Robert Pinsky, America's Poet Laureate

"We are a great nation.  But are we a great people?  We are not a people based on blood, but we are a people based on MEMORY.  We sing the same songs, watch the same TV shows, remember the same national events.  We are no better or worse than other peoples; but we are different from them.  Certain social forces can hold a people together in the creation, maintenance and evolution of its art.  One is a folk source, though ours vary by ethnic origin.  Another is the notion of a social class that believes by heredity that it is the keeper of  culture, for example in eastern Europe.  There's even the force of government control, such as when the Soviet Union held poetry readings in stadiums and a hundred thousand people would attend.

"In place of those forces, we in America have a dynamic, improvising culture.  Jazz music is the best example of this.  Our popular culture has really dazzled the world.  We should not be proud of it or ashamed of it; we should take care of it and try to understand it, for in understanding it we can unlock keys to dealing with our social problems.

"We have dazzling mass art, becoming more dazzling all the time.  Computer screen, TV, DVD... you can send an image in seconds to Europe, Africa, South America, a million copies.  That is mass art.  But it creates a craving for something that is not mass art.  Popular art may not be the same as mass art.  Mass art may be created by a computer expert - how can it be popular?

"The medium for a poem is not words, not lines.  It is the reader's body, a column of breath shaking the reader's organs.  Your breath becomes the poet's medium.  So it is highly individual.  We crave that, and that is why poetry is on the rise.  Poetry is a vocal art.  "The Favorite Poem Project has served to highlight that.  Please visit www.favoritepoem.org.  America's grassroots people have favorite poems.  When they are called from their diverse places in life to read their poems together on a stage. they discover that none of them are experts, and they all root for one another.  It pulls people together.  The ditch-digger from Boston reading Walt Whitman and the gay black intellectual from Atlanta reading his favorite work are equals in this.  "The book, 'America's Favorite Poems,' is now in its fourth printing."

Answer:  That is a false issue.  I write for someone who is exactly like me but who is not me.  I know that not everyone who reads my poem will think it is great.  But I'd like to give someone the kind of pleasure I have felt when I read Yeats or Dickinson, from something I write.  I want you to say, "Mmmmmm" first, and then later, if at all, to analyze it.

Question:  When did you realize you'd be spending your life writing poetry?

Answer:  A career in art and a career earning your bread may be two different things.  Many great poets earned their living as doctors, lawyers, teachers.  I have earned my bread as a teacher, and have enjoyed teaching immensely.  I was 20 or 21 when I gave my heart, my desire, to writing poetry.  There was a certain fear involved, as with falling in love: I didn't know if I would get stuck, or get burned.  By the time I was 28 I had had a number of poems published in magazines, but was still trying to get my first book of poems published.  I felt very old at 28.  Now I actually make money from this, which surprises me.  The most important step for a young poet is to work with five or six of your peers, to discuss poems and work at poetry together.  Find like-minded peers, maybe start to hold regular poetry readings with an open mike, then start a small magazine; this is how to join the social world of poetry.

Question: Erica Jong said the poet is care-taker of the soul.

Answer:  No profession has a monopoly on caring for the soul.  An artist takes something of the physical world and shapes it in a way as to try to infuse it with a soul.  Everything and everyone is here to care for souls, in some way; even the clothes we wear.

Question:  What is your inspiration as a poet?

Answer:  I am inspired by art and motivated by emulation.  The rhythms and patterns we love as young children are what suggest a soul residing in the art; the rocking and crooning of elementary self-stimulation are the basis for art.  We as Americans are still inventing our experience of art as a people.  I am optimistic.  We will see exciting things yet to come!

Question:  Why did you choose to translate Dante's Inferno?

Answer:  I sort of fell into it.  I discovered I was good at it, so I kept doing it.  I had the technique and I enjoyed it.  It was no different from writing my own poetry except that I didn't have to worry about what to say next.  Also, being from a fairly Orthodox Jewish family, there was something about working with such a weighty Christian drama: I didn't know how much was I bending to the dominant (Christian) culture and how much I was TAKING IT OVER.  Sort of like Irving Berlin, another Jew who upon coming to America not only wrote "White Christmas" but then went on to write "Easter Parade" too!

Question:  How would you change how poetry is taught to grade school and high school students?

Answer:  THAT is my FAVORITE question!  The teacher must teach what he or she loves.  The teacher must read to the students.  The students must read to each other.  I have my students write a 25-30 page paper on what he or she means by poem -- poetry, rock music lyrics, anything.  Tell the students to conduct their own "favorite poem" project: each student find three adults who have a favorite poem, and collect them.  Have a person from the community (a mailman, a businesswoman) read a favorite poem to the class and say why it's a favorite.  Children love poetry.  Even younger children love poetry, whether Shel Silverstein, Dr. Seuss, or Stevenson's Child's Garden of Verse.  As we grow older, some of us learn NOT to love poetry.

Question:  What is the poet laureate's responsibility or role to make political statements?

Answer:  No more than your responsibility or role.  Wordsworth, after writing nine poems in favor of capital punishment, then wrote a poem denouncing the ballot box, calling upon St. George to run his spear through the evil box.