02 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
Poetry and Its Traditions (1976) he challenges dominant trends in contemporary
poetry (such as the use of free verse and a focus on the personal) by emphasizing
the discursive possibilities of poetry. “The idea,” he writes, “is to have all the virtues
of prose, in addition to those qualities and degrees of precision which can be called
poetic.” In the long, three-part poem An Explanation of America (1979) Pinsky
bridges the “apparently contradictory” aspects of the term “discursive” which can
describe that “which is wandering and disorganized” and also “pointed, organized
around a setting forth of material.” The poem illustrates the former in its depic-
tion of the diversity and disorder of America, its “Colonial Diners, Disney, films /
Of concentration camps” and “Deep Throat,” the latter in his attempt to “tell [his
daughter] something about our country, / Or my idea of it: explaining it.”
The poem’s vision of “our country like a common dream / To be between
us,” despite its contradictions, also reveals Pinsky’s faith in poetry’s potential to
unite and ignite communities to action, a theme he returns to in later works.
For example, in “The Unseen,” a poem from History of My Heart (1984), Pinsky
balances an autobiographical impulse and its attending attention to self with
poems about political and social issues. In a description of a visit to a death
camp in Kraków, the narrator observes, “the heaped-up meticulous / Mountains
of shoes, toothbrushes, hair”; these become “the whole unswallowable / Menu
of immensities.” While Pinsky registers outrage and horror, he also refuses
readers the comfort of self-righteousness, noting “a formal, dwindled feeling”
of boredom and the capacity of all humans to resort to violence in an attempt
to ward off that feeling.
Pinksy’s work also shows a careful attention to form. To contain the vagaries
of his explorations, Pinsky often employs strict form. In earlier work, he often
chooses to stick to a regular pattern. An Explanation of America, for example,
uses modified iambic pentameter, which lends stability to the disparate, chaotic,
and potentially overwhelming images of American life. Pinsky, however, is not
limited by a particular form, and his work incorporates a remarkable range of
style. Unlike the long, discursive lines of An Explanation of America, the poems
in The Want Bone (1990) are shorter and exhibit more language play than earlier
poems. The title poem, for example, consists of quatrains that rhyme on the
first and third lines (instead of on the conventional second and fourth), and
“Visions of Daniel,” employs short, terse lines to suggest the urgency of God’s
challenge to Daniel. Later collections The Figured Wheel: New and Collected
Poems, 1966–1996 (1996), Jersey Rain (2000), and Gulf Music (2007) continue
Pinsky’s exploration of form to convey such varying topics, from the joke telling
in the elegy “Impossible to Tell” (1996) to rock ’n’ roll music in “Louie, Louie”
(2007).
Pinsky’s interest in language and form is also evident in his best-selling
translation of The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation (1994), in which he
re-creates the interlocked rhyme scheme of Dante’s terza rima. It received the
Los Angeles Times Book Award in poetry and the Howard Morton Landon Prize
for translation. Pinsky is cotranslator of The Separate Notebooks (1983), poems by
Nobel Prize winner Czesław Miłosz, and retells in prose biblical stories in The
Life of David (2005). He is also author of the interactive game Mindwheel (1984),