WENDY LESSER
I was thinking there are really two notions of the poetic role. A much older one, from the Homeric through Renaissance at least and beyond that into the eighteenth century, of the poet as public figure expressing public concerns, for the most part, of representing public people in some way, or describing public people. Then there’s the Romantic notion, which carries through heavily to our time, of the private, the personal, and everything coming out of the interior of the poet’s life. Normally these are seen as two conflicting parts, or roles, for the poet, but they seem to be blended in your work. I wanted to ask you if you could comment on this blending. In your life, is there a conflict between the public poet, the Poet Laureate, the person who has to do the public poems and be out there on television, and the man who has to sit in the room and write the poems?
ROBERT PINSKY
I was not a successful teenager. I was not the kind of kid who would be elected class president or go to Harvard. I was put into the Dumb Class in the eighth grade and I graduated from high school in the lower third of my class. Playing music probably kept me from falling apart completely. So I have a bit of the failure’s scorn for official, public things like Poet Laureate. On that old level, it’s all kind of stupid to me: titles, prizes, Professor, Ph.D. … I have the failure’s defensive skepticism and scorn towards such things that are officially designated as important. I don’t think Harvard is more important than a community college. I don’t take Poet Laureate as—
WENDY LESSER
Harvard is less public than a community college.
ROBERT PINSKY
Yes. Certainly schools of that category are less important to our society than community colleges.
Now, on the other hand, I’m very proud of the Favorite Poem Project, with the videos at favoritepoem.org, and I do understand that it was enabled by the title Poet Laureate. Furthermore, I’ve raised a family, I have children and grandchildren. I appreciate what a nice life I have, and I know that this partly involves acquiescence to certain basic worldly patterns … patterns that I guess turn out to be more forgiving as you get older, if you’re a certain kind of person.
When Rilke talks about angels—and whether we’ll hear them or not—he may seem to epitomize one of the kinds of poet you’re talking about, the inwardness of German Romanticism. But Rilke acknowledges that he is a product of history all the time. He makes a point about this in his language, as much as Paul Celan, who also acknowledges history, in a quite different way. It was impossible for Paul Celan not to write about the Holocaust, where his parents perished—and in writing in one of the many languages he knew growing up. German was the language of culture and art. Celan was compelled to write in it, though he tried to do that in a way that made German itself writhe, to reflect his own agony, so the language seems to be coming apart.
The public/interior distinction—if we look at the poets we admire the most and elevate, like Dante, well, he embodies breaking down of that distinction. In his greatest work, Dante’s cosmology is tied up with, and responds to, his personal grudges. In the first third of The Inferno he spends energy trying to stop himself from being so angry at the football coach in the tenth grade. And he’s still trying to get back at him, though he knows it’s idiotic that he doesn’t get beyond it. The personal, you know, it’s all got to do with a crush on an unattainable girl. And Dante’s classical learning, Christian learning, cosmology, politics, it’s all tied up completely with who he is in particular. The girl, the coach. He also knows he’s a product of history. All of us here have histories, and we didn’t invent those.
WENDY LESSER
Now, the good thing about the passing of time since a work was written is that we don’t need to know who that football coach was. In other words, you can read the Dante passages without knowing the source of the particular grudge, and just feel the strength of it and the anger.
ROBERT PINSKY
Yes! He’s such a good writer that you know exactly what it is and understand, although we have footnotes and an immense amount of scholarship. That’s useful. We’re glad it’s there. But I agree, the way he writes it you don’t have to know a lot about Branca d’Oria. He says, wait a second, Branca’s not dead, I’ve seen him: he wears pants and eats. And the devil explains, well, some souls are so corrupt and evil that they come down here before they die—a devil is driving Branca’s body around, in the world above.
WENDY LESSER
Since you raised Dante, I’d like to ask you about your work as a translator. You did these very good translations of Dante and Milosz and some of the Hebrew poets you’ve decided to write through or with, but what does it do for you to take on their voices or language?
ROBERT PINSKY
I’m not sure I know the answer. To an extent, it just eases one of the difficult parts of writing, which is knowing what to say next. And translation, the way I do it, is exactly like writing a poem. There is no difference. It is the same imagination process, and the same kind of verbal, audible process … except you don’t have to think about what to say next. In some ways translation’s just a relatively easy way to be writing poetry.
