It is with great pleasure that we bring you Robert Pinsky's inaugural Poet's Choice column. Pinsky is a former U.S. poet laureate, distinguished for his many volumes of poetry, numerous prizes and tireless work on behalf of poets around the world. We would like to take this opportunity to thank Edward Hirsch for three years of excellent and perceptive work in this space in Book World, and we heartily welcome Robert Pinsky to the task.
-- The Editors
Our national poets, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, both writing about poetry, provide a suitable beginning for my first column. In the final passage of "Song of Myself," Whitman accepts the notion that poetry may be silly, a matter of gab and loitering rather than purpose -- and he also accepts that poetry is a matter of large scope, with a vitality that reaches far into the future, beyond the bounds of any one human life:
The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my
gab and my loitering.
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
The last scud of day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow'd
wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.
I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
