A master of improvisation, Robert Pinsky moves among ideas or images the way Charlie Parker moves in melody. His poems seamlessly telescope between cosmos and computers, God and green pianos, Hermes and a vintage Oldsmobile. A poet, translator, essayist, teacher and popularizer, Pinsky was Poet Laureate of the United States for an unprecedented three terms (1997-2000). He may be the most inspiring American poet working today.
His work is melodic in the sense that he does not shy away from rhyme and refrain. But he also doesn’t hesitate to make his readers work. Stylistically, his work has a great range of technical complexity. “Shirt,” which depicts a tragic fire in 1911 that claimed the lives of 146 seamstresses, is made up of straightforward lines:

We have culled its cost and quality
Down to the buttons of simulated bone.
The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters
Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape,
The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.

At the other end of Pinsky’s vast spectrum, “The Refinery” goes to the barbarous ontological origins of language itself:

Thirsty and languorous after their long black sleep
The old gods crooned and shuffled and shook their heads.
Dry, dry. By railroad they set out
Across the desert of stars to drink the world
Our mouths had soaked
In the strange sentences we made
While they were asleep: a pollen-tinted
Slurry of passion and lapsed
Intention, whose imagined
Taste made the savage deities hiss and snort.

Yet Pinsky’s poetry is defined by its vivid colors, energy and blood pulse rhythms. Like all great poetry, it is meant to be heard rather than read upon a page.
As for his accomplishments as a poet, they are far too many to list. Highlights include a Pulitzer nomination and the coveted Lenore Marshall Award for The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1965-1995. He has received the Shelley Memorial Award, the Harold Washington Literary Award and the PEN Voelcker Award. His collection of essays, Poetry and the World, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle award in criticism. He is also co-translator of The Separate Notebooks, poems by Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz. His latest collection of poems is Jersey Rain.
In 2004, Norton published the anthology An Invitation to Poetry, a collection of poems featured in Pinsky’s Favorite Poem Project, which he founded shortly after the Library of Congress appointed him to the post of US Poet Laureate in 1997. Since its launch, the Favorite Poem Project has been dedicated to celebrating, documenting and promoting poetry’s role in Americans’ lives.
During the one-year open call for submissions, 18,000 Americans wrote to the project volunteering to share their favorite poems—Americans from ages five to 97, from every state, of diverse occupations, kinds of education and backgrounds. From those thousands of letters and e-mails, the project has culled several enduring collections.
Currently, Pinsky is poetry editor of the online journal Slate, and writes the weekly “Poet’s Choice” column for the Washington Post. He has also been a regular contributor to The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. He teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University.
Last week, he discussed his work with the Weekly via e-mail.

RM: Your tenure as US Poet Laureate was highlighted by the Favorite Poem Project, in which people from across the United States introduced their favorite classic and contemporary poems. A number of books resulted, including last summer’s An Invitation to Poetry: A New Favorite Poem Project Anthology. What is your favorite poem and why?

RP: I never asked anyone to pick “the” favorite poem, only “a” favorite poem. If I had to choose, it might be “Sailing to Byzantium” by William Butler Yeats or “Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats. Both poems became central for me when I was about seventeen years old and falling in love with poetry. Both are about the mystery, glamour, pain and yearning of art. They treat art, and the art of poetry, with spiritual grandeur.
They attain that feeling of spiritual grandeur in terms that are not Christian or Jewish. They make the adventures and struggles of the imagination heroic, in terms that have nothing to do with battle or warfare.

RM: There is a music to your poetry and I understand you are also a musician in addition to being a poet. What do you play and what do you listen to? What is the relationship between your music and your poetry and between music and poetry in general?

RP: When I was a kid I wanted to be a jazz musician: voted “Most Musical Boy” in my high school graduating class—certainly not “Most Literary!” I bong an electronic keyboard in my study, blow my saxophone too. The tenor saxophone was my instrument.
Truly, I was never a very good musician, though I wanted to be, deeply. I try to do with the sounds and rhythms of words, with the colors and perfumes of sentences, what I could not do with the horn.
Poetry, itself, is partway between singing and speaking. Yet it is not for an expert’s or artist’s voice: it is for the reader’s voice, the audience’s voice. That is why I think the videos on the DVD included with An Invitation to Poetry are so important. They demonstrate that great principle. (See also www.favoritepoem.org.)