But that’s a little superficial, because (among other things) translation is also the best form of reading. Just think about those people in the Renaissance, like Sir Philip Sidney and his sister Mary. Literary theory; creative writing; history of literature—all of these things were learned by translation. The little schoolkids, I guess they’d get up and do prayers before dawn and then they’d translate Greek hexameters into Latin elegiac couplets. The whole education was based on translation and they grew up to love learning. (Despite the brutality, in a way, of the learning process.) And they produced great literature. So translation—what does it do for one?—it is the highest form of study.
WENDY LESSER
I was looking at your book Selected Poems, and realized it’s organized in reverse chronological order. Why? Normal selection goes from oldest to newest.
ROBERT PINSKY
When I started publishing my poetry I felt I was going very much against the prevailing grain, and part of that was writing long poems. An Explanation of America, my second book, is a book-length poem. Sadness and Happiness, my first book, contains the quite long title poem. Also, at the end of Sadness and Happiness there’s another long poem called “Essay on Psychiatrists.” Those titles—“an explanation of”; the two common abstractions of “sadness and happiness” and “essay on” psychiatrists—were expressing something rebellious, but also something in me. I wanted to feel free to talk. And to talk not as “the speaker,” but as Robert Pinsky. The name on the front cover of the book, that’s who was saying the poems.
So: I don’t go back on that, but with Selected Poems I thought about people who might be new to my work, someone who might be eighteen or twenty-one or twenty-four years old, maybe just picking it up in a bookstore. I don’t want to say to that person, “You now must read a very long poem,” or necessarily excerpt those early, expansive poems. So the reverse chronological order was a practical matter: a way to have poems that looked rather like poems early on in the book. It’s poetry, so I want it to look like what a new reader might think poetry would look like. Then the first poem of the book is called “Rhyme.” A favorable reviewer said, “It’s just like Robert Pinsky to write a poem called ‘Rhyme’ that does not rhyme.” But, in fact, it does, in its way.
WENDY LESSER
When you published your earliest book you were married to an English teacher, and now to a psychoanalyst. They are the same person, but still …
ROBERT PINSKY
Yes, Wendy—we hasten to say it’s the same woman!
WENDY LESSER
I was wondering if this transformation was in any way reflected in your poetry. Then in Selected Poems I found that last poem—which chronologically is really the first—“Essay on Psychiatrists.” There’s a lot of what one might call Freudian digging in those early poems.
ROBERT PINSKY
The present Mrs. Pinsky—Doctor Pinsky—to whom I have been married for fifty years, was just driven to become a mental health professional … [laughter] She is a very good reader and is still one of the three or four people I depend upon to read drafts of my poems.
She was an English teacher in the eighth/ninth grade of independent schools, and then started a new intellectual endeavor, based on reading she’d been doing for years. I think that did give me new ideas that were coming into my life, by listening to her conversation.
WENDY LESSER
Who is really worth reading among poets and prose writers? Let’s limit it to those among the dead.
ROBERT PINSKY
Good! An ambitious writer who simply reads his/her contemporaries and his/her teacher’s generation is failing to get a leg up. You’re falling back. If you want to do something great, find those who the super-talented aren’t reading. It’s important to read things you think are magnificent and that are very remote—other languages far from you, as well as distant in time—but I shouldn’t choose the reading for you. You should feel compelled to look around and find things for yourself. William Butler Yeats says there’s no singing school but studying monuments of singing’s magnificence. The young poet should find things to read the way an ambitious musician listens to things, or an ambitious actor watches plays and films. It should be something you think is monumentally magnificent and it shouldn’t be something that Wendy Lesser or Robert Pinsky chooses. You must choose, and Yeats doesn’t say “be familiar with” or “look at.” He says “studying monuments of its own magnificence.”
I give this assignment to anyone who takes a poetry course with me, writing or reading: They have to type up an anthology of things that they think are magnificent. Examples that they would stand behind. You know, when you type something you’re memorizing it three words at a time. So if nothing else, you’re reading something you admire slowly. And you’re being forced to choose, and choosing, like the physical typing and memorizing, is … good for you. It’s nutritious! (And it tastes good.)
