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Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky (b. 1940), at a 2005 event.
Born:	20 October 1940. Long Branch, New Jersey (USA)
Occupation:	poet, literary critic, editor, academic
Nationality:	American
Writing period:	1968-present
Genres:	poetry, literary criticism.
Influences:	Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden
Influenced:	(other writers who were influenced by his/her work)

Robert Pinsky (born October 20, 1940) is an American poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator who served in the post of Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (known popularly as the Poet Laureate of the United States) from 1997 to 2000. Pinsky is the author of nineteen books—most of which are collections of his own poetry—but including critically-acclaimed translations of the Inferno from Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy and a collection of poems by Czeslaw Milosz. Image File history File links Broom_icon. ... Image File history File links Download high resolution version (1028x1260, 410 KB) Description: Photograph of Robert Pinsky Source: Photograph taken by Jared C. Benedict on 15 May 2005. ... October 20 is the 293rd day of the year (294th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 72 days remaining. ... 1940 (MCMXL) was a leap year starting on Monday (the link is to a full 1940 calendar). ... Map of Long Branch in Monmouth County Long Branch is a City located in Monmouth County, New Jersey. ... It has been suggested that this article be split into multiple articles. ... For the album by the Kaiser Chiefs see Employment (album) Employment is a contract between two parties, one being the employer and the other being the employee. ... In English usage, nationality is the legal relationship between a person and a country. ... A literary genre is one of the divisions of literature into genres according to particular criteria such as literary technique, tone, or content. ... Samuel Taylor Coleridge(October 21, 1772 – July 25, 1834) (pronounced ) was an English poet, critic, and philosopher who was, along with his friend William Wordsworth, one of the founders of the Romantic Movement in England and one of the Lake Poets. ... Matthew Arnold Caricature from Punch, 1881: Admit that Homer sometimes nods, That poets do write trash, Our Bard has written Balder Dead, And also Balder-dash Family tree Matthew Arnold (24 December 1822 – 15 April 1888) was an English poet and cultural critic, who worked as an inspector of schools. ... Thomas Stearns Eliot, OM (September 26, 1888 – January 4, 1965), was a poet, dramatist and literary critic. ... Wystan Hugh Auden (21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973) (IPA: ; first syllable of Auden rhymes with law), who signed his works W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet, regarded by many as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. ... October 20 is the 293rd day of the year (294th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 72 days remaining. ... 1940 (MCMXL) was a leap year starting on Monday (the link is to a full 1940 calendar). ... The poor poet A poet is a person who writes poetry. ... An essayist is an author who writes compositions which can be about any particular subject. ... Literary criticism is the study, discussion, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. ... Look up Translator in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... The Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress is appointed by the United States Librarian of Congress and earns a stipend of $35,000 a year. ... // Inferno means a large fire in general or hell in particular. ... Dante in a fresco series of famous men by Andrea del Castagno, ca. ... Dante shown holding a copy of The Divine Comedy, next to the entrance to Hell, the seven terraces of Mount Purgatory and the city of Florence, in Michelinos fresco. ... Czesław Miłosz in September 1999 Czesław Miłosz (pronounced [ʧεsȗav miȗɔʃ]; June 30, 1911–August 14, 2004) was a Polish poet and essayist. ...

Pinsky has become a figure within popular culture through a satirical guest-starring role in a 2002 episode of the animated sitcom, The Simpsons entitled Little Girl in the Big Ten. 1867 edition of the satirical magazine Punch, a British satirical magazine, ground-breaking on popular literature satire. ... Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement. ... A sitcom or situation comedy is a genre of comedy performance originally devised for radio but today typically found on television. ... Simpsons redirects here. ... Little Girl in the Big Ten is the twentieth episode of The Simpsons thirteenth season. ...

