenix
"Robert Pinsky's poetry is noted for its combination of vivid imagery and clear, discursive language that explores such themes as truth, the history of nations and individuals, and the transcendent aspects of simple acts. Pinsky strives to create an organized view of the world, often confronting and trying to explain the past to bring order to the present. Recurring subjects in his work include the Holocaust, religion, and childhood. Pinsky's moral tone and mastery of poetic meter often are compared to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English poets, and the insights conveyed in his analytical works on poetry have led critics to place him in the tradition of other poet-critics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden."

Published works

Poetry

Sadness and Happiness (1975)
An Explanation of America (1980)
History of My Heart (1984)
Dying (1984)
The Want Bone (1990)
The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 (1996)
Jersey Rain (2000)
Gulf Music: Poems (2007)

Prose

The Situation of Poetry (1977)

Poetry and the World (1988)

The Sounds of Poetry (1998)

Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry (2002)

The Life of David (2006)

As Translator

The Separate Notebooks by Czeslaw Milosz, with Renata Gorczynski and Robert Hass (1984)

The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation (1995)

As Editor

Landor's Poetry (1968)

Handbook of Heartbreak (1998)

Americans' Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology, with Maggie Dietz (1999)

Poems to Read (2002)

An Invitation to Poetry (2004)

Honors and awards

Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1997-2000)

National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (1974)

Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University

Saxifrage Prize (1980) for An Explanation of America

William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America

Nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism (1988) for Poetry and the World

Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1996) for The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996

Ambassador Book Award in Poetry of the English Speaking Union

Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize (1997) for The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996

Los Angeles Times Book Award (1994) for The Inferno of Dante

Book-of-the-Month Editor's Choice (1994) for The Inferno of Dante

Academy of American Poets' Translation Award (1994) for The Inferno of Dante

Notes and references

Notes and citations

Books and printed materials

The Art of Poetry LXXVI: Robert Pinsky" The Paris Review No. 144 (1997), 180-213 (interview)

Online Resources

Boston University Press Release

Cortland Review Interview with Robert Pinsky

Modern American Poetry on Robert Pinsky

The Academy of American Poets on Robert Pinsky

Further Information

Get more info on 'Robert Pinsky'.

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