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Robert Pinsky Biography

Robert Pinsky (born October 20, 1940) is 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.

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Robert Pinsky Quotes

If a poem is written well, it was written with the poet's voice and for a voice. Reading a poem silently instead of saying a poem is like the difference between staring at sheet music and actually humming or playing the music on an instrument.

Differences, Music, Poem, Reading, Voice

Even in the scorched and frozen world of the dead after the holocaust The wheel as it turns goes on accreting ornaments.

Accreting, Death, Frozen, Holocaust, Ornaments, Wheel

The heart grows brutal feeding on fantasies.

Fantasy, Feeding, Grows, Heart

Autobiography is a genre notorious for falsehood.

Autobiography, Falsehood, Genre, Notorious

In jazz, as in poetry, there is always that play between what’s regular and what’s wild. That has always appealed to me.

Jazz, Play, Whats, Wild

Poetry's medium is not merely light as air, it is air: vital and deep as ordinary breath.

Air, Breath, Deep, Light, Merely, Ordinary

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.

Emotional, Heart, Hum, Imagination, Intellectual, Memorable

Sometimes the ideas that mean the most to you will feel true long before you can quite formulate them or justify them.

Formulate, Ideas, Justify, Long, Mean, Quite

Poetry is the most bodily of the arts.

Art, Arts, Bodily, Poetry, Poetry Is

Art will not solve your problems. It will not enable you to live merrily.

Art, Problem, Solve, Live, Merrily

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.

Assemblage, Children, Glue, Refrigerator, Strong

My poems - like my family life, my life with friends, my teaching - these things express who I am. I don't feel any extra responsibilities or relishes or necessary evils in them. They are part of who I am, with all of those customary desires and doubts, purposes and confusions that come along with being a particular person.

Teaching, Responsibility, Who I Am, Evils, Responsibilities, Family

When I had no roof I made audacity my roof.

Audacity, Made, Roof

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.

Couple, Reading, Mean, Together, Pauses

If what you want to do is make good art, decide whats good and try to imitate it.

Art, Decide, Good, Trying, Want

The poetry I love is written with someone's voice and I believe its proper culmination is to be read with someone's voice. And the human voice in that sense is not electronically reproduced or amplified.

Believe, Love Is, Poetry, Reproduced, Sense, Voice

My devils and angels, fears and hopes, insights and stupidities, loves and loathings, are what they are. I don't edit them out so much as try to make them interesting - whether I am talking to you, or writing a poem, or joking with my kids, or speaking on television.

Angel, Edit, Kids, Poem, Writing

Poetry’s medium is the individual chest and throat and mouth of whoever undertakes to say the poem.

Mouths, Individual, Mediums, Say, Poem, Undertakes

The medium of poetry is not words, the medium of poetry is not lines-it is the motion of air inside the human body, coming out through the chest and the voice box and through the mouth to shape sounds that have meaning. It's bodily.

Air, Human, Motion, Sound, Voice

Deciding to remember, and what to remember, is how we decide who we are.

Decide, Deciding, Identity, Memories, Remember, Who We Are

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