Biography

Robert Pinsky was born on 20 October 1940 in Long Branch, New Jersey. After graduating from Long Branch High School, he earned a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey and continued to receive a Master of Arts (M.A.) and Doctor of Philosophy (Ph. D.) from Stanford University. During his years at Rutgers, Pinsky was involved in the school's literary journal, The Anthologist. At Stanford, where he learned creative writing, Pinsky studied under the noted poet and critic Yvor Winters, and his classmates included the poets Robert Hass and John Matthias. After graduating, he taught at Wellesley College and the University of California, Berkeley before being appointed to the faculty of Boston University. He is currently poetry editor of the weekly Internet magazine Slate. October 20 is the 293rd day of the year (294th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 72 days remaining. ... 1940 (MCMXL) was a leap year starting on Monday (the link is to a full 1940 calendar). ... Map of Long Branch in Monmouth County Long Branch is a City located in Monmouth County, New Jersey. ... It has been suggested that this article be split into multiple articles. ... Bachelor of Arts (B.A., BA or A.B.), from the Latin Artium Baccalaureus is an undergraduate bachelors degree awarded for either a course or a program in the liberal arts or the sciences, or both. ... Rutgers redirects here. ... Nickname: Hub CityThe Healthcare City Coordinates: Country United States of America State New Jersey County Middlesex Established 1714 Incorporated {{{established_date2}}} Government type Faulkner Act Mayor James Cahill Area    - City 14. ... A Master of Arts is a postgraduate academic masters degree awarded by universities in North America and the United Kingdom (excluding the ancient universities of Scotland and Oxbridge. ... Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated Ph. ... The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly known as Stanford University (or simply Stanford), is a private university located approximately 37 miles (60 kilometers) southeast of San Francisco and approximately 20 miles northwest of San José in an unincorporated area of Santa Clara County. ... Arthur Yvor Winters (October 17, 1900 - January 26, 1968) was an American literary critic and poet, noted as a critic of poetry and embroiled in controversy. ... Robert L. Hass (b. ... John Matthias is an American poet. ... Wellesley College is a womens liberal arts college that opened in 1875, founded by Henry Fowle Durant and his wife Pauline Fowle Durant. ... Sather tower (the Campanile) looking out over the San Francisco Bay and Mount Tamalpais. ... For the unrelated Jesuit university in Chestnut Hill, see Boston College. ... Slate Thick slate fragment Slate roof Slate is a fine-grained, homogeneous, metamorphic rock derived from an original shale-type sedimentary rock composed of clay or volcanic ash through low grade regional metamorphism. ...

Early on, Pinsky was inspired by the flow and had sex with playboy and the excitement that it made him feel. He said it was an incredible experience that he has tried to reproduce in his poetry. The musicality of poetry was and is extremely important to his work. (http://project1.caryacademy.org/echoes/poet_Robert_Pinsky/defaultrobert%20pinsky.htm).

Pinsky teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University, and in 1997 was named the United States poet Laureate and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of congress. He now lives in Newton Corner, Massachusetts.

As Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky became a public ambassador for poetry, founding the Favorite Poem Project, in which thousands of Americans of varying backgrounds, all ages, and from every state share their favorite poems. Pinsky believed that, contrary to stereotype, poetry had a strong presence in the American cultural. The project sought to document that presence, giving voice to the American audience for poetry.

Pinsky's collection of essays, Landor's Poetry was published in 1968 and followed by other essay collections in 1977- The Situation of Poetry and Poetry and the World (1988), which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. He received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 1974 and in 1975 published his collection of poems, Sadness and Happiness. It contains both long and short poems but is noted in particular for the seventeen-page "Essay on Psychiatrists." Offering a variety of literary and cultural references, the poem is said to typify Pinsky's use of discursive poetic forms. Similarly, in the book-length poem An Explanation of America, one of his most ambitious and admired works, the poet teaches his daughter about the past so that she may shape her future. The title poem in History of My Heart is an autobiographical narrative on memory and desire that draws on many of Pinsky's childhood, adolescent, and adult experiences. In "The Want Bone" he employs, "a pastiche technique characterized by overt word play in order to symbolize and examine the lust for life and the desire for sensual experience. The volume includes mock biblical stories on the childhood of Jesus and an extended prose section in which Jesus, in disguise, enters the story of Tristan and Isolde in order to learn about love." The National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) is an American association of approximately seven hundred book reviewers. ... The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent federal agency of the United States established by the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965 (Pub. ...

Poetry collections: An Explanation of America (1980) which won the Saxifrage Prize; History of My Heart (1984), awarded the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America; The Want Bone (1990); and, The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, and was awarded the Ambassador Book Award in Poetry of the English Speaking Union and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Professor Pinsky is renowned for his translation work, most notably The Inferno of Dante (1994) which won the Los Angeles Times Book Award in poetry, the Academy of American Poets' translation award, and was a Book-of-the-Month-Club Editor's Choice. He has received many other literary awards and honors. William Carlos Williams Dr. William Carlos Williams (sometimes known as WCW) (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963), was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. ... The Pulitzer Prize is an American award regarded as the highest national honor in print journalism, literary achievements, and musical composition. ... Established in 1975, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize is (currently) a $25,000 award recognizing the most outstanding book of poetry published in the United States in the previous year. ...

Pinsky is also the author of the interactive fiction game Mindwheel (1984) developed by Synapse and released by Broderbund. He is known for his innovative, personal style, and his use of contemporary themes. Pinsky is a professor at Boston University, where he teaches in the graduate creative writing program. Zork, an early work of interactive fiction, running on a modern interpreter Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, describes software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. ... For the unrelated Jesuit university in Chestnut Hill, see Boston College. ...

Criticism

Pinsky is often praised for "his grasp of traditional metrical forms and his ability to evoke timeless meaning within the strictures of contemporary idioms." Critics applaud, "his ability to imbue simple images—a Brownie troop square dance, cold weather, the music of Fats Waller—with underlying meaning to create order out of the accidental events people encounter in their lives." Commentators admire Pinsky's, "ambitiousness, his juxtaposition of the personal with the universal, the present with the past, the simple with the complex, and it has been noted that his intellectual style presents challenges to readers, obliging them to unravel the complexity behind the clarity of language and imagery."

