Robert Pinsky

I was disappointed in Pinsky's prose writing and storytelling. I am not moved by his poetry, but was pleased with his Favorite Poem Project when he was poet laureate. His road to becoming a poet by his fascination with word sounds (moreso than meanings) is not something I can identify with. I am pleased he gives his family as much credit as he does, but he does not seem to understand their reasons for their attempted assimilation. I enjoyed learning about other known members of different time periods, but many of the details were uninteresting.… (mere)

Growing up in a historic, perpetually declining American resort town, with families of year-round Hispanic and South Asian newcomers beginning to arrive, I could see that nearly everybody feels like an outsider, one way or another.
from Jersey Breaks by Robert Pinsky

In 1998 my husband gifted me The Figured Wheel by Robert Pinsky, Poet Laureate of the United States. But the real impetus for reading Pinsky’s memoir was 1) I am always interested in writers and their stories, and 2) a friend grew up in Long Branch, NJ, and her family married into Pinsky’s family and as a girl she called him ‘cousin’. I could learn about her hometown and about the poet at the same time!

I loved reading about Pinsky’s discovery of literature and poetry, the magic of words. The books that captivated him as a child, the poets in his personal canon. And, I enjoyed his stories about his colorful family, growing up Jewish Orthodox with a grandfather who worked for a famous crime kingpin.

How could the book I loved trick me that way? With so few words? Then, I felt wonder. How was something so real created in such a small space? How had the writer built so much inside my mind? A kind of question I keep trying to answer.
from Jersey Breaks by Robert Pinsky

I understood Pinksy’s marveling on the magic of stories. As a girl, I realized that a book affected my emotions and spurred my imagination. Writers were powerful. I have spent my life trying to understanding how they do it.

“Language-drunk,” he describes himself, drawn from the saxophone to Yeats Sailing to Byzantium, a conversion to poetry; he explains, “But what I try to do in my poems is almost exactly what I wanted to do with the horn.”

The book is far ranging, incorporating Pinksy’s family, teachers, other poets, insight into his own poetry. He explains what drives his poetry, the music of language, the rhythm and drive of words.

One of my favorite chapters addresses the vagaries of fame, how for some, fame is short term and fades while those ignored later rise to acclaim. We are driven to work for excellence, but fame does not always result.

His work with deaf and blind poets was so interesting. The hand sign for poetry is “a fountain-like burst of five fingers opening out from the heart,” he shares.

…Poetry does not merely put particular feeling and ideas into language, it creates an experience that reminds us of something beyond any particular feelings and ideas.
from Jersey Breaks by Robert Pinsky

Granted, I would have gained more from some parts of the book had I read all of his contemporary poets that he discusses. But I found it an interesting read. And, I have taken that gifted book off the shelf to revisit his poems.

I received a free egalley from the publisher through Net Galley. My review is fair and unbiased.… (mere)

I really don't want to rate this book, because this is a collection of poems, and really out of my comfort zone, and if I were to rate it I would give it a low rating, and I don't think it is fair to the author or his works :P I'm not a poetry person, I didn't understand most of the poems I read in this book :P :P :P I think out of the 30 poems in this poetry collection I only (believe I partially) comprehended about five or six. But here's my favorite one (I think it's about mankind and mankind's capabilities. I'm not sure :P ) :

Instrument

It was a little newborn god
That made the first instrument:
Sweet vibration of
Mind, mind, mind
Enclosed in its orbit.

He scooped out a turtle’s shell
And strung it with a rabbit’s guts.
O what a stroke, to invent
Music from an empty case
Strung with bloody filaments—

The wiry rabbitflesh
Plucked or strummed,
Pulled taut across the gutted
Resonant hull of the turtle:
Music from a hollow shell
And the insides of a rabbit.
Sweet conception, sweet
Instrument of mind,

Mind, mind: Mind
Itself a capable vibration
Thrumming from here to there
In the cloven brainflesh
Contained in its helmet of bone—
Like an electronic boxful
Of channels and filaments
Bundled inside its case,
A little musical robot

Dreamed up by the mind
Embedded in the brain
With its blood-warm channels
And its humming network
Of neurons, engendering

The newborn baby god—
As clever and violent
As his own instrument
Of sweet, all-consuming
Imagination, held
By its own vibration:

Mind, mind, mind pulled
Taut in its bony shell,
Dreaming up Heaven and Hell… (mere)