Robert Pinsky is the author of several collections of poetry, including Gulf Music: Poems (2007); Jersey Rain (2000); The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 (1996), which received the 1997 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and was a Pulitzer Prize nominee; The Want Bone (1990); History of My Heart (1984); An Explanation of America (1980); and Sadness and Happiness (1975).
The audience may not have been thinking, My God, that kid is the best saxophone player I’ve ever heard; I’m There’s a lot of cant about poetry and jazz.
He says the familiarity of the neighborhood made him realize he “didn’t want to go back to Berkeley. Over the years, he has garnered many prizes and awards, including the William Carlos Williams Award, the Landon Prize in Translation, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Shelley Memorial Award and the Ambassador Prize. I think my first experience of art, or the joy in making art, was playing the horn at some high-school dance or bar mitzvah or wedding, looking at a roomful of people moving their bodies around in time to what I was doing. One senses that Pinsky feels nearly as at home in the garage where he gets his Chrysler convertible fixed as in the halls of academe—or, for that matter, of Congress. Although far from jingoistic, he’s an unabashed patriot who embodies many of our more attractive national traits: ingenuity, open-mindedness, a certain stalwart optimism. His mother struggled with alcoholism and his father seemed to hate his job, and “neither,” Hass would recall, “seemed to be having their lives.” He grew up hunting and fishing, and would one day raise his own children blackberrying and mushrooming and birding around the Bay Area.Hass also produced two volumes gathering some of his essays and reviews—Our conversation began in 2010, but we didn’t finish it until this January. “I think poetry is a vital part of our intelligence, our ability to learn, our ability to remember, the relationship between our bodies and minds,” he told the Christian Science Monitor. He teaches at Boston University.
Photo courtesy of the author.
“Poetry’s highest purpose is to provide a unique sensation of coordination between the intelligence, emotions and the body.
Then a few years ago, I went out in a trance and bought this Grassi, an Italian copy of the Selmer Mark VI. Formerly a retiring person, Pinsky became a public figure, and he used the notoriety to promote a new project. Much as I love my present, more remote home, I am still drawn by deep roots to those kinds of homes and neighborhoods. His dominant driving force was to make poetry retain its power and meaning throughout literary periods. There was a piano player, a bass player, a drummer, and my breath making the melody. Pinsky has also been active as a critic, publishing Landor’s Poetry (1968), The Situation of Poetry (1977) and Poetry and the World (1988). The human voice in that sense is not electronically reproduced or amplified; it's the actual living breath inside a body—not necessarily an expert's body or the artist's body. Born in 1940 in Long Branch, New Jersey into a family he describes as lower-middle class, he went to Rutgers, and then, in 1965, won a Stegner Fellowship to Stanford, where he studied with Yvor Winters. Whoever reads the poem aloud becomes the proper medium for the poem.
Then I took it up again a few years ago—after maybe a thirty-year gap! And context, itself one of Hass’s great subjects, became a touchstone as the interview unfolded, too.Hass’s smile is sweet and a little bit sad. He’s told me he’s not sure he believes in digression.