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In late-1940s Long Branch, a historic but run-down Jersey Shore resort town, in a neighbourhood of Italian, Black and Jewish families, Robert Pinsky began his unlikely journey to becoming a poet. Descended from a bootlegger grandfather, an athletic father, and a rebellious tomboy mother, Pinsky was an unruly but articulate student whose obsession with the rhythms and melodies of speech inspired him to write. Pinsky traces the roots of his poetry, with its wide and fearless range, back to the voices of his neighbourhood, to music and a distinctly American tradition of improvisation, with influences including Mark Twain and Ray Charles, Marianne Moore and Mel Brooks, Emily Dickinson and Sid Caesar, Dante Alighieri and the Orthodox Jewish liturgy. He reflects on how writing poetry helped him make sense of life’s challenges, such as his mother’s traumatic brain injury, and on his notable public presence, including an unprecedented three terms as United States poet laureate. Candid, engaging and wry, Jersey Breaks offers an intimate self-portrait and a unique poetic understanding of American culture.
In late-1940s Long Branch, an historic but run-down Jersey Shore resort town, in a neighbourhood of Italian, Black and Jewish families, Robert Pinsky began his unlikely journey to becoming a poet. Descended from a bootlegger grandfather, an athletic father and a rebellious tomboy mother, Pinsky was an unruly but articulate high-school C-student whose obsession with the rhythms and melodies of speech inspired him to write. Pinsky traces the roots of his poetry, with its wide and fearless range, back to the voices of his neighbourhood, to music and a distinctly American tradition of improvisation, with influences including Mark Twain and Ray Charles, Marianne Moore and Mel Brooks, Emily Dickinson and Sid Caesar, Dante Alighieri and the Orthodox Jewish liturgy. Jersey Breaks offers a candid self-portrait and, underlying Pinsky's notable public presence and unprecedented three terms as poet laureate of the United States, a unique poetic understanding of American culture.
Quick, joyful, and playfully astringent, with surprising comparisons and examples, this collection takes an unconventional approach to the art of poetry. Instead of rules, theories, or recipes, Singing School emphasizes ways to learn from great work: studying magnificent, monumentally enduring poems and how they are made in terms borrowed from the singing school of William Butler Yeats s Sailing to Byzantium. Robert Pinsky s headnotes for each of the 80 poems and his brief introductions to each section take a writer s view of specific works: William Carlos Williams s Fine Work with Pitch and Copper for intense verbal music; Emily Dickinson s Because I Could Not Stop for Death for wild imagination in matter-of-fact language; Robert Southwell s The Burning Babe for surrealist aplomb; Wallace Stevens s The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm for subtlety in meter. Included are poems by Aphra Behn, Allen Ginsberg, George Herbert, John Keats, Mina Loy, Thomas Nashe, and many other master poets. This anthology respects poetry s mysteries in two senses of the word: techniques of craft and strokes of the inexplicable."
This text gathers together all Robert Pinsky's poetry, including 21 new poems. The verse essay "An Explanation of America" (Carcarnet, 1980) remains at the heart of this work. The book also includes "Ginza Samba", a history of the saxophone, and "Impossible to Tell", a jazz-like poem that combines elegy with the Japanese custom of linking-poems and the American tradition of ethnic jokes. "Sadness and Happiness" (1975), "History of My Heart" (1984) and "The Want Bone" (1990). Also included are some of Pinsky's translations of Czeslaw Milosz, Paul Celan and others, and the last canto of his version of Dante's "Inferno" (1994).
This widely praised version of Dante's masterpiece, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award of the Academy of American Poets, is more idiomatic and approachable than its many predecessors. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Pinsky employs slant rhyme and near rhyme to preserve Dante's terza rima form without distorting the flow of English idiom. The result is a clear and vigorous translation that is also unique, student-friendly, and faithful to the original: "A brilliant success," as Bernard Knox wrote in The New York Review of Books.
The Poet Laureate's clear and entertaining account of how poetry works.
