THE ANTHOLOGIST SINCE 1927 THE LITERARY AND FINE ARTS JOURNAL OF RUTGERS COLLEGE I N T E R V I E W S Reprinted from The Anthologist Fall 1997 Robert Pinsky's work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies including Antaeus, The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, The Harper American Literature, and The Harvard Book of Contemporary Poetry. Also his latest book, The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and received the Ambassador Book Award of the English Speaking Union. Born in 1940 in the seaside resort of Long Branch New Jerse, Robert Pinsky attended Long Branch High School. From 1958 to 1962, he attended Rutgers College where he was the editor of The Anthologist. He then went onto Stanford University on a Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing, and now he teaches at Boston University. Currently, Robert Pinsky is the ninth Poet Laureate Consultant of the United States. What propelled you to Poetry? A love of art-music, movies, stories, dance, pictures-and a gradual realization that in the sounds of words, not in music, I would find my natural gift. How did Rutgers shape this path? I had magnificent teachers at Rutgers: Paul Fussell for Freshman English and 18th Century Literature. Francis Fergusson, one of the few truly great American Critics of the century, for a couple of courses. I was very fortunate. Princeton, Harvard, Yale, ect…, had no one of Fergusson's stature and value to a young writer. He was also a kind and wonderful teacher. How was the literary atmosphere when you were on the banks? My classmates included Alan Cheuse, Digby Diehl, Henry Dumas, Robert Maniquis, and Peter Najarian, all of whom went on to have literary careers. The Anthologist , with covers by Lucas Samaras, was a lively and enterprising beatnik operation. I had a lot of fun, and learned a lot from my peers as well as from people like Fussell, Fergusson, and David Weimer. What do you think of Rutgers now? How does it compare to when you attended? I don't know much about the Rutgers of today. I assume that Alicia Ostriker is a wonderful teacher and model, and that with her there the poetry-writing classes thrive. (There was not such a figure in my day-Ciardi more or less had retired, I think.) And does Rachel Hadas teach in New Brunswick, or only at Newark? If you have both of them, it is a rich slate. I know that under the guidance of Richard Poir the English department has generally become a more sophisticated and lively place than it was in the sleepy late 'fifties and early 'sixties. I assume, and hope, that Rutgers continues to be more mixed and bouncy than Princeton, more suited to the unruliness and rebelliousness of the arts. How do you feel the current atmosphere of poetry is in general? How does it fit into today's society? Poetry seems to be increasingly valued by Americans, perhaps in reaction to the brilliance and wide penetration of our wonderful mass art: we like much of the mass art (I do), but it makes us hunger for poetry, where the medium is one human body-one voice, speaking aloud. This seems to satisfy a craving not fed by a medium like the CD, which is highly duplicable. What is your project as poet laureate? Why did you choose it, and what do you expect to accomplish with it? My main project as poet laureate will be to create an audio and video archive of perhaps two thousand American's each choosing and reading aloud a favorite poem. The archive would be a record, at the end of the century, of what poems people choose (as well as which I select from the pool, as editor), and how they read the poem aloud. The readers would be encouraged, but not required, to say a sentence or two about the poem before reading it aloud. I hope to include a wide range of regional accents, ages, and professions. Maybe ten or fifteen percent of the readers be eminent Americans: the President, members of congress, and so forth. Only two kinds of people will be somewhat excluded: poets, and professional critics of poetry. Nothing against either category, but recordings of poets reading aloud already exist; and the inquiry here would be what life and presence poetry has in the United States outside of the professional microcosm of poetry has in the United States outside of the professional microcosm of poetry. The Library of Congress has made this project one of its four undertakings in celebration of its Bicentennial, and the White House is interested in having the project as part of the official Millenial Celebration. With help from John Cole at the Library of Congress's Center for the Book, I will encourage public libraries across the country to schedule readings of this kind. Two examples of the sort of thing that should be included: Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts has offered to read aloud T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Mr. Rudolph Aukshun, a retired parole officer in Freeland, Maryland has offered to read a Langston Hughes poem ("Hold onto your dreams") that he used to recite to his clients; on one occasion, a young man recently released from prison quoted the poem back to him from memory, after hearing the first few words. Although readers should be completely free in their choice: for this purpose, Browning and Shakespeare are "American" poets. Most of the poems will be in English, but I think that some poems in Chinese, Navajo, Spanish, Yiddish, ect. also would be appropriate. I hope that people hearing the request for a favorite poem will wonder to themselves how they will answer. I hope the archive will make an interesting portrait of America at the Millennium. Do you have a theory of poetics? I suppose so. It is not systematic. It is based on the notion I mentioned above, that the medium for poetry is a voice, therefore a body-and not necessarily the poet's body, an expert's body. Rather, the medium is the audience's body. Poetry is a vocal art, but not a performative art. This gives it a special combination of intimacy and civic presence. I view poetry as an ancient technology for memory and speed, a technology that uses the body, rather than tools such as papyrus scrolls or movable type or digitalized information. Poetry, like dance and music, is an ancestor of which those later technologies are extensions. How do you teach poetry and creative writing? There is no singing school but studying monuments of its own magnificence, to paraphrase "Sailing to Byzantium." The students and I discuss student work, but always in the context of great art. They compile and type anthologies of poetry they love, poems that define the art for them. I also ask them to memorize a poem they love. How do you see the internet influencing literary circles? What about poetry specifically? There is a lot of poetry on the web. I hope that the sound card will help serve the vocality of the art. (Slate magazine, where I am poetry editor, has a poem read aloud each week. The magazine, published by Microsoft, is at slate.com) What would you like to tell the aspiring poets here on the banks? Write with your voice, and read great poetry with your voice. Princeton students have passed upper-middle-class obedience training with higher grades than you, and therefore they suffer a handicap in art. There is no singing school but studying monuments of its own magnificence.