Robert Pinsky Comes to Town

Robert Pinsky, former poet laureate of the United States, is coming to Kansas City this Thursday. I'm going to try to attend, but this week's a little busy, so who knows?

I've seen Pinsky read before at AWP. He's a great reader: he performs his poems with energy, modulation, and charisma. But, more importantly, his poems are great: they're intellectual, clever, meandering, and delightfully strange.

My favorite work of his is a chapbook titled First Things to Hand. Each poem in the collection is based on an object that the poet can see from his desk. Though he begins each poem with a familiar object, his mind wanders far and wide in each poem, leaping back and forth between the familiar, the imagined, and ancient mythologies, including the Hindu and Norse pantheons.

My copy of First Things To Hand is packed right now, so I won't include a sample poem here. But I will leave you with this clip from "What Shall We Teach the Young?", a lecture Pinsky delivered in 2002. Throughout his career as a poet and as poet laureate, Pinsky has served as an excellent advocate for poetry as a part of everyday life (for example, he initiated the Favorite Poem Project and edited An Invitation to Poetry and Essential Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud). I love what this essay says about why people should read poetry, especially children, and why verse is such a vital part of human culture.

If you like this quote, I urge you to read the whole lecture at the Grantmakers in the Arts website; it's a fascinating read.
---------------

From "What Shall We Teach the Young?"

By Robert Pinsky

“We crave difficulty. Music, and art in general, fills that craving, sometimes profoundly [. . . .] I submit to you that what we now call education in the arts is not an ornament, or a decoration, or a beauty, or a nice thing to do with learning, but that it resides at the center of the process of learning. [. . .] I have a superstitious and abiding sense that insofar as you remove the instrument case [and the ability of a child to perform art], it’s not only a local matter. It’s extending back to defy or abrogate a chain that goes to our origins. Intelligence and learning are associated with art, with all the arts. They’re at the core, not peripheral. The human ability to learn, the relish for difficulty, for physical engagement of difficulty, for something that comes from somewhere—these have profound origins.”