This new paperback edition of Henry D. Thoreau's compelling account of Cape Cod contains the complete, definitive text of the original. Introduced by American poet and literary critic Robert Pinsky--himself a resident of Cape Cod--this volume contains some of Thoreau's most beautiful writings. In the plants, animals, topography, weather, and people of Cape Cod, Thoreau finds "another world" Encounters with the ocean dominate this book, from the fatal shipwreck of the opening chapter to his later reflections on the Pilgrims' landing and reconnaissance. Along the way, Thoreau relates the experiences of fishermen and oystermen, farmers and salvagers, lighthouse-keepers and ship captains, as well as his own intense confrontations with the sea as he travels the land's outermost margins. Chronicles of exploration, settlement, and survival on the Cape lead Thoreau to reconceive the history of New England--and to recognize the parochialism of history itself.
From "An Explanation of America" Inexhaustible, delicate, as if Empty actual is too bright, Later, how quiet the house is: Piercing from the trees; Ranged on a table; the brain The hands feeding it paper I persist a while, finish the recognition Witnessing the blue gulf of the air."
In this book Robert Pinsky writes about contemporary poetry as it reflects its modernist and Romantic past. He isolates certain persistent ideas about poetry's situation relative to life and focuses on the conflict the poet faces between the nature of words and poetic forms on one side, and the nature of experience on the other. The author ranges for his often surprising examples from Keats to the great modernists such as Stevens and Williams, to the contents of recent magazines. He considers work by Ammons, Ashbery, Bogan, Ginsberg, Lowell, Merwin, O'Hara, and younger writers, offering judgments and enthusiasms from a viewpoint that is consistent but unstereotyped. Like his poetry, Robert Pinsky's criticism joins the traditional and the innovative in ways that are thoughtful and unmistakably his own. His book is a bold essay on the contemporary situation in poetry, on the dazzling achievements of modernism, and on the nature or "situation" of poetry itself.
From "Sadness and Happiness: Poems by Robert Pinsky" Against weather, and the random Soul, one's life is one's enemy. Lavishing their brilliant strokes Going even in the woods when not
The place of poetry in modern democracy is no place, according to conventional wisdom. The poet, we hear, is a casualty of mass entertainment and prosaic public culture, banished to the artistic sidelines to compose variations on insipid themes for a dwindling audience. Robert Pinsky, however, argues that this gloomy diagnosis is as wrongheaded as it is familiar. Pinsky, whose remarkable career as a poet itself undermines the view, writes that to portray poetry and democracy as enemies is to radically misconstrue both. The voice of poetry, he shows, resonates with profound themes at the very heart of democratic culture. There is no one in America better to write on this topic. One of the country's most accomplished poets, Robert Pinsky served an unprecedented two terms as America's Poet Laureate (1997-2000) and led the immensely popular multimedia Favorite Poem Project, which invited Americans to submit and read aloud their favorite poems. Pinsky draws on his experiences and on characteristically sharp and elegant observations of individual poems to argue that expecting poetry to compete with show business is to mistake its greatest democratic strength--its intimate, human scale--as a weakness. As an expression of individual voice, a poem implicitly allies itself with ideas about individual dignity that are democracy's bedrock, far more than is mass participation. Yet poems also summon up communal life.. Even the most inward-looking work imagines a reader. And in their rhythms and cadences poems carry in their very bones the illusion and dynamic of call and response. Poetry, Pinsky writes, cannot help but mediate between the inner consciousness of the individual reader and the outer world of other people. As part of the entertainment industry, he concludes, poetry will always be small and overlooked. As an art--and one that is inescapably democratic--it is massive and fundamental.
Bilingual Edition English / Spanish "Robert Pinsky in Spanish is at once a fantastic desire and a human feat. The process of re-presenting any poet's words in another language and culture entails a dual venture, both passionate and miraculous in nature. I invite you to enjoy these poems; they combine in a unique and cosmopolitan manner the mischiefs, sonic and linguistic licenses, the unexpected movement and the modes of understanding and expression, and they situate us in our universe of peace and violence, justice and injustice, faith and beauty, life and death, in the simple complexity of who we were, are now, and should be as individuals and as a community." -Luis Alberto Ambroggio "It is refreshing to find a poet who is intellectually interesting and technically first-rate. Robert Pinsky belongs to that rarest category of talents, a poet-critic." -Robert Lowell
C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933) lived in relative obscurity in Alexandria, and a collected edition of his poems was not published until after his death. Now, however, he is regarded as the most important figure in twentieth-century Greek poetry, and his poems are considered among the most powerful in modern European literature. This revised bilingual edition of "Collected Poems" offers the reader the original Greek texts facing what are now recognized as the standard English translations of Cavafy's poetry. It is this translation that best captures the poet's mixture of formal and idiomatic language and that preserves the immediacy of his increasingly frank treatment of homosexual eroticism, his brilliant re-creation of history, and his astute political ironies. This new bilingual edition also features the notes of editor George Savidis and a new foreword by Robert Pinsky.
