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SPEAKER:

This is The Poetry Foundation’s Essential American Poets Podcast. Essential American Poets is an online audio poetry collection. The poets in the collection were selected in 2006 by Donald Hall when he was poet laureate. Recordings of the poets he selected are available online at poetryfoundation.org and poetryarchive.org. In this edition of the podcast, we'll hear poems by Robert Pinsky. Robert Pinsky is known as a public or civic poet. In 1997, he was elected to the first of a record, three terms as US poet laureate. And his time there was marked by ambitious efforts to demonstrate the necessity of poetry in every part of American life.

Robert Pinsky was born in 1940 in Long Branch, New Jersey. Pinsky recalls the town as decayed, but still gaudy with a glorious history where presidents summered along with Broadway stars, famous gamblers and patent medicine millionaires. Pinsky's own father was an optician and their apartment building was sandwiched between rooming houses. 

So, Pinsky says his childhood neighbors were house painters, railroad workers, horse trainers, and a jockey or two. The experience had a lasting impact on Pinsky. He says he has respect and maybe some nostalgia for the practical knowledge of the world for that earthly competence. Pinsky also says his work as a poet is an extension of his lifelong desire to make things. Pinsky earned his BA at Rutgers University and an MA and a PhD from Stanford University where he studied under the poet Yvor Winters. 

Pinsky published his first book of poetry in 1975 and has since published many books of poetry, prose and translation. The critic Willard Spiegelman says Pinsky's poetry and criticism has an abiding unity of which the principle ingredients are ethical, ambition, sanity, a sense of humor, and something to say. Pinsky's 1996 book of collected poems, The Figured Wheel received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Pinsky's translation work with the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz also received wide acclaim, as did his 1994 translation of Dante's Inferno. Pinsky has received many other honors and awards, including a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the William Carlos Williams Award and the Shelley Memorial Prize.

During his time as poet laureate from 1997 until 2000, Pinsky launched the Favorite Poem Project, a nationwide effort to have Americans read and comment on their favorite poems. Pinsky has edited several anthologies based on the Favorite Poem Project. He's also edited a poetry column for slate.com and has appeared on The Simpsons and The Colbert Report. Robert Pinsky lives with his wife in Cambridge, Massachusetts and teaches at Boston University. The Poetry Foundation recorded the following poems at WBUR in Boston in 2007.

ROBERT PINSKY:

"Shirt". 
The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,
The nearly invisible stitches along the collar
Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians

Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break
Or talking money or politics while one fitted
This armpiece with its overseam to the band

Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter,
The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,
The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze

At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.
One hundred and forty-six died in the flames
On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes—

The witness in a building across the street
Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step
Up to the windowsill, then held her out

Away from the masonry wall and let her drop.
And then another. As if he were helping them up
To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.

A third before he dropped her put her arms   
Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held
Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once

He stepped to the sill himself, his jacket flared
And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down,
Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers—

Like Hart Crane’s Bedlamite, “shrill shirt ballooning.”
Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly
Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked

Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme
Or a major chord.   Prints, plaids, checks,
Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans

Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian,
To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed
By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor,

Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers
To wear among the dusty clattering looms.
Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader,

The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter
Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton
As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields:

George Herbert, your descendant is a Black
Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma
And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit

And feel and its clean smell have satisfied
Both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality
Down to the buttons of simulated bone,

The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters
Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape,
The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.

"Poem about People".

The jaunty crop-haired graying   

Women in grocery stores,   

Their clothes boyish and neat,   

New mittens or clean sneakers,

Clean hands, hips not bad still,   

Buying ice cream, steaks, soda,   

Fresh melons and soap—or the big   

Balding young men in work shoes

And green work pants, beer belly   

And white T-shirt, the porky walk   

Back to the truck, polite; possible   

To feel briefly like Jesus,

A gust of diffuse tenderness   

Crossing the dark spaces

To where the dry self burrows   

Or nests, something that stirs,

Watching the kinds of people   

On the street for a while—

But how love falters and flags   

When anyone’s difficult eyes come

Into focus, terrible gaze of a unique   

Soul, its need unlovable: my friend   

In his divorced schoolteacher   

Apartment, his own unsuspected

Paintings hung everywhere,

Which his wife kept in a closet—

Not, he says, that she wasn’t   

Perfectly right; or me, mis-hearing

My rock radio sing my self-pity:

“The Angels Wished Him Dead”—all   

The hideous, sudden stare of self,   

Soul showing through like the lizard

Ancestry showing in the frontal gaze   

Of a robin busy on the lawn.