WENDY LESSER
You talked about your wife being one of your good readers, and I also know that you have a circle that includes Louise Glück and Frank Bidart and maybe others. Can you talk a little bit about what it’s like to write poetry in that situation, where you come up with something and then other people give you their two cents’ worth, or maybe more than two cents’ worth?
ROBERT PINSKY
It’s a traditional thing among poets. If anyone here knows both fiction writers and poets … Fiction is an industrial revolution product. Picture those pages, perfectly symmetrical rectangles. A certain kind of machine produces that rectangle and binds it. When we reproduce it electronically we still have a justified right and left margin, to market. Poetry is older and more aristocratic, so that the circle of Philip Sidney and his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, and their poet friends like Fulke Greville, they gathered at leisure and talked about one another’s verses and conferred about them. They didn’t make a big distinction between translation and composition. Originality was not in your ideas, but in your style. So whether you were imitating a poem, or translating, or you felt free to combine translating with adapting, changing it a bit—that was not a big distinction for them. That also was aristocratic—nobody was doing anything as vulgar as publishing their work, selling it. The idea was, you were simply doing something beautiful. So I’m not cheating Catullus or Statius. If I take Statius’s poem on sleep and it’s a fifteen-line poem and I turn it into a sonnet, it’s just amusing to me to do it and I’ll show it to my friends and see if they’re amused by it. It’s not middle-class property.
Now, fiction writers are different from that. They tend to say, “I’ll show it to you when it’s finished.” It’s “mine”—property. It’s, “I’ll show my novel to my agent so he can pitch it for selling to my publisher.” Poets are more likely to say, “What do you think of this? I’m working on it.” For fiction writers, it tends to be less sociable, more proprietary. That, too, to go back to our first topic—that, too, has a history.
We all have emails now. I live near Frank and Louise, but I don’t live near Charlie Williams, and so I can email him a draft of my poem, continuing poetry’s long history of being somewhat social and collaborative in a way that other forms of composition may not be. As with ancient Chinese poets. Poets are not like the characters in Balzac’s Lost Illusions. In that novel, the two main characters are the young poet Lucien and his friend, whose name I forget, who is literally in the paper business. They both are, and Lucien as I remember abandons poetry and becomes a journalist.
Speaking of great novels about writers in middle-class settings, I’d like to add that I think everyone here should read Ulysses. You don’t have to read it straight through: just read it dipping in here and there, like a book of poems. And everyone should own a copy of the John Williams anthology of Renaissance poetry. And read William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain.
WENDY LESSER
It’s so perverse of you to answer my last question, instead of this one.
ROBERT PINSKY
That’s me all over.
QUESTIONS FROM THE AUDIENCE
What would you like to translate next, if anything?
ROBERT PINSKY
I don’t know. I never planned to do The Inferno. Somebody suggested it to me and then I got going on it. I don’t know if I ever will translate again. There was a time people in my category in high school were not allowed to take the high-class language, French, so we were confined to take the language of Cervantes: we took Spanish. There was a time when I was not bad in Spanish, so if it were translating anything, then I’d probably look around in language I used to know a little bit. I knew Spanish in a way that I’m not so hot in Italian or Hebrew or Polish. If I were going to guess, the next thing would be Spanish, where I can actually at least fake it if you hum a few bars for me.
What role does music play in your work?
ROBERT PINSKY
Music informs my writing entirely. It’s what I spend most of my energy on. I think about music the most, and it really goes back to early childhood. I remember as a child, maybe even in my crib, I was tapping out the rhythm of sentences on the headboard. And thinking about the melody of sentences as well, the pitches. Every sentence has its melody.
In those difficult years of high school I was the music man. I was maybe afraid of trying to do something verbal. I don’t know what the problem was, with school, but there was a problem. And yet I was always sort of a good talker. And I read a lot. Music was less my natural gift, but my band was the one that played the school’s rock and roll dances. In the popularity poll, I was voted Most Musical Boy.
