Gulf Music: Poems - Hardcover

Pinsky, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374167494 ISBN 13: 9780374167493

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007

Synopsis

Dollars, dolors. Callings and contrivances. King Zulu. Comus.
Sephardic ju-ju and verses. Voodoo mojo, Special Forces.

Henry formed a group named Professor Longhair and his
Shuffling Hungarians. After so much renunciation

And invention, is this the image of the promised end?
All music haunted by all the music of the dead forever.

Becky haunted forever by Pearl the daughter she abandoned
For love, O try my tra-la-la, ma la belle, mah walla-woe.

―from "Gulf Music"

An improvised, even desperate music, yearning toward knowledge across a gulf, informs Robert Pinsky's first book of poetry since Jersey Rain (2000).

On the large scale of war or the personal scale of family history, in the movements of people and cultures across oceans or between eras, these poems discover connections between things seemingly disparate.

Gulf Music is perhaps the most ambitious, politically impassioned, and inventive book by this major American poet.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Pinsky was Poet Laureate of the United States from 1997 to 2000. Creator and director of the Favorite Poem Project and poetry editor at Slate, he also teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University.

Reviews

I think that Robert Pinsky would agree that every act, event, performance and whooziwhatsis is two things at once: itself and an instruction manual on the class of phenomena to which it belongs. Thus, a badly sung song hurts our ears, but it also describes by negation the way a good song sounds. A wonderful sandwich is a deli full of good sandwiches that haven't been made yet. A leather shoe, a jewelry box, a bit of stained glass: each of these speaks to us of the ways in which it was or wasn't well made.

Pinsky has a thing about things, but then he would say that things have a thing about him. It sounds as though the joint's jumping chez Pinsky: In a Neruda-style ode to pens, he writes that a fat fountain pen wishes the poet were not himself at all but the farm boy who dropped it into a privy, just as "another pen strains to call back/ The characters of the thousand/ World languages dead since 1900,/ Curlicues, fiddleheads, brushstroke/ Splashes and arabesques:/ Footprints of extinct species." Does this sound a little busy for a jarful of inanimate objects? Not if, like Pinsky, you see the world as a "net of being," as he says elsewhere, a "rivalrous web of exterminations/ And propagating shadows."

Besides, with our sieve-like brains, we need all the help we can get. As a kid, says Pinsky in a poem called "Immature Song," he thought a concentration camp was a place where ditzy youngsters were sent to acquire focus. And grownups are no better; these poems are so shot through with references to memory loss that, after a while, it sounds like any other bodily function.

It might even be what makes us human. If you've ever tried to make out the lyrics of the garage rock classic "Louie Louie," then you'll feel right at home in the poem by the same title in which the speaker says, "I have heard of Yale but I never/ Heard of George W. Bush." Come again? In a would-be helpful note at the book's end, the poet says that a friend asked how he could make that claim, to which he answers: "What could I answer? That I liked saying I had not heard of him? That there was a time not long ago when we had not heard of him . . . ? That someday someone, indeed many people, will not have heard of him?" That's the brain for you: Today's leader of the free world is tomorrow's big fat question mark.

Meanwhile, the non-human world is taking care of business. In a deliberately unlovely poem that looks more like a dictionary entry than a lyric, Pinsky points out that the Old English word "thing" originally meant something like "council" or "conference" or "transaction," and in the note he explains that "every artifact, every natural object, with its ghostly wrapping of associations and meanings, begotten and forgotten, is a gathering of minds or contending voices: every thing is an invisible assembly."

But shouldn't a poem do a better job of telling the truth than the pen it's written with? Not necessarily, Pinsky would reply. To go back to the terminology of "Immature Song," a poem might concentrate better than a poet, but that doesn't mean it has more than a human might of the quality of what he calls "Citizenship." Even bad people write poems, as Pinsky says throughout this collection and in various ways.

The world is cruel: No wonder we're always trying to forget it. And poetry can be cruel, too, but if you take poetry away, then cruelty is what remains. Because poetry can be beautiful, too, and nowhere here more than in Pinsky's translation of Akhmatova's "Summer Garden," where the statues remember the Russian poet and she them amid the "hundreds of thousands/ Of footfalls of friends and enemies" and the "white nights of those years whisper/ About some love grand and mysterious," and everything glows like jewels lighted by an unknown source. This is one of those poems you're afraid to look at again for fear it might be less beautiful than you thought.

Of all the things that populate the world, then, both human and non-, a poem has the greatest potential to succeed or fail, which is why Pinsky can comfortably offer a piece called "Poems with Lines in Any Order" or observe, again in "Immature Song," that poems are adolescents, "confused, awkward, self-preoccupied, vaguely// Rebellious in a way that lacks practical focus, moving without/ Discipline from thing to thing." That may sound disrespectful coming from someone who was poet laureate of the United States from 1997 to 2000 (and Book World's current Poet's Choice columnist), but the best poets take neither themselves nor their work too seriously. Pinsky has been much praised -- in reviews of his work, he comes across as something just short of a divinity -- but in this book, he appears as an honest guildsman, his apron smudged by his labors, his work table piled up with the objects of his making.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Starred Review. The gulf in the title of Pinsky's seventh collection is both the large southern body of water that has been the site of so much weather-related misery, and the unavoidable distances between an author's thoughts and feelings and his expression. Poems from the first section frequently butt up against subjects too large for speech, and break down into music and mystery. The title poem begins with a devastating hurricane in Galveston in 1900 and reaches after fragments and song to recall what was lost: O try my tra-la-la, ma la belle, mah wallah-woe. Another poem describes the ecstasy of forgetting, in which an enraptured audience at once hears and doesn't hear what it's being told. Pinsky (Jersey Rain) describes solid things in the second section, though he can't help noting that thing itself first meant to confer or address. Of a camera, he writes, The flash of your hammer/ Fashions the shelter. Signs of Pinsky's craftsmanship abound. Perhaps most laudable is that Pinsky—a former Poet Laureate and one of America's best-known poets—is not above self-criticism: in writing about peace, his last thought compares his own mind to a monkey who fires his shit in handfuls from the cage. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374167494
• ISBN 13: 9780374167493
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96