In the movies, when the sensitive   

Young Jewish soldier nearly drowns

Trying to rescue the thrashing   

Anti-semitic bully, swimming across   

The river raked by nazi fire,

The awful part is the part truth:

Hate my whole kind, but me,

Love me for myself. The weather   

Changes in the black of night,

And the dream-wind, bowling across

The sopping open spaces

Of roads, golf courses, parking lots,   

Flails a commotion

In the dripping treetops,

Tries a half-rotten shingle

Or a down-hung branch, and we   

All dream it, the dark wind crossing   

The wide spaces between us.

Poem of Disconnected Parts is written in closed couplets. It's meant to evoke some of the anger and confusion I feel when I read the newspaper. I hope the parts are not unconnected, but the jaggedness of the movement from one coupler to the next is meant to be expressive.

Poem of Disconnected Parts.

At Robben Island the political prisoners studied.   

They coined the motto Each one Teach one.

In Argentina the torturers demanded the prisoners   

Address them always as “Profesor.”   

Many of my friends are moved by guilt, but I   

Am a creature of shame, I am ashamed to say.

Culture the lock, culture the key. Imagination   

That calls boiled sheep heads “Smileys.”

The first year at Guantánamo, Abdul Rahim Dost   

Incised his Pashto poems into styrofoam cups.

“The Sangomo says in our Zulu culture we do not

Worship our ancestors: we consult them.”   

Becky is abandoned in 1902 and Rose dies giving   

Birth in 1924 and Sylvia falls in 1951.   

Still falling still dying still abandoned in 2005   

Still nothing finished among the descendants.   

I support the War, says the comic, it’s just the Troops   

I’m against: can’t stand those Young People.   

Proud of the fallen, proud of her son the bomber.   

Ashamed of the government. Skeptical.   

After the Klansman was found Not Guilty one juror   

Said she just couldn’t vote to convict a pastor.   

Who do you write for? I write for dead people:   

For Emily Dickinson, for my grandfather.   

“The Ancestors say the problem with your Knees

Began in your Feet. It could move up your Back.”   

But later the Americans gave Dost not only paper   

And pen but books. Hemingway, Dickens.   

Old Aegyptius said Whoever has called this Assembly,   

For whatever reason—it is a good in itself.   

O thirsty shades who regard the offering, O stained earth.   

There are many fake Sangomos. This one is real.

Coloured prisoners got different meals and could wear   

Long pants and underwear, Blacks got only shorts.   

No he says he cannot regret the three years in prison:   

Otherwise he would not have written those poems.   

I have a small-town mind. Like the Greeks and Trojans.   

Shame. Pride. Importance of looking bad or good.   

Did he see anything like the prisoner on a leash? Yes,   

In Afghanistan. In Guantánamo he was isolated.   

Our enemies “disassemble” says the President.   

Not that anyone at all couldn’t mis-speak.   

The profesores created nicknames for torture devices:   

The Airplane. The Frog. Burping the Baby.   

Not that those who behead the helpless in the name   

Of God or tradition don’t also write poetry.   

Guilts, metaphors, traditions. Hunger strikes.   

Culture the penalty. Culture the escape.   

What could your children boast about you? What   

Will your father say, down among the shades?   

The Sangomo told Marvin, “You are crushed by some

Weight. Only your own Ancestors can help you.”

" Impossible to Tell is an elegy for my friend Elliot Gilbert, who loves telling jokes and knew a million of them. 
And at about the same time that Elliot died through the blunder that doctors made they made a mistake. They didn't detect their mistake. Then they lied about their mistake. That was the end of Elliot. At about the same time that we in Berkeley were grieving that my friend Bob has was finishing his wonderful anthology of Haiku. And I was reading Bob's introduction which really made me understand Haiku for the first time. Among other things, it's part of a social evening part of a longer (UNKNOWN), a collaborative forum where people inspire one another to contribute stances. 
This is what people do tell jokes.

