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Robert Pinsky (1940– )
As a poet, literary critic, teacher, and translator, Robert Pinsky has sought to
move poetry beyond the realm of academics and to make it accessible to all read-
ers. Shortly after being appointed U.S. poet laureate (a position he held for three
terms, 1997–2000), he founded the Favorite Poem Project, a large-scale effort
to document and celebrate the strong presence of poetry in America. Over the
course of a year, Pinsky solicited Americans to share their most cherished poems,
resulting in over eighteen thousand responses. A highly public literary figure,
Pinsky has appeared regularly as “America’s Wordsmith” on PBS’s The NewsHour
with Jim Lehrer and contributed a “Poet’s Choice” column for The Washington
Post. He has participated in more-popular venues as well, appearing on the ani-
mated television show The Simpsons and on The Colbert Report. Through various
activities, Pinsky seeks to make people’s connections to poetry and its importance
to their everyday lives obvious.
Pinsky was born on 20 October 1940 in Long Branch, New Jersey, “a decayed
but still gaudy town” (Gibson Fay-LeBlanc interview) whose suburban images
are featured in his work. He grew up in a “nominally Orthodox” Jewish family
who “did keep kosher” but “didn’t go to synagogue except on High Holidays, and
sometimes not even then” (interview with Ben Downing and Daniel Kunitz).
His father, Milford Simon Pinsky, was an optician. Although his mother, Sylvia
(née Eisenberg), urged him to follow his father in his profession, Pinsky instead
was drawn to the arts, finding pleasure in music, in “reading the dictionary and
daydreaming about the sounds of words,” and “imitating Yeats, Allen Ginsberg,
Frost, Eliot” (interview with J. M. Spalding). While attending Rutgers University,
Pinsky decided to concentrate on writing rather than on playing music. After
performing badly at an audition, he decided, “I could not do the things I wanted
to do on the horn or the keyboard so I faced what I might have been evading, my
actual métier, the sounds and nature of words” (Fay-LeBlanc). In 1961 he married
Ellen Jane Bailey, with whom he has three daughters, Nicole, Caroline Rose, and
Elizabeth. After graduating from Rutgers with a B.A. in English, Pinsky went on
to Stanford University as a Stegner fellow. There, he studied under Yvor Winters
and earned an M.A. and a Ph.D. in creative writing. Pinsky now teaches creative
writing at Boston University, where he is professor of English.
A self-described “compulsive explainer” (An Explanation of America, p. 6),
Pinsky seeks to explore the world and its relationship to culture in both his poetry
and literary criticism. Pinsky, however, does not ignore the difficulties of such an
investigation. As interviewer Fay-LeBlanc notes, his “work is filled with efforts to
get at the fragmentation, the forgetting, and the disconnection that accompanies
our existence.” In “Poem about People,” in Pinsky’s first collection, Sadness and Hap-
piness (1975), he describes “the dark wind crossing / The wide spaces between us.”
Taken together, his work tries to close this distance by uncovering and explaining
ideas and conditions that keep us apart. In The Situation of Poetry: Contemporary