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1 " This is one of the great human mysteries: why do works of art about bad things such as loss and deprivation make us feel good? "
― Robert Pinsky , The Handbook of Heartbreak: 101 Poems of Lost Love and Sorrow
2 " As the globe revolvesDifferent mixes keep passing into the lightOr into the dark, and then back out again:The unexpected, over and over again.Jefferson’s July 2 draft blamed George IIIFor violating the liberty of “a PeopleWho never offended him” shipped off to be“Slaves in another hemisphere.” For many“Miserable death in transportation thither.”On the Fourth of July, that passage was left out. Thither. "
― Robert Pinsky
3 " It can feel heavy with longing, and heavy with longing, in my mind, is preferable to hollow, which one also feels. If I'm heavy with longing, at least I have some idea of what I want. "
4 " The best anthology is the one each reader compiles, personally, according to his or her judgment, pleasure and awe." ~ Robert Pinsky, Singing School, 2013 "
― Robert Pinsky , Singing School: Learning to Write (and Read) Poetry by Studying with the Masters
5 " A sentence is like a tune. A memorable sentence gives its emotion a melodic shape. You want to hear it again, say it—in a way, to hum it to yourself. You desire, if only in the sound studio of your imagination, to repeat the physical experience of that sentence. That craving, emotional and intellectual but beginning in the body with a certain gesture of sound, is near the heart of poetry. "
6 " When I had no roof I made audacity my roof. "
7 " A reflection on Robert LowellRobert Lowell knew I was not one of his devotees. I attended his famous “office hours” salon only a few times. Life Studies was not a book of central importance for me, though I respected it. I admired his writing, but not the way many of my Boston friends did. Among poets in his generation, poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Alan Dugan, and Allen Ginsberg meant more to me than Lowell’s. I think he probably sensed some of that.To his credit, Lowell nevertheless was generous to me (as he was to many other young poets) just the same. In that generosity, and a kind of open, omnivorous curiosity, he was different from my dear teacher at Stanford, Yvor Winters. Like Lowell, Winters attracted followers—but Lowell seemed almost dismayed or a little bewildered by imitators; Winters seemed to want disciples: “Wintersians,” they were called.A few years before I met Lowell, when I was still in California, I read his review of Winters’s Selected Poems. Lowell wrote that, for him, Winters’s poetry passed A. E. Housman’s test: he felt that if he recited it while he was shaving, he would cut himself. One thing Lowell and Winters shared, that I still revere in both of them, was a fiery devotion to the vocal essence of poetry: the work and interplay of sentences and lines, rhythm and pitch. The poetry in the sounds of the poetry, in a reader’s voice: neither page nor stage.Winters criticizing the violence of Lowell’s enjambments, or Lowell admiring a poem in pentameter for its “drill-sergeant quality”: they shared that way of thinking, not matters of opinion but the matter itself, passionately engaged in the art and its vocal—call it “technical”—materials.Lowell loved to talk about poetry and poems. His appetite for that kind of conversation seemed inexhaustible. It tended to be about historical poetry, mixed in with his contemporaries. When he asked you, what was Pope’s best work, it was as though he was talking about a living colleague . . . which in a way he was. He could be amusing about that same sort of thing. He described Julius Caesar’s entourage waiting in the street outside Cicero’s house while Caesar chatted up Cicero about writers.“They talked about poetry,” said Lowell in his peculiar drawl. “Caesar asked Cicero what he thought of Jim Dickey.”His considerable comic gift had to do with a humor of self and incongruity, rather than wit. More surreal than donnish. He had a memorable conversation with my daughter Caroline when she was six years old. A tall, bespectacled man with a fringe of long gray hair came into her living room, with a certain air.“You look like somebody famous,” she said to him, “but I can’t remember who.”“Do I?”“Yes . . . now I remember!— Benjamin Franklin.”“He was a terrible man, just awful.”“Or no, I don’t mean Benjamin Franklin. I mean you look like a Christmas ornament my friend Heather made out of Play-Doh, that looked like Benjamin Franklin.”That left Robert Lowell with nothing to do but repeat himself:“Well, he was a terrible man.”That silly conversation suggests the kind of social static or weirdness the man generated. It also happens to exemplify his peculiar largeness of mind . . . even, in a way, his engagement with the past. When he died, I realized that a large vacuum had appeared at the center of the world I knew. "
