FEED: Tell me about how you came up with the idea for the Favorite Poem
Project.
PINSKY: The project is so much an extension of what I've been doing all my
life that it's hard for me to think of it as an "idea." Poems are meant for
people's voices. The art is vocal, but not necessarily performative. The
appeal of cadenced language is as universal as voice. It's not much of an
"idea" to go
from those basic notions on to the idea of asking as many people as
possible, of as many kinds as possible, to say a poem they love, and to
explain a little bit about
why.
Most attachments are based on a physical encounter, or begin with a
physical encounter. That is why the teacher must read aloud things he or
she loves to the children, and the children must read aloud to one another
things that they have chosen, that they love. Analysis and interpretation
are good, but the appetite for them comes after that physical encounter and
the attraction. First you like the cuisine, the sport, the person, the
animal... then, later, the craving comes for
information, analysis, interpretation.
FEED: So that's why it's important to read poetry out loud, for the physical
encounter?
PINSKY: Poetry is a bodily medium. Its intimacy and universality depend on
the medium of the reader's voice. It must be heard to be appreciated and to
work.
FEED: What was the FPP submission that most stood out in your mind?
PINSKY: Probably the only anonymous one in the anthology (Americans'
Favorite Poems), about Edwin Arlington Robinson's poem "Eros Turannos."
FEED: Right. "What fated her to choose him;/She meets in his engaging
mask/All reasons to refuse him…" Like most of Robinson's work, that poem is
haunting,
tragic. What explanation did the anonymous person give for why he or she
submitted it?
PINSKY: The letter is quoted on page 235 of "Americans' Favorite Poems."
FEED: A poetry cliff-hanger! All right. So, do you have a favorite poem? Was
there a poem that you read that made you say to yourself, "Okay, I'm
becoming a poet"?
PINSKY: The list is long, perhaps beginning with and certainly including
"Sailing to Byzantium," which I typed up and hung on the wall when I was
17 years old.
FEED: Who turned you on to "Sailing to Byzantium"? What was it about that
poem that captured your imagination?
PINSKY: My freshman English teacher Paul Fussell first showed it to me, I
think. A great teacher. I may have been attracted by the poem's spiritual
power, entirely apart from, and as it seemed to me, above any religion such as
Christianity or Judaism. The religion of art, I suppose.
FEED: How important is the oral tradition to you in writing poems? Telling
stories used to be a popular entertainment because there weren't many other
options. But
television, and, more recently, the internet, are much easier forms of
entertainment than storytelling. Do you think poets growing up today are
missing out to some extent because they are not verbally sharing stories
with their elders and peers?
PINSKY: I don't think the appetite for TV or the web exhausts or diminishes
our appetite for personal contact, or the vocal arts. I think people still
tell and hear stories, as much as ever. What may be unusual about my
childhood and youth is that my town was a close-knit microcosm. Maybe that
kind of experience is increasingly rare. It was the New Jersey Shore as a
small Southern town, in a way.
FEED: Why are you working to keep poetry active in American life?
PINSKY: In an age of dazzling, gorgeous, mass media, highly duplicable and
inherently on a mass scale, there is profound value in an art whose medium
is one individual's voice -- and the audience's voice, not necessarily the
artist's! Because poetry is inherently, and by its nature, on an individual,
intimate scale, we value it.
FEED: By that, do you mean that the voice of any given poem is the voice of
the reader more than it is the voice of the writer?
PINSKY: Not "more than," necessarily. A poem is a reality. That reality
inheres not on a page or in an expert performance but in the sounds of the
words of the poem, realized in a voice, actual or imagined. That reality is
not bound to the poet's voice, or to an actor's.
FEED: Is storytelling, or the idea of poetry sharing, necessary to sustain
poetry as a viable, cultural force?
PINSKY: Sharing goods is more or less a definition of culture, I think. It
is "natural," in the way that culture is natural. Such sharing may have more
to do with the health and survival of an art than the official world of
grants, prizes, curricula, and so on.