RM: You were poetry editor of the New Republic for a long time, and now you’re poetry editor of an on-line magazine published by Microsoft, Slate. While many poets view technology as an anathema to literary arts, you seem to have embraced technology, even writing a wonderful ode “To Television” in your most recent collection Jersey Rain. What’s the relationship between poetry and technology in the 21st Century?

RP: Poetry has for its medium each reader’s voice, actual or imagined by each reader. So poetry is inherently—by the nature of the medium—on an individual, human scale.
That human scale makes poetry all the more valuable in a time of mass media. This is not to say that mass media cannot be wonderful. Great works of art are sometimes made in mass media. But poetry has that special intimacy. At the same time, the art uses language—something everybody uses every day. So in addition to that intimate, human scale, the art is uniquely public and universal.
But this is a reason to value poetry, and no reason to scorn or neglect technology or mass media.

RM: When I was in grad school, I sat in on a friend’s thesis defense. There was a historian on her advisory board who took a great deal of offense to the fact that her thesis was a poetic biography of a historical personality. She considered the idea of a poet presenting history as dangerous, I think. Yet we turn on the TV and here you are regularly talking poetry on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. What kind of reactions do you get to this, and what is poetry’s role in social history and politics?

RP: “Dangerous!” What a great compliment that professor paid to the art of poetry! And its power!…correctly, I think.
I don’t want to overstate the importance of poetry. It cannot replace sober history or the Op-Ed page. But can you know who the Americans are if you do not know Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Williams, Stevens, Ginsberg, Bishop? Our notion of who the English were in the 17th century, who the Athenians were, come from their artists. And our notions of their communal life, in particular, come from their literary artists.
The NewsHour pieces have attracted gratifying attention.

RM: In a recent speech to the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, you created a virtual manifesto for literary education as an indispensable ingredient of democracy itself. Unfortunately, most of the dollars for literary education are currently dog-eared for war. What are some ways to infuse literary arts into a community without much financial support?

RP: Poetry has the advantage of not needing much expensive equipment. At the Web site www.favoritepoem.org, I think we have instructions for a public Favorite Poem Reading: some people from a community reading poems they love, by the likes of Neruda or Dickinson or Hopkins or Oppen or Donne—the only rule is you don’t read anything by yourself or an immediate family member.

RM: This fall, Schocken Books will publish The Life of David, a retelling and interpretation of the Biblical and legendary stories. I assume this is a work in prose. What is the inspiration and back-story of this project?

RP: Yes, this is a prose book—about a great legendary poet who is also a great legendary killer and governor. The stories and legends about him, in Samuel I & II and elsewhere, are marvelous. In the book, I tell the stories, and marvel at them. It is an entertaining read, I hope. Certainly it tickled me while writing it.

RM: Why do so many people fear and loathe the idea of poetry? Is this a result of how it is taught in high schools?

RP: I’m afraid that well-meaning teaching has given people the idea that a poem is first of all a challenge to see if you can say something smart about it. That is too bad, because the appetite for poetry is universal, like the appetite for singing or dancing. As with dancing, people have to learn to fear or loathe it.
A poem is first of all something that sounds wonderful when you say it aloud. The Favorite Poem Project, the videos, the anthologies, all serve that idea. I’ll repeat: I’m very glad Norton put that DVD in the back of An Invitation to Poetry.

RM: Who are some of the young poets you think we should keep a bead on in coming years?

RP: I have enjoyed poems by Elise Partridge, Dan Chiasson, Joshua Weiner, Rachel DeWoskin, Mark Turpin, David Gewanter, Cate Marvin, Erin Belieu, Carl Phillips, Joanie Mackowski, Mark Halliday…some of these people are younger than others. Nearly everyone looks “young” to me these days!

RM: Something a lot of people don’t know…you did a cameo voice role on The Simpsons. Many people consider that evidence of true pop canonization. Who were you and what episode was it?

RP: In an episode called “Little Girl in the Big Ten” I play a character named Robert Pinsky, who was once US Poet Laureate. He gives a reading at Springfield College while Lisa is pretending to be a student there. He is a pompous jerk.

RM: Which poems would you recommend as an introduction to your work?

RP: It’s a bit like choosing among your children. But let’s say, “Shirt,” “The Hearts,” “Ode to Meaning,” “Samurai Song,” “Impossible to Tell,” “Poem With Refrains,” “The Ice Storm,” “The Questions,” “Icicles,” “December Blues,” “Tennis,” “The Cold,” “Poem About People.”

Robert Pinsky’s reading begins on Monday, February 7, at 7pm on the Morgan Stock Stage at Monterey Peninsula College. Tickets are $10. For more information call 646-4057.