8 " The heart grows brutal from feeding on fantasies. "
9 " Symmetry suggests one myth, or significance: the drinking of writers coming from too much concentration, in solitude, upon feelings expressed for or even about possibly indifferent people, people who are absent or perhaps dead, or unborn; the suicide of psychiatrists coming from too much attention, in most intimate contact, concentrated upon the feelings of people toward whom one may feel indifferent, people who are certain, sooner or later, to die... "
― Robert Pinsky , The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996
10 " God’s Grandeur The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. And, for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs— Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. "
11 " But someone I know is dying--And though one might say glibly, "everyone is,"The different pace makes the difference absolute. "
12 " From an essay on early reading by Robert Pinsky:My favorite reading for many years was the "Alice" books. The sentences had the same somber, drugged conviction as Sir John Tenniel's illustrations, an inexplicable, shadowy dignity that reminded me of the portraits and symbols engraved on paper money. The books were not made of words and sentences but of that smoky assurance, the insistent solidity of folded, textured, Victorian interiors elaborately barricaded against the doubt and ennui of a dreadfully God-forsaken vision. The drama of resisting some corrosive, enervating loss, some menacing boredom, made itself clear in the matter-of-fact reality of the story. Behind the drawings I felt not merely a tissue of words and sentences but an unquestioned, definite reality.I read the books over and over. Inevitably, at some point, I began trying to see how it was done, to unravel the making--to read the words as words, to peek behind the reality. The loss entailed by such knowledge is immense. Is the romance of "being a writer"--a romance perhaps even created to compensate for this catastrophic loss--worth the price? The process can be epitomized by the episode that goes with one of my favorite illustrations. Alice has entered a dark wood--"much darker than the last wood":[S]he reached the wood: It looked very cool and shady. "Well, at any rate it's a great comfort," she said as she stepped under the trees, "after being so hot, to get into the--into the--into what?" she went on, rather surprised at not being able to think of the word. "I mean to get under the--under the--under this, you know!" putting her hand on the trunk of the tree. "What does it call itself, I wonder? I do believe it's got no name--why to be sure it hasn't!"This is the wood where things have no names, which Alice has been warned about. As she tries to remember her own name ("I know it begins with L!"), a Fawn comes wandering by. In its soft, sweet voice, the Fawn asks Alice, "What do you call yourself?" Alice returns the question, the creature replies, "I'll tell you, if you'll come a little further on . . . . I can't remember here".The Tenniel picture that I still find affecting illustrates the first part of the next sentence: So they walked on together through the wood, Alice with her arms clasped lovingly round the soft neck of the Fawn, till they came out into another open field, and here the Fawn gave a sudden bound into the air, and shook itself free from Alice's arm. "I'm a Fawn!" it cried out in a voice of delight. "And dear me! you're a human child!" A sudden look of alarm came into its beautiful brown eyes, and in another moment it had darted away at full speed.In the illustration, the little girl and the animal walk together with a slightly awkward intimacy, Alice's right arm circled over the Fawn's neck and back so that the fingers of her two hands meet in front of her waist, barely close enough to mesh a little, a space between the thumbs. They both look forward, and the affecting clumsiness of the pose suggests that they are tripping one another. The great-eyed Fawn's legs are breathtakingly thin. Alice's expression is calm, a little melancholy or spaced-out.What an allegory of the fall into language. To imagine a child crossing over from the jubilant, passive experience of such a passage in its physical reality, over into the phrase-by-phrase, conscious analysis of how it is done--all that movement and reversal and feeling and texture in a handful of sentences--is somewhat like imagining a parallel masking of life itself, as if I were to discover, on reflection, that this room where I am writing, the keyboard, the jar of pens, the lamp, the rain outside, were all made out of words.From "Some Notes on Reading," in The Most Wonderful Books (Milkweed Editions) "
