Robert Pinsky is a cool dude. The U.S. poet laureate from 1997-2000, he's known for his efforts to make poetry accessible to the public--he started the "Favorite Poem Project," which added a recorded collection of ordinary Americans reading their favorite poems aloud to the Library of Congress. He has also authored several volumes of poetry and criticism, as well as a translation of Dante's Inferno. Saturday, you and the 'rents will have the opportunity to hear Pinsky speak about poetry and modern America at 3:30 p.m. in Page Auditorium--an event sponsored by the Union's Major Speaker's Committee and the Undergraduate Publications Board. Anticipating his visit, Arts Editor Meghan Valerio engaged Pinsky via e-mail on the topics of writing, scholarship and making literature accessible.
Recess: In English classes at Duke, we often use Norton Anthologies--poetry, modern poetry, short stories, a reader, you name it. I've always thought publication in one of those would be an indication that the writer had "made it"--kind of like a rock musician hearing themselves on the radio, or an actor being asked for an autograph. When did you know that you had "made it" as a poet? A point when you knew that the world, and not just you, considered yourself a poet?
Robert Pinsky: Anthologies, prizes, titles, critics--all these offer only unreliable measures of one's work. Once, visiting a poetry class at a prison, I heard one of the inmates recite from memory a poem I had written, "Exile." I once met a 14-year-old boy who for a school assignment had to memorize a text related to the word "compassion," and he chose my poem "From the Childhood of Jesus." Those are examples of real laurel.
You will see what I mean if you go to www.favoritepoem.org and look at the videos--of a construction worker reading Whitman, of a Jamaican immigrant reading Plath, of a young Cambodian-American woman reading Langston Hughes, of a nine-year-old reading Theodore Roethke's "The Sloth."
Notice the way these readers say the poems aloud, and what they say about them. Imagine yourself being the poet: that, for me, is far more glorious than inclusion in any anthology.
(On the other hand, POEMS TO READ, the Favorite Poem Project anthology, is indeed published by Norton!)
You've commented that poetry is doing well in this era, but that criticism is not. How can the U.S. train new, intelligent critics?
Literary criticism is in a somewhat dark age at the moment, and reviewing suffers as a result. Newspapers do as good a job as ever, though the literary newspaper reviewer must fight for space. It's in the highbrow quarterlies that the decline seems so drastic. The academic critics who used to write for them have lost confidence and morale. They seem terrified by new work, depressed about the challenge of making judgments.
But this weakness in criticism may be a general, culture-wide matter: the scandals about film criticism for example, with critics being manipulated by publicity agents.
I don't know how this situation might improve. Maybe it is cyclical. Or maybe a new wave of clever young people are ready to take over reviewing?
The chair of Duke's English Department, Maureen Quilligan, recommended Robert Fitzgerald's translation of The Odyssey as summer reading, especially because the new translation has turned it into "true beach reading." Did you have such accessibility in mind when you began your Inferno?
I tried to make a translation that would be a poem in English, that would be exciting to read. I didn't know of such a translation of Dante--in other words, I tried to make something that I would like to read. The poem in Italian has given great pleasure to readers for hundreds of years. It has speed and quickness, as they say in basketball, and tremendous variety. I strove to give it something with that grace and attraction in English.
As poet laureate, you began the Favorite Poem Project. Were you surprised by its eager reception or by the poems and recordings that came of it?
Yes and no--I knew that the American audience for great poems was far greater and more vital than the stereotype of us might indicate. But yes, I am surprised that the first anthology, Americans' Favorite Poems, has gone through 15 printings. And yes, I have been surprised by the quality and intensity of the letters quoted in the two anthologies and at www.favorite poem.org.
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