Robert Pinsky
"Poet's Choice" Columnist
Tuesday, December 4, 2007; 3:00 PM

"Poet's Choice" columnist Robert Pinsky fields questions and comments on this year in poetry. Plus: Pinsky's ideas for poetic holiday gifts. Read this week's "Poet's Choice" column

Robert Pinsky served as the United States Poet Laureate and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, 1997-2000. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including "The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996," which was nominated for a Pulitzer prize.

Join Book World Live each Tuesday at 3 p.m. ET for a discussion based on a story or review in each Sunday's Book World section.

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Robert Pinsky: Hello all-- this is Robert Pinsky here. Greetings, and I will get to these first Q's with the best A's I can.

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Rockville, MD: Which younger poets under 35 do you think have published good books this year, and do you sense any trends in younger writers' writing?

Robert Pinsky: I'm at an age where I have trouble knowing who is under 35-- I suspect that poets who look young to me (I'm thinking of new books from Mark Svenvold & Campbell McGrath)are probably too old for this category.

I think C. Dale Young and A. Van Jordan, whose books I have done columns on fairly recently, may be that young-- anyway, terrific books. I also think of Cate Marvin and Jessica Fischer (she must be nearly that young, to qualify for the Yale series. David Roderick's BLUE COLONIAL is a book I chose for that publication prize. Natasha Trethewey's book, if she's under thirty-five.

As to trends,that's a word I tend to hear as pejorative-- the best work is outside of group tendencies, fashions, any "what are they wearing" notion.

But let me try to accept the word: maybe the American political and social realities of our time, to some extent, drive all of us away from complacency, toward ways to deal with what's urgent?

The great question-- in writing and in life, I guess-- is, how do you do that.

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Kingston Springs, Tenn: What do you think of the contest system, which has become such an integral part of poetry publishing?

Robert Pinsky: A good practical question. For the poets, there is something demoralizing about paying an entry fee or reading fee. On the plus side, at least the contests keep to a calendar, whereas a press-- large or small-- may consign an unsolicited poetry ms to limbo for months, even years.

This is one of the many areas where money makes a difference. What if the Poetry Foundation offered to pay the costs of reading and processing poetry manuscripts-- postage, judges' fees, office overhead, the works-- for any respectable, non-vanity publisher at all? Right across the range of aesthetic tastes and colors (and smells?) Maybe that isn't practical, but I do like the idea of prejudice-free, hands-off subsidies to the entire art.

My experience when I submitted to contests was as I recall an internal struggle between discouragement & determination. As a judge, I've been annoyed by discovering that the pre-screeners had predudices and alliances I didn't know about . . . I've tended toward a friend's advice to ask for the whole batch, rather than relying on screeners.

It's good that this Q forces me to consider this-- I guess my first thought is that it's a defective system but better than nothing. And some of the worst aspects of it have been reformed, apparently.

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Harrisburg, Pa.: What is the earliest examples of poetry in human history that have been found?

Robert Pinsky: I'm not scholarly enough to know the answer-- presumably something Sumerian or Babylonian, either that part of the world or something pre-Columbian? I feel like I'm flunking an exam!

One of the most interesting moments for me in school, in an Old English class, was learning that poetry preceded prose by centuries: people were composing poetry, reciting it, even writing it down, long before there was such a thing as prose.

(You see, I am trying to supply SOME kind of information, even when I can't answer the main Q.)

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Fairfax County, VA: Due to the writer's strike, the Colbert Report and Daily Show are replaying some of their best older episodes, so I got to watch the metaphor-off once again. You are hilarious. Did you approach them, did they approach you, were you involved in the writing, and what did you think of it?

And what is the correct metaphor for love?

Robert Pinsky: The Colbert people came to me, via Tree Swenson at the Academy of American Poets . . . and I was in Italy, I think at a Dante conference, and my first response was I couldn't do it because they had one specific date, when Frank Bidart and I were giving a reading for the Grolier Book Store in Cambridge.

Fortunately, I told Frank about this, I think by email, and he said I was crazy, we'd change the reading date. (Which Ifeanki Menkiti at the Grolier was very nice about.

The Cobert writers are brilliant-- they did it all, including the Ozymandias quotation, which some people think I came up with. That you for saying I was hilarious-- if so, I owe it to the advice of my youngest daughter, when I boasted to her that I wld be on the show. She said, memorably and wisely "DON'T TRY TO BE FUNNY."

I did as I was told. I do think the sketch-- they said it was the longest segment they've ever done-- came out well. I think it's funny partly because of the three different styles: Colbert the brilliant improv-trained comic, Penn the actual actor, and my own amateur-ham manner, held in check by the daughter's advice.

In the sketch the correct metaphor comes from a song I'm too square or too hip to know.

In life, the good metaphors aren't correct.

