Poetry And The World - Softcover

Pinsky, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 088001217X ISBN 13: 9780880012171

Publisher: Ecco, 1992

Synopsis

A collection of sharp, entertaining, and informative essays by poet Robert Pinsky, Poetry and the World is a passionate inquiry into poetry's place in the modem world. Combining the arts of criticism and autobiography, Pinsky writes about poets as diverse as Walt VVhitman and Philip Freneau, Marianne Moore and Frank O'Hara, about a visit to Poland during the early days of Solidarity, and his own childhood in a seedy New Jersey resort town. The scope and diversity of these essays confirm Pinsky's stature as not only one of our best poets, but as a perceptive and engaging critic as well.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Pinsky was born on October 20, 1940 in Long Branch, New Jersey. He received a B.A. from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and earned both an M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from Stanford University, where he was a Stegner Fellow in creative writing, and studied under the poet and critic Yvor Winters .

He is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Gulf Music: Poems; Jersey Rain (2000); The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 (1996), which received the 1997 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and was a Pulitzer Prize nominee; The Want Bone (1990); History of My Heart (1984); An Explanation of America (1980); and Sadness and Happiness (1975).

He is also the author of several prose titles, including The Life of David; Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry (2002); The Sounds of Poetry (1998), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Poetry and the World (1988); and The Situation of Poetry (1977). In 1985 he also released a computerized novel, Mindwheel.

Pinsky has published two acclaimed works of traslation: The Inferno of Dante (1994), which was a Book-of-the-Month-Club Editor's Choice, and received both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award ; and The Separate Notebooks by Czeslaw Milosz (with Renata Gorczynski and Robert Hass ).

About his work, the poet Louise Glück has said, "Robert Pinsky has what I think Shakespeare must have had: dexterity combined with worldliness, the magician's dazzling quickness fused with subtle intelligence, a taste for tasks and assignments to which he devises ingenious solutions."

From 1997 to 2000, he served as the United States Poet Laureate and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. During that time, he founded the Favorite Poem Project, a program dedicated to celebrating, documenting and encouraging poetry's role in Americans' lives.

In 1999, he co-edited Americans' Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology with Maggie Dietz. Other anthologies he has edited include An Invitation to Poetry (W. W. Norton & Company, 2004); Poems to Read (2002); and Handbook of Heartbreak (1998).

His honors include an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, both the William Carlos Williams Award and the Shelley Memorial prize from the Poetry Society of America, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. He is currently poetry editor of the weekly Internet magazine Slate .

Pinsky has taught at both Wellesley College and the University of California, Berkeley, and currently teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

From Publishers Weekly

How poets connect with the outer world is the broad theme that links these searching essays and reviews by Pinsky, a poet ( History of My Heart ) and critic. He admires William Carlos Williams, who had one foot in the daily life of working-class America, the foot in the avant-garde, and whose syncopated poems voice an implied critique of American culture. Pinsky puts his finger on the "sociable presence" in Marianne Moore's poems, which make them "a profound moral force." He unmasks Philip Larkin, who too often affects the persona of a cheerfully philistine reactionary. Other poets whose stance vis-a-vis the world infused their art include American Revolutionary balladeer Philip Freneau, cosmopolite George Oppen, Whitman, Eliot and Edward Arlington Robinsonwho typifies the tragic fate of the sensitive individual in a provincial community. In sinuous, modulated prose, Pinsky gets deep inside his subjects' creative processes.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Ecco
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 088001217X
• ISBN 13: 9780880012171
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208