Robert Pinsky
Robert Pinsky
Robert Pinskyis an American poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator. From 1997 to 2000, he served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Pinsky is the author of nineteen books, most of which are collections of his poetry. His published work also includes critically acclaimed translations, including The Inferno of Dante Alighieri and The Separate Notebooks by Czesław Miłosz. He teaches at Boston University...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth20 October 1940
CityLong Branch, NJ
CountryUnited States of America
Art will not solve your problems. It will not enable you to live merrily.
An underestimated element in poetry, that reading aloud makes clear, is the pause. I mean especially the force of a pause or a couple of pauses close together, contrasted with a longer unit of grammar.
If what you want to do is make good art, decide whats good and try to imitate it.
Sometimes the ideas that mean the most to you will feel true long before you can quite formulate them or justify them.
The heart grows brutal feeding on fantasies.
Deciding to remember, and what to remember, is how we decide who we are.
Whatever makes a child want to glue macaroni on a paper plate and paint the assemblage and see it on the refrigerator - that has always been strong in me.
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.
When I had no roof I made audacity my roof.
Poetry's medium is not merely light as air, it is air: vital and deep as ordinary breath.