Robert Pinsky on teaching and censoring poetry

Abstract

Throughout his career, three-time US Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky has been the recipient of some of the country’s most important poetry prizes. These include the William Carlos Williams Award, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and the Lenore Marshall Prize. He has also been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His seminal translation of Dante’s Inferno won the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Howard Morton Landon Prize. His use of sound in that translation has been the subject of scholarly research, which is no surprise given the strong emphasis he places on the auditory quality of poetry. As Pinsky says in an essay on becoming a poet, ‘Write is not precise. I work to produce not marks on paper but something more like a song or a monologue, or both’. The prizes awarded to Pinsky have served to confirm the accolades showered upon him by poets and critics. Nobel Laureate Louise Glück said, ‘Pinsky is, among poets singled out for the highest praise, the poet read most closely and most anxiously’. He has been described ‘as a poet with a vision of (and for) the nation as a whole’, someone who ‘has used both critical and poetic lenses to craft and fictionalize a landscape of small town America in an act of investigation and documentation of sociologic and cultural aspects of American community’. The fact that ‘Pinsky has devoted his career to promoting the idea of poetry as a social presence’ is linked to what is perhaps the greatest honour bestowed upon him to date. In this brief interview conducted at his home in Cambridge (MA), Pinsky discusses the teaching of poetry, the way teachers position themselves when teaching it, and how poetry is at times a victim of censorship in the USA.