"Dollars, dolors. Callings and contrivances. King Zulu.
Comus.
"History of My Heart," winner of the William Carlos Williams Prize,
first appeared in 1984. In "The New Republic," J.D. McClatchy
called it "one of the best books of the past decade." It is
Pinsky's third volume of poems--and an ideal introduction to the
work of a vital and original contemporary American poet.
This widely praised version of Dante's masterpiece, which won the
Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Harold Morton Landon
Translation Award of the Academy of American Poets, is more
idiomatic and approachable than its many predecessors. Former U.S.
Poet Laureate Pinsky employs slant rhyme and near rhyme to preserve
Dante's "terza rima" form without distorting the flow of English
idiom. The result is a clear and vigorous translation that is also
unique, student-friendly, and faithful to the original: "A
brilliant success," as Bernard Knox wrote in "The New York Review
of Books."
"The Figured Wheel" fully collects the first four books of poetry,
as well as twenty-one new poems, by Robert Pinsky, the former U.S.
Poet Laureate.
Sculpture has the longest memory of the arts: from the Paleolithic era we find stone carvings and clay figures embedded with human longing. And poets have long been fascinated by the idea of eternity embodied by the monumental temples and fragmented statues of ancient civilizations. From Keats's Grecian urn and Shelley's 'Ozymandias' to contemporary verse about Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Janet Echelman's windborne hovering nets, the pieces in this collection convert the physical materials of the plastic arts - clay, wood, glass, marble, granite, bronze - into lapidary lines of poetry. Whether the sculptures celebrated here commemorate love or war, objects or apparitions, forms human or divine, they have called forth evocative responses from a wide range of poets, including Homer, Ovid, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Rilke, Dickinson, Yeats, Auden and Plath. A compendium of dazzling examples of one art form reflecting on another, Poems About Sculpture is a treat for art lovers.
"Since the death of Robert Lowell in 1977, no single figure has dominated American poetry the way that Lowell, or before him Eliot, once did . . . But among the many writers who have come of age in our fin de si cle, none have succeeded more completely as poet, critic, and translator than Robert Pinsky." --James Longenbach, The Nation With all the generosity and mastery we have come to expect from our three-time Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky has written a bold, lyrical meditation on identity and culture as hybrid and fluid, violent as well as creative: the enigmatic, maybe universal, condition of the foundling. At the Foundling Hospital considers the foundling soul: its need to be adopted, and its need to be adaptive. These poems reimagine identity on the scale of one life or of human history: from "the emanation of a dead star still alive" to the "pinhole iris of your mortal eye." What is a particular person? How unique? What is anyone born as? Born with? Born into? The poems of Robert Pinsky's At the Foundling Hospital engage personality and culture as improvised from loss: a creative effort so pervasive it can be invisible.
Intense verbal music with a jazz feeling; invention against the grain of expectation; intelligence racing among materials with the variety of a busy street--these have been the qualities of Robert Pinsky's work since his first book, "Sadness and Happiness "(1975), celebrated for setting a new direction in American poetry. At that time, responding to a question about that book, Pinsky said: "I would like to write a poetry which could contain every kind of thing, while keeping all the excitement of poetry." That ambition was realized in a new way with each of his books, including the book-length personal monologue "An Explanation of America"; the transformed autobiography of "History of My Heart"; the bestselling translation "The Inferno of Dante"; and, most recently, the savage, inventive "Gulf Music." This volume contains a selection of poems from Pinsky's career to demonstrate that variety and renewal with fresh clarity.
Cathartic, refreshing new work by the American favorite
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