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Richmond, Va: I think I'm fairly bright, love love love to read read read, did well in school, but I can not stand poetry. Love symbolism in movies, but can not stand the cryptic nature of poetry. Say what you mean and mean what you say, dernit! stop pussyfooting around talking about leaves!

what work would you suggest that would show the reason for, value in poetry to someone who understands it but doesn't 'get' it?

Robert Pinsky: I have a really, really good answer for you.

That person should go to www.favoritepoem.org and watch three or four of the brief video segments, where readers-- mostly not poets or critics or professors-- read aloud a poem by the likes of Emily Dickinson or Shakespeare or Walt Whitman, and say a little about why that particular poem is important to them.

The videos also appear on a DVD that comes with AN INVITATION TO POETRY the latest of three Favorite Poem Project anthologies I edited for Norton. The first anthology, AMERICANS' FAVORITE POEMS is now in something like its 20th printing. Each poem in the books is accompanied by quotes from readers who wrote to me as part of the project.

Your question, in a way I like and find endearing, embodies an American freedom from the social prestige many cultures associate with poetry. This has an up as well as a down side. The Favorite Poem Project is a step in the process of devising American cultural ways and means.

(The videos are also a great teaching tool in my opinion-- a a corrective to well-meaning teaching based on a false idea that puts interpretation first, as though a poem is primarily a puzzle.)

www.favoritepoem.org. Or, AN INVITATION TO POETRY.

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For Rockville:: I don't know about their specific ages, but two young(ish) poets who are always a treat to read are A.E. Stallings and Li-Young Lee. But really, why get hung up about certain ages? On the other end of the spectrum, there's Linda Pastan (who I believe is from somewhere in the D.C. area) -- her stuff is just knock-you-on-your-butt fabulous.

(btw, Mr. Pinsky, thank you so much for your great columns every Sunday; I've enjoyed it immensely!)

Robert Pinsky: Thanks-- to continue the favorite poem idea, you are invited to send emails (we no longer have staff to read snailmail letters at the FPP) about specific poems you admire by Stallings, Lee, Pastan, whoever you choose and as many as you choose.

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richmond again: your answer DOES help (read aloud a poem by the likes of Emily Dickinson or Shakespeare or Walt Whitman)! It makes me remember that when I HEAR great writing such as Edgar Allen Poe, it is the rhythm that entices me.

Robert Pinsky: Yes, trying to approach poetry without hearing it-- in my opinion-- is like studying a score without hearing the music.

At the least, _imagine_ hearing!

It's interesting how often saying a poem aloud makes it become more clear as well as more moving or exciting.

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Robert Pinsky: For this last ten or twelve minutes-- if there is anyone out there silently lurking, wondering whether to add a question or remark, let me invite you to jump in.

I promise to be respectful of whatever you may say or ask.

(That includes following-up on some previous matter.)

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Waldorf, MD: OK, been lurking but now will jump in.

Who do you think were the half dozen or so best American poets of the 20th century? Best half dozen of any nationality?

Thanks

Robert Pinsky: Welcome and thanks for participating. Rather than best in some absolute sense, I'll try to name the ones that were best for me:

It starts with W.C. Williams and Robert Frost, and especially with the overlap between them: two poets more similar than their adherents always acknowledge. The sound of American speech in their work guided me.

Elizabeth Bishop's way of including much in little, the world reflected in the surfaces of one life and personality.

Hart Crane's reckless, gorgeous incorporation of large scope, large language, refreshing the old pentameter.

T. S. Eliot as a starting point-- put him with Allen Ginsberg, his follower and nephew, in challenging and colliding the spiritual and the urban, the tawdry and the noble, insisting on those dualities as really monads.

These are some that have been important for me personally. In later generations, the solitary, lonely, determined paths taken by Robert Hayden and Alan Dugan come to mind also.

Out of the US? Like many in my generation, I absorbed Yeats and Neruda pretty early in my hunt for poetry. At the very beginnning of the 20th century, Thomas Hardy. I have a feeling of leaving out something primary . . .

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The Favorite Poem Project is a step in the process of devising American cultural ways and means: i SEE A resurgance in poetry interest among young people with poetry slams, etc.

Robert Pinsky: Because of our culture's nature, many approaches to art will begin with steps that reflect the power of show business, the entertainment industry. Though ultimately the nature of poetry is different from that: profoundly vocal, but not necessarily performative.

(Again, see that DVD!)

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Silver Spring, Md: I've always loved "The going from a world we know" Might be a Dirda question, but any bio or interpretive suggestions for Dickinson? Do you think that a deeper understanding of a poet's life is necessary? I mean does it matter what the poet meant for the poem to be or just what we think it means?

Robert Pinsky: Letters are fascinating, a step between the writer's writing as art and ordinary uses of language with family, friends,etc.

(The correspondence of Pound and Williams, which is published, makes a moving, wonderful as well as terrible story, spanning from college-age youths to old age.)

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Robert Pinsky: Thank you all for your thoughtful, generous questions. I've enjoyed this!

Good wishes to you,

Robert Pinsky

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