FEED: A friend told me about an exhibition that she saw at one of the
Harvard libraries a few years ago in which your notes for your translation
of Dante's Inferno were shown. They were covered with comments from
poet-friends of yours like Tom Sleigh and Seamus Heaney. Do you think
collaboration is important to the translating process? What are the
similarities between the translation process and the act of writing
original verse?
PINSKY: I needed and used a lot of help -- more friends than it is easy to
name helped out, besides Seamus and Tom, including Rosanna Warren, Frank
Bidart, Bob Hass, and many, many others. Steve Greenblatt. David Ferry. Mike
Mazur, Gail Mazur, Peter Sacks. For me, the only difference between
translating and writing a poem is that in translation one doesn't have to
think what to say next.
FEED: Are Creative Writing programs -- the Creative Writing poetry
"track" --
helping or hindering modern poets and poetry? Have they narrowed the
audience? Or were such programs necessary for the survival of poetry in the
second half of this century?
PINSKY: America, without the single unifying folk tradition or the
aristocratic tradition of some other cultures, has relied on school to care
for many things. Even jazz and the films of Keaton and Hitchcock now find a
harbor in universities. Creative writing becomes obnoxious when it becomes
a guild. But it is valuable in other ways: To the extent that English
departments have abandoned literature, creative writing programs have
inherited it.
FEED: When does creative writing become a guild?
PINSKY: A guild is an organization that requires membership in order for a
person to practice a craft. For instance, the silversmiths or shoemakers
allow only guild members to make silver candlesticks or leather brogans. It
would be obnoxious to limit the art of poetry to accredited members of the
creative writing guild.
FEED: You're a great jazz lover. How is jazz like poetry? Any favorite poems
about jazz? (One of mine is Levin's "I Remember Clifford.")
PINSKY: Like poetry, jazz is based on contrasting recurrence and surprise.
Most poems I like are not "about" topics in this way; "Ode to a Nightingale"
is not about a bird, and "Sailing to Byzantium" is not about sailing or a
city or sages. A wonderful poem that includes jazz references, that comes
to mind, is O'Hara's "The Day Lady Died," which is about different kinds and
levels of being alive.
FEED: Are the bookstores and publishing houses so inundated with poetry
books that the "bad stuff" is weakening the market and distracting readers
from the "good stuff"? Or are poetry lovers becoming overwhelmed by the
plethora of choices? Or are poetry lovers damn happy to have so much choice?
PINSKY: I think these are serious questions: The bad driving out the good
is a disturbing thought. My tendency is toward the theory that the cream
rises to the top, in the long run. Thank god for boredom! It insures that
inflated writing or coterie writing -- whether the coterie is avant garde or
academic or ethnic or whatever -- quietly sinks.
FEED: Is the internet helping to disseminate poetry to a wider audience?
PINSKY: I think so -- the number of poetry sites, and the amount of poetry
on
them, both old and new, canonical and not, is remarkable. And as with the
poems in Slate, some
of it is audible.
FEED: Which poems would you recommend as an introduction to your work?
PINSKY: Maybe "Shirt" or "The Figured Wheel." Maybe "The Want Bone" or
"History of My Heart." Maybe a section from "An Explanation of America."
Maybe "From the Childhood of Jesus" or "Immortal Longings." But this
[choosing one of my poems] is, as the old line has it, like choosing a
favorite child. And each different reader in each different mood will want
something different.
FEED: Finally, who do you write for? Do you have one person in mind?
PINSKY: I write for a person like me, but who did not write this poem. To
put it another way, I try to write things that would attract and move me, if
someone else had written them. I try to write something that would make me
feel something like what I feel when I read "At the Fishhouses" or "The Snow
Man" or "Eros Turannos."
Or to put it yet another way, I write for Ben Jonson or Emily Dickinson if
they were me.