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 18th printing. The most recent anthology, An
Invitation to Poetry, comes with a DVD featuring 27 of the
FPP video segments, as seen on PBS. In April 2009, WW Norton
will publish Essential
Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud; a
CD will accompany the book.
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, the National Foundation
for Jewish Culture’s 2006 Jewish Cultural Achievement
Award in Literary Arts, and the 2008 Theodore M. Roethke Memorial
Poetry Award. 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.”