Impossible to Tell

To Robert Hass and in Memory of Elliot Gilbert.

Slow dulcimer, gavotte and bow, in autumn,   
Bashō and his friends go out to view the moon;   
In summer, gasoline rainbow in the gutter,

The secret courtesy that courses like ichor   
Through the old form of the rude, full-scale joke,   
Impossible to tell in writing. “Bashō”

He named himself, “Banana Tree”: banana   
After the plant some grateful students gave him,   
Maybe in appreciation of his guidance

Threading a long night through the rules and channels   
Of their collaborative linking-poem   
Scored in their teacher’s heart: live, rigid, fluid

Like passages etched in a microscopic circuit.   
Elliot had in his memory so many jokes
They seemed to breed like microbes in a culture

Inside his brain, one so much making another   
It was impossible to tell them all:   
In the court-culture of jokes, a top banana.

Imagine a court of one: the queen a young mother,   
Unhappy, alone all day with her firstborn child   
And her new baby in a squalid apartment

Of too few rooms, a different race from her neighbors.   
She tells the child she’s going to kill herself.   
She broods, she rages. Hoping to distract her,

The child cuts capers, he sings, he does imitations   
Of different people in the building, he jokes,   
He feels if he keeps her alive until the father   

Gets home from work, they’ll be okay till morning.   
It’s laughter versus the bedroom and the pills.   
What is he in his efforts but a courtier?

Impossible to tell his whole delusion.
In the first months when I had moved back East   
From California and had to leave a message

On Bob’s machine, I used to make a habit
Of telling the tape a joke; and part-way through,   
I would pretend that I forgot the punchline,

Or make believe that I was interrupted—
As though he’d be so eager to hear the end   
He‘d have to call me back. The joke was Elliot’s,

More often than not. The doctors made the blunder   
That killed him some time later that same year.   
One day when I got home I found a message

On my machine from Bob. He had a story   
About two rabbis, one of them tall, one short,   
One day while walking along the street together

They see the corpse of a Chinese man before them,   
And Bob said, sorry, he forgot the rest.   
Of course he thought that his joke was a dummy,

Impossible to tell—a dead-end challenge.   
But here it is, as Elliot told it to me:
The dead man’s widow came to the rabbis weeping,

Begging them, if they could, to resurrect him.   
Shocked, the tall rabbi said absolutely not.   
But the short rabbi told her to bring the body

Into the study house, and ordered the shutters   
Closed so the room was night-dark. Then he prayed   
Over the body, chanting a secret blessing

Out of Kabala. “Arise and breathe,” he shouted;   
But nothing happened. The body lay still. So then   
The little rabbi called for hundreds of candles

And danced around the body, chanting and praying   
In Hebrew, then Yiddish, then Aramaic. He prayed   
In Turkish and Egyptian and Old Galician

For nearly three hours, leaping about the coffin   
In the candlelight so that his tiny black shoes   
Seemed not to touch the floor. With one last prayer

Sobbed in the Spanish of before the Inquisition
He stopped, exhausted, and looked in the dead man’s face.   
Panting, he raised both arms in a mystic gesture

And said, “Arise and breathe!” And still the body
Lay as before. Impossible to tell
In words how Elliot’s eyebrows flailed and snorted

Like shaggy mammoths as—the Chinese widow   
Granting permission—the little rabbi sang   
The blessing for performing a circumcision

And removed the dead man’s foreskin, chanting blessings   
In Finnish and Swahili, and bathed the corpse   
From head to foot, and with a final prayer

In Babylonian, gasping with exhaustion,
He seized the dead man’s head and kissed the lips   
And dropped it again and leaping back commanded,

“Arise and breathe!” The corpse lay still as ever.   
At this, as when Bashō’s disciples wind   
Along the curving spine that links the renga

Across the different voices, each one adding   
A transformation according to the rules   
Of stasis and repetition, all in order

And yet impossible to tell beforehand,   
Elliot changes for the punchline: the wee   
Rabbi, still panting, like a startled boxer,

Looks at the dead one, then up at all those watching,   
A kind of Mel Brooks gesture: “Hoo boy!” he says,   
“Now that’s what I call really dead.” O mortal