About Robert Pinsky's first book of poems Robert Lowell wrote, "It is refreshing to find a poet who is intellectually interesting and technically first-rate. Robert Pinsky belongs to that rarest category of talent, a poet-critic." Writing in the Times Literary Supplement, William Pritchard called "Sadness and Happiness", "the best work by any younger poet within recent memory." Louis Martz wrote of Pinsky "the most exhilarating new poet that I have read since A. R. Ammons entered upon the scene. In his peculiar and original combination of abstract utterance and vivid image Pinsky points the way toward the future of poetry." "The Inferno of Dante" has been celebrated by Stephen Greenblatt as, "the premier modern text for English-language readers to experience Dante's power." Hugh Kenner has described Pinsky's ambition as "nothing less than the recovery for language of a whole domain of mute and familiar experience," (http://www.bu.edu/favoritepoem/contact/rp_bio.html, 2). “In his poems Pinsky talks, with democratic warmth and intimacy, to the common things of this world. His extraordinary poems remind us that he has always embodied the very ideal he proposes for what a poet can do,” (Lloyd Schwarz, The Boston Phoenix). “Among the many writers who have come of age in our fin de siècle, none has succeeded more completely as a poet, critic and translator than Robert Pinsky,” (James Longenbach, The Nation). (http://www.bu.edu/favoritepoem/contact/rp_bio.html, 2)

"Robert Pinsky's poetry is noted for its combination of vivid imagery and clear, discursive language that explores such themes as truth, the history of nations and individuals, and the transcendent aspects of simple acts. Pinsky strives to create an organized view of the world, often confronting and trying to explain the past to bring order to the present. Recurring subjects in his work include the Holocaust, religion, and childhood. Pinsky's moral tone and mastery of poetic meter often are compared to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English poets, and the insights conveyed in his analytical works on poetry have led critics to place him in the tradition of other poet-critics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden."

Achievements

Published works

• Gulf Music (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 2007). ISBN
• First Things to Hand (2006). ISBN
• The Life of David (2005). ISBN
• An Invitation to Poetry (2004). ISBN
• Poems to Read (2002). ISBN
• Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry (2002). ISBN
• Jersey Rain (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 2000). ISBN
• Americans' Favorite Poems (1999). ISBN
• The Sounds of Poetry (1998). ISBN
• The Handbook of Heartbreak (1998). ISBN
• The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation (1995). ISBN
• The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 (1995). ISBN
• The Want Bone (1990). ISBN
• Poetry and the World (1988). ISBN
• History Of My Heart (1984). ISBN
• The Separate Notebooks, Poems by Czeslaw Milosz (1984). ISBN
• An Explanation of America (1980). ISBN
• The Situation of Poetry (1977). ISBN
• Sadness and Happiness (1975). ISBN
• Landor's Poetry (1968). ISBN

Honours and awards

• Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1997-2000)
• National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (1974)
• Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University
• Saxifrage Prize (1980) for An Explanation of America
• William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America
• Nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism (1988) for Poetry and the World
• Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1996) for The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996
• Ambassador Book Award in Poetry of the English Speaking Union
• Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize (1997) for The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996
• Los Angeles Times Book Award (1994) for The Inferno of Dante
• Book-of-the-Month Editor's Choice (1994) for The Inferno of Dante
• Academy of American Poets' Translation Award (1994) for The Inferno of Dante

The Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress is appointed by the United States Librarian of Congress and earns a stipend of $35,000 a year. ... The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent federal agency of the United States established by the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965 (Pub. ... The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly known as Stanford University (or simply Stanford), is a private university located approximately 37 miles (60 kilometers) southeast of San Francisco and approximately 20 miles northwest of San José in an unincorporated area of Santa Clara County. ... The William Carlos Williams Award is given out by the Poetry Society of America. ... The National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) is an American association of approximately seven hundred book reviewers. ... The Pulitzer Prize for Poetry has been presented since 1922 for a distinguished volume of original verse by an American author. ... Established in 1975, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize is (currently) a $25,000 award recognizing the most outstanding book of poetry published in the United States in the previous year. ... The Academy of American Poets is the largest organization in the United States dedicated to the art of poetry. ...

Notes and references

Notes and citations

Books and printed materials

• The Art of Poetry LXXVI: Robert Pinsky" The Paris Review No. 144 (1997), 180-213 (interview)

Online Resources

• [1]
• [2]
• [3]
• Modern American Poetry: Pinsky on his Religious Background (interview)
• [4]
• [5]
• [6] Interview with Pinsky by J.M. Spalding

External links

• Robert Pinsky reads his poetry at Wired for Books - RealAudio
• The Favorite Poem Project Site
• IPA: Robert Pinsky reads a selection of his poetry
• Poet Robert Pinsky Takes on King David in a public radio interview on ThoughtCast!