Quotes by Robert Pinsky

“The test of whether its poetry is: does it sound beautiful when you say the words over, in your mind or your voice, with no skilled performer, no music, just the sounds and meanings in the words themselves,”

“Its true that school can poison things - some people hate W.C. Williams little poem about the wheelbarrow because somebody bullied them with it in school,”

“poetic language is singularly appropriate for recounting the life of the king who is traditionally accepted as the author of the poetic psalms, some of which are included in the narrative.”

“Vivid and reflective, documentary and visionary, re-imagining the city of New York with the same urgency that ponders the opening words of Genesis, this is a passionate, artful and re-readable book.”

“to talk about the reality of life here and the work that you do here at the university.”

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.

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 Tenniels 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 its 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 its got no name--why to be sure it hasnt!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, Ill tell you, if youll come a little further on . . . . I cant 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 Alices arm. Im a Fawn! it cried out in a voice of delight. And dear me! youre 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, Alices right arm circled over the Fawns 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 Fawns legs are breathtakingly thin. Alices 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)

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?

I delight sometimes in saying to - as when Im a teacher, I love saying, This is really important, so dont write it down. To me, what you retain is a very important filter.

I think art is not an ornament or refinement at the fringes of human intelligence, I think its at the center. Its at the core.

The last thing a young artist should do in poetry or any other field is think about whats in style, whats current, what are the trends. Think instead of what you like to read, what do you admire, what you like to listen to in music. What do you like to look at in architecture? Try to make a poem that has some of those qualities.

Jazz and poetry both involve a structure that may be familiar and to some extent predictable. And then, you try to create as much surprise and spontaneity and feeling and variation while respecting that structure.

For an American, theres no automatic place where people love the art of poetry. Theres not a social class that considers poetry its property the way in some countries theres a snob value to the art.

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. There was a piano player, a bass player, a drummer, and my breath making the melody.