Robert Pinsky

As Poet Laureate, Pinsky is one of America's best spokesmen for poetry, In this book, writing plainly and specifically, for general readers as well as for poets, he explains in detail how the sounds of poetry embody the work of art that is "performed" in us when we read it aloud. Pinsky devotes clear, informative chapters to the sonic elements of poetry: accent and duration, syntax and line, like and unlike sounds, blank verse and free verse. He illustrates these with examples from the work of some fifty poets - from Shakespeare, Milton, and Emily Dickinson to William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, Louise Glock, C.K. Williams, and Frank Bidart.

"The place of poetry in modern democracy is no place, according to conventional wisdom. The poet, we hear, is a casualty of mass entertainment and prosaic public culture, banished to the artistic sidelines to compose variations on insipid themes for a dwindling audience. Robert Pinsky, however, argues that this gloomy diagnosis is as wrong-headed as it is familiar. Pinsky, whose remarkable career as a poet itself undermines the view, writes that to portray poetry and democracy as enemies is to radically misconstrue both. The voice of poetry, he shows, resonates with profound significance at the very heart of democratic culture.". "There is no one in America better to write on this topic. One of the country's most accomplished poets, Robert Pinsky served an unprecedented two terms as America's Poet Laureate (1997-2000) and led the immensely popular multimedia Favorite Poem Project, which invited Americans to submit and read aloud their favorite poems. Pinsky draws on his experiences and on characteristically sharp and elegant observations of individual poems to argue that expecting poetry to compete with show business is to mistake its greatest democratic strength - its intimate, human scale - as a weakness."--BOOK JACKET.

A discussion of the influence of Dante upon 20th century culture, and the publication of The Inferno of Dante, translated by Robert Pinsky, illustrated by Michael Mazur, and published by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux in 1994.

Robert Pinsky's The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996 gathers together all his poetry to date, including twenty-one new poems. The critic Hugh Kenner, writing about Pinsky's first volume, described this poet's project as "nothing less than the recovery for language of a whole domain of mute and familiar experience." Transformation of the familiar and uttering of what had been mute or implicit within culture continue to be central to Pinsky's art. New poems like "Avenue" and "The City Elegies" envision the city's mysterious epitome of human pain and imagination, forces that recur in "Ginza Samba," an astonishing history of the saxophone, and "Impossible to Tell," a jazz-like work that intertwines elegy with the Japanese custom of linking-poems and the American tradition of ethnic jokes. A final section of translations includes renderings of poems by Czeslaw Milosz, Paul Celan, and others, as well as the last canto of Pinsky's award-winning version of the Inferno.

A vibrant anthology and accompanying CD that revive a great American tradition: the joy of reciting poetry aloud.