13 " Shirt" The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,The nearly invisible stitches along the collarTurned in a sweatshop by Koreans or MalaysiansGossiping over tea and noodles on their breakOr talking money or politics while one fittedThis armpiece with its overseam to the bandOf cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter,The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blazeAt the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.One hundred and forty-six died in the flamesOn the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes—The witness in a building across the streetWho watched how a young man helped a girl to stepUp to the windowsill, then held her outAway from the masonry wall and let her drop.And then another. As if he were helping them upTo enter a streetcar, and not eternity.A third before he dropped her put her arms Around his neck and kissed him. Then he heldHer into space, and dropped her. Almost at onceHe stepped to the sill himself, his jacket flaredAnd fluttered up from his shirt as he came down,Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers—Like Hart Crane’s Bedlamite, “shrill shirt ballooning.”Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectlyAcross the placket and over the twin bar-tackedCorners of both pockets, like a strict rhymeOr a major chord. Prints, plaids, checks,Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartansInvented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian,To control their savage Scottish workers, tamedBy a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor,Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workersTo wear among the dusty clattering looms.Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader,The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorterSweating at her machine in a litter of cottonAs slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields:George Herbert, your descendant is a BlackLady in South Carolina, her name is IrmaAnd she inspected my shirt. Its color and fitAnd feel and its clean smell have satisfiedBoth her and me. We have culled its cost and qualityDown to the buttons of simulated bone,The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the charactersPrinted in black on neckband and tail. The shape,The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt. "
14 " As to his unique opinions on the poem, Pinsky had this to tell his Lincoln Center audience: “This is not a poem about punishment, but the sin of despair… the agony of feeling defective and being defective… I believe Inferno is the best book ever written about depression. "
15 " Samurai Song"When I had no roof I madeAudacity my roof. When I hadNo supper my eyes dined.When I had no eyes I listened.When I had no ears I thought.When I had no thought I waited.When I had no father I madeCare my father. When I hadNo mother I embraced order.When I had no friend I madeQuiet my friend. When I had noEnemy I opposed my body.When I had no temple I madeMy voice my temple. I haveNo priest, my tongue is my choir.When I have no means fortuneIs my means. When I haveNothing, death will be my fortune.Need is my tactic, detachmentIs my strategy. When I hadNo lover I courted my sleep. "
16 " Genesis According to George Segal,”The Spirit brooded on the water and made The earth, and molded us out of earth. And then The Spirit breathed Itself into our nostrils—And rested. What was the Spirit waiting for? An image of Its nature, a looking glass? Glass also made of dust, of sand and fire.Ordinary, enigmatic, we people waiting In the terminal. A survivor at a wire fence, Also waiting. Behind him, a tangle of bodiesMade out of plaster, which plasterers call mud. The apprentice hurries with a hod of mud. Particulate sand for glass. Milled flour for bread.What are we waiting for? The hour glass That measures all our time in trickling dust Is also of dust and will return to dust—So an old poem says. Men in a bread line Out in the dusty street are silent, waiting At the apportioning-place of daily bread.At an old-fashioned radio’s wooden case A man sits listening in a wooden chair. A woman at a butcher block waits to cut.What are we waiting for, in clouds of dust? Or waiting for the past, particles of being Settled and moist with life, then brittle again. "
― Robert Pinsky , Poems About Sculpture
17 " Afternoon light like pollen. This is my language, not the one I learned. "
18 " Walter Ralegh’s “Nature, That Washed Her Hands in Milk” (p. 100): "