Pianist Lawrence Hobgood and I recently made our second “PoemJazz” CD, House Hour. I read my poems and try to use the sentences as melodic phrases, in conversation with Laurence’s beautiful, inventive playing.
WENDY LESSER
Your reference to your crib made me remember that in one of your poems, you describe climbing down out of your crib and going into your parents’ room. Do you actually remember being in your crib?
ROBERT PINSKY
Nobody is going to believe me, but yes, I do.
WENDY LESSER
How long did they keep you there?
ROBERT PINSKY
I was twenty-eight.
WENDY LESSER
Robert Duncan used to say he could remember being six months old, but I didn’t ever believe him.
ROBERT PINSKY
I don’t know how old you are when you get out of your crib for the first time, but I woke up and figured out a way to climb out, almost falling out, and I went into their bedroom, where they were still sleeping. It must have been a weekend. I can remember them laughing, it was all very nice, and I guess this is all very Freudian—they picked me up and put me in the bed. We were all three of us laughing. I climbed out by myself and it was, “Look at that!” A moment of tremendous happiness. Did I make it up? I don’t think so, but I can’t prove it to you.
I wanted to hear your thoughts about the literary canon.
ROBERT PINSKY
I don’t believe in “the” canon, like an academic’s list. Excellence is real, and the body of it is always evolving, always changing. The important thing is to find something you love. Each reader. Also, each teacher. My answer, if a teacher asks, “What should I teach?”: something you love. Kids can smell it, if you don’t really like something “canonical” but you’re trying to pretend you do. It doesn’t matter how arcane or difficult a work is—if you love it, share it. You might think, “Oh, it’s a class of boys, so let’s find a poem about sports.” No. If what touches you is a poem about death, you should read that to the boys. And expect them to respect it, as you respect them by giving it to them.
What would you say to the young poet, in terms of how they should structure their lives?
ROBERT PINSKY
My advice: read a lot, notice a lot. Read what?—everybody is different, so as with the canon, I don’t like making prescriptions. Ezra Pound recommends translation for young poets, because it keeps the subject from wobbling around: you have to stick to the original subject.
One is distracted by many things as a teenager—almost as many as at my age. I think that all of us crave something difficult: that’s why video games are so popular. And that’s why people who become very successful in this country—we likely find them walking through the greensward with little sticks pushing a little white ball around. As an animal we crave difficulty—even more than pleasure, I think. Contrary to the travel industry, what we really want most is a nice juicy difficulty to engage—to engage, not even to solve, necessarily. For a long time in my life, music was the best difficulty I had. It was infinitely difficult. No one ever is perfect at it. The greatest players practice, and it’s objective in a certain way: whether you’re keeping time or not, your intonation is there or not. It resembles the difficulties of a game, but it’s more subtle and has more to do with feeling. Poetry, the same. What one hopes to provide for children, for the young, is a worthy difficulty. Difficulties they can relish, and that will also be productive for the rest of us. Easier said than done. And competence: difficulty and its reflection, competence.
WENDY LESSER
Along the lines of that question, somebody once said to me as a writer, beware of your strengths. I found that useful advice, actually. I wondered if you agree with that.
ROBERT PINSKY
My first response to “beware of your strengths” is, yes—don’t be complacent in what you can do. Mastery is … I’m wondering how much to plagiarize the essay I haven’t written, that I have to write about poetry, and I was thinking about forms of deprecation. You master something and unless you’re stretching to make yourself get better you start using your settled mastery to deprecate things. In poetry I can think of two extremes of that. At one extreme the genteel, jovial, amusing chum, smirking: “I know that nothing is very serious or important.” That tone. And the opposite is surprisingly similar, is equally glib or knowing, as well as “experimental”: “I know language can’t do anything, language is completely useless and incompetent, it’s illusory, it’s just a closed system.” In contrast, if I think about the high modernists who inspired me when I was a kid—you know, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Yeats’s late poetry, Cather, Faulkner, Williams. The aspiration. It’s the opposite of deprecation. It’s daringly grand, very large. When I think about “beware of what you’re good at” I think of urgent aspiration—feeling yourself get further, struggling with something you haven’t done yet … because the reality, the subject matter, is important.