Robert Pinsky.By Chauncey Mabe
As America’s only three-time poet laureate, Robert Pinsky would appear perfectly suited to deliver a “State of the Nation”-style disquisition.
Who better to survey the role of poetry in contemporary life – the challenges (and opportunities) presented by the digital revolution, the rise of spoken-word and hip-hop, the advent of the amazing shrinking attention span?
Pinsky, however, declines the invitation:
“Unlike the Dow Jones or the Mets or video games, poetry is fundamental and central and enduring,” Pinsky says. “Poetry goes deeper than terms like ‘the state of’ and ‘2011.’ Nothing against 2011, but personally, I’m in many ways more interested in 1595 and 2164.”
Before branding Pinsky with a scarlet “E” (for “elitist,” or perhaps even “effete”), it’s important to note that his faith in high culture is matched by an equally firm confidence in the general reader.
Pinsky, special guest poet at this week’s 7th annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival, created the Favorite Poem Project during his time as poet laureate (1997-2000). Not only is it an ingenious forum for the promotion of poetry, it also disproves a received truth about the American character that goes back to the nation’s beginnings.
That’s the idea that America hates poetry and neglects its greatest poets. Eighteen thousand people responded to Pinsky’s call for a favorite poem, with 50 of them filmed in mini-documentaries, reading and discussing their selection. [To see the videos, visit http://www.favoritepoem.org/.]
“No human culture I know of is without poetry,” Pinsky says. “Poetry is like dancing, or singing. There may be fads or exemplars, but the thing itself is large and permanent. I love the Favorite Poem Project because it doesn’t persuade you to love poetry, but asks what poetry you already love.”
As a poet, Pinsky is often praised for the musicality of his verse. He grew up hoping to become a jazz musician and at one time hoped to be a musician, but turned to poetry when his skill with the saxophone fell short. Since his first collection, Sadness and Happiness, came out in 1975, he’s published a total of 11 collections. He’s been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He’s also an important translator, critic and essayist.
“I write with my ear,” Pinsky says. “I’m trying to do with the sounds of vowels and consonants what I was not always doing with the horn.”
When he reads Wednesday night after the gala fundraising dinner, Pinsky will be accompanied by the Paul Tardiff Jazz Trio.
“Jazz was one of the pleasures of youth, but I drifted away from it in my 20s. I thought that pleasure was in the past, but now I’ve read with some tremendous musicians. It’s very different from songwriting, where the words fit the tune. It’s more like a conversation between words and instruments.” [To see samples of Pinsky reading with jazz accompaniment, visit http://vimeo.com/2772210/.]
Miles Coon, founder and director of the festival, calls Pinsky “a master of taking a symbol of America or some aspect of American life and expanding on it.”
“One of the things I love about poetry is the way it presents the vagaries of life and how to deal with them,” Coon says. “One of Pinsky’s poems I adore is ‘Samurai Song.’ It’s a persona poem, with a samurai talking about loss and how he copes with it. In reading it I feel like I’m a samurai and we are all warriors on the battlefield of life.”
In fact, adds Coon, the first time he saw Pinsky read the poem it was with a jazz trio. “Which seemed odd,” Coon recalls. “Jazz? Samurai? But it works, which proves a point. Even someone reading to the rhythms of jazz is a samurai. Pinsky epitomizes the strength of the personal lyric. He represents all of us, and what it means to be a body in time, alive.”
Coon is no less enthusiastic for the other poets on this year’s schedule: Heather McHugh, Thomas Lux, Alan Shapiro, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Vijay Seshadri, C.D. Wright, Jane Hirschfield and the spoken-word poets D. Blair and Taylor Mali.
The poetry workshops are sold out, but plenty of room remains for the public readings and discussions by the featured poets that take place each afternoon at 2 p.m. and each evening at 8. You don’t even have to attend the gala dinner (at $250 each) to attend Pinsky’s performance.
Tickets for all the public events are $12 general admission, $10 for seniors and $8 for students. All events are at Old School Square in downtown Delray Beach. For schedules, directions and tickets (it’s wise to purchase ahead of time), see http://www.palmbeachpoetryfestival.org/.
The festival begins Tuesday with a 2 p.m. craft talk by Jane Hirschfield and Vijay Seshadri. The kick-off reading, featuring Heather McHugh and Alan Shapiro, follows in the evening at 8. It wraps up Saturday night with a spoken word performance by Blair and Mali, both national slam poetry champions.
“This festival is going to be great,” Coon says. “We have 107 poets coming to take the workshops, including a woman from England here for the second time. We have a participant from British Columbia. It’s a testament to what we’ve accomplished here. And our line-up of featured poets is just terrific.”
Lux, for example, is the festival’s “old stand-by,” Coon says, having been here for every year to date: “People are blown away by his readings.” McHugh, he declares, “is a certified genius, one of the most intelligent, witty poets writing today.”
Pinsky, making his first appearance at the festival, also praises the line-up of poets. “Anyone who knows poetry will see how good it is,” he says. It’s also the kind of event that can prove his idea that Americans already love poetry and do not need to have it sold to them “like soap or toothpaste.”
A big part of the misconception that America doesn’t revere poetry comes from its characteristic entrepreneurial spirit, which has left poetry in particular and culture in general to the mercies of the marketplace. In many European and Asian cultures, Pinsky explains, “there is a social class that considers itself by heredity the curator of art.” In Eastern Europe, he says, two cab drivers in an argument may accuse each other of having no culture.
“It’s no better or worse, but for good or ill we don’t have that traditional snob value for certain kinds of art,” Pinsky says. As a result, it falls to two “industries” to preserve and foster culture: show business and academia.
“I have a lot of respect for shows and film, but the idea poetry is not loved by comparison is misguided,” Pinsky says. “You can’t compare an Elizabeth Bishop poem to a TV show, or even whether it’s on the curriculum. Entertainment and the academy are only part of the culture. They are not the culture.”