Quotes from Robert Pinsky

Poetry is a vocal art for me - but not necessarily a performative one. It might be reading to oneself or recalling some lines by memory.

When I was a teenager, just about the only thing I could do right was play music. In my graduating class, I was certainly not voted 'Most Literary Boy.' I can assure you I was not voted 'Mostly Likely to Succeed.' I was voted 'Most Musical Boy.' And the music led to the poetry.

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

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

There is something cathartic about having absolute loss articulated.

I think my first experience of art, or the joy in making art, was playing the horn at some high-school dance or bar mitzvah or wedding, looking at a roomful of people moving their bodies around in time to what I was doing. There was a piano player, a bass player, a drummer, and my breath making the melody.

For a lot of people, well-meaning teaching has made poetry seem arcane, difficult, a kind of brown-knotting medicine that might be good for you but doesn't taste so good. So I tried to make a collection of poetry that would be fun. And that would bring out poetry as an art, rather than the challenge to say smart things.

I'm far from immune to the American, perhaps historically male, prejudice toward practical and physical competence; I hope I've also considered that prejudice enough to have some distance from it.

The best argument for teaching poetry is to put a three-year-old or a four-year-old and read Dr. Seuss, or Robert Louis Stevenson, and to feel how the child and you are engaging in something that's really basic to the animal, which is passing on in these rhythmic ways, something that came from somewhere.

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.

The heart grows brutal from feeding on fantasies.

Symmetry suggests one myth, or significance: the drinking of writers coming from too much concentration, in solitude, upon feelings expressed for or even about possibly indifferent people, people who are absent or perhaps dead, or unborn; the suicide of psychiatrists coming from too much attention, in most intimate contact, concentrated upon the feelings of people toward whom one may feel indifferent, people who are certain, sooner or later, to die...

But someone I know is dying-- And though one might say glibly, "everyone is," The different pace makes the difference absolute.

The best anthology is the one each reader compiles, personally, according to his or her judgment, pleasure and awe." ~ Robert Pinsky, Singing School, 2013

Afternoon light like pollen. This is my language, not the one I learned.

It can feel heavy with longing, and heavy with longing, in my mind, is preferable to hollow, which one also feels. If I'm heavy with longing, at least I have some idea of what I want.

As to his unique opinions on the poem, Pinsky had this to tell his Lincoln Center audience: "This is not a poem about punishment, but the sin of despair… the agony of feeling defective and being defective… I believe Inferno is the best book ever written about depression.

As the globe revolves Different mixes keep passing into the light Or into the dark, and then back out again: The unexpected, over and over again. Jefferson's July 2 draft blamed George III For violating the liberty of "a People Who never offended him" shipped off to be "Slaves in another hemisphere." For many "Miserable death in transportation thither." On the Fourth of July, that passage was left out. Thither.

Walter Ralegh's "Nature, That Washed Her Hands in Milk" (p. 100):

Poetic language is singularly appropriate for recounting the life of the king who is traditionally accepted as the author of the poetic psalms, some of which are included in the narrative.

I don't like to have a calm, orderly, quiet place to work. I often compose while driving, compose in my head. It is true that I wrote my little book, 'The Sounds of Poetry, A Brief Guide,' almost entirely in airplanes and airport departure lounges.

New Jersey is the most poetic state: close enough to New York to be urban and cosmopolitan, far enough to be desirous and unsure; densely populated, but full of farms and woods, with the most deer of any state.

I have always been thinking about the sounds and shades and aromas of words - fitting them together or disrupting their customary march - more or less every second of my life, waking and sleeping.