| Robert
Pinsky’s first two terms as United States Poet Laureate
were marked by such visible dynamism, and such national enthusiasm
in response, that the Library of Congress appointed him to an
unprecedented third term. Throughout his career, Pinsky has
been dedicated to identifying and invigorating poetry’s
place in the world.
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 —
shared their favorite poems. Pinsky believed that, contrary
to stereotype, poetry had a vigorous presence in the American
cultural landscape. The project sought to document that presence,
giving voice to the American audience for poetry. The anthology
Americans’
Favorite Poems, which include letters from project participants,
is in its eighteenth printing. The new anthology, An
Invitation to Poetry, comes with a DVD featuring twenty-seven
of the FPP video segments, as seen on PBS.
Elegant and tough, vividly
imaginative, Pinsky’s poems have earned praise for their
wild musical energy and ambitious range. His book Gulf Music
(2007) is his seventh volume of poetry. His The
Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 was a Pulitzer
Prize nominee and received the Lenore Marshall Award and the
Ambassador Book Award of the English Speaking Union. In May
2006 his chapbook entitled First
Things to Hand was published. His most recent book is Gulf
Music.
Pinsky’s books about
poetry include Poetry
and the World, nominated for the National Book Critics’
Circle Award, The
Sounds of Poetry, and more recently, Democracy,
Culture and the Voice of Poetry. Pinsky contends that, though
intimate, poetry addresses cultural needs by communicating a
shared set of social meanings, a paradox that becomes part of
his effort to demonstrate the complexity of American poetry.
Robert Pinsky’s
landmark, best-selling translation of The
Inferno of Dante received the Los Angeles Times Book
Award in poetry and the Howard Morton Landon Prize for translation.
He is also co-translator of The Separate Notebooks, poems
by Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz. Pinsky’s prose book,
The
Life of David, is a lively retelling and examination of
the David stories, narrating a wealth of legend as well as scripture.
The poetry editor
for the online magazine Slate, for seven years Pinsky
appeared regularly on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. He
writes the weekly “Poet’s Choice” column for
the Washington Post. He was elected in 1999 to the American
Academy of Arts and Letters. Pinsky’s poems appear in
magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly,
The Threepenny Review, American Poetry Review,
and frequently in The Best American Poetry anthologies.
He teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University.
Robert Pinsky is also the winner of the PEN/Voelcker Award,
the William Carlos Williams Prize, the Lenore Marshall, and
the National Foundation for Jewish Culture’s 2006 Jewish
Cultural Achievement Award in Literary Arts. He is one of the
few members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters to have
appeared on “The Simpsons.”
•••
“Pinsky is our finest
living specimen of this sadly rare breed, and the poems of “Gulf
Music” are among the best examples we have of poetry’s
ability to illuminate not only who we are as humans, but who
we are — and can be — as a nation.”
— The New York Times
Book Review
“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
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