Powers and princes of earth, and you immortal   
Lords of the underground and afterlife,   
Jehovah, Raa, Bol-Morah, Hecate, Pluto,

What has a brilliant, living soul to do with   
Your harps and fires and boats, your bric-a-brac   
And troughs of smoking blood? Provincial stinkers,

Our languages don’t touch you, you’re like that mother   
Whose small child entertained her to beg her life.   
Possibly he grew up to be the tall rabbi,

The one who washed his hands of all those capers   
Right at the outset. Or maybe he became   
The author of these lines, a one-man renga

The one for whom it seems to be impossible   
To tell a story straight. It was a routine   
Procedure. When it was finished the physicians

Told Sandra and the kids it had succeeded,
But Elliot wouldn’t wake up for maybe an hour,   
They should go eat. The two of them loved to bicker

In a way that on his side went back to Yiddish,   
On Sandra’s to some Sicilian dialect.   
He used to scold her endlessly for smoking.

When she got back from dinner with their children   
The doctors had to tell them about the mistake.   
Oh swirling petals, falling leaves! The movement

Of linking renga coursing from moment to moment   
Is meaning, Bob says in his Haiku book.   
Oh swirling petals, all living things are contingent,

Falling leaves, and transient, and they suffer.   
But the Universal is the goal of jokes,   
Especially certain ethnic jokes, which taper

Down through the swirling funnel of tongues and gestures   
Toward their preposterous Ithaca. There’s one   
A journalist told me. He heard it while a hero

Of the South African freedom movement was speaking   
To elderly Jews. The speaker’s own right arm   
Had been blown off by right-wing letter-bombers.

He told his listeners they had to cast their ballots   
For the ANC—a group the old Jews feared   
As “in with the Arabs.” But they started weeping

As the old one-armed fighter told them their country   
Needed them to vote for what was right, their vote   
Could make a country their children could return to

From London and Chicago. The moved old people   
Applauded wildly, and the speaker’s friend   
Whispered to the journalist, “It’s the Belgian Army

Joke come to life.” I wish that I could tell it   
To Elliot. In the Belgian Army, the feud
Between the Flemings and Walloons grew vicious,

So out of hand the army could barely function.   
Finally one commander assembled his men   
In one great room, to deal with things directly.

They stood before him at attention. “All Flemings,”   
He ordered, “to the left wall.” Half the men
Clustered to the left. “Now all Walloons,” he ordered,

“Move to the right.” An equal number crowded   
Against the right wall. Only one man remained
At attention in the middle: “What are you, soldier?”

Saluting, the man said, “Sir, I am a Belgian.”
“Why, that’s astonishing, Corporal—what’s your name?”   
Saluting again, “Rabinowitz,” he answered:

A joke that seems at first to be a story   
About the Jews. But as the renga describes   
Religious meaning by moving in drifting petals

And brittle leaves that touch and die and suffer   
The changing winds that riffle the gutter swirl,   
So in the joke, just under the raucous music

Of Fleming, Jew, Walloon, a courtly allegiance   
Moves to the dulcimer, gavotte and bow,   
Over the banana tree the moon in autumn—

Allegiance to a state impossible to tell.

The Hearts

The legendary muscle that wants and grieves,   

The organ of attachment, the pump of thrills   

And troubles, clinging in stubborn colonies

Like pulpy shore-life battened on a jetty.

Slashed by the little deaths of sleep and pleasure,   

They swell in the nurturing spasms of the waves,

Sucking to cling; and even in death itself—

Baked, frozen—they shrink to grip the granite harder.   

“Rid yourself of attachments and aversions”—

But in her father’s orchard, already, he says

He’d like to be her bird, and she says: Sweet, yes,   

Yet I should kill thee with much cherishing,

Showing that she knows already—as Art Pepper,   

That first time he takes heroin, already knows   

That he will go to prison, and that he’ll suffer

And knows he needs to have it, or die; and the one   

Who makes the General lose the world for love   

Lets him say, Would I had never seen her, but Oh!

Says Enobarbus, Then you would have missed   

A wonderful piece of work, which left unseen   

Would bring less glory to your travels. Among

The creatures in the rock-torn surf, a wave   

Of agitation, a gasp. A scholar quips,   

Shakespeare was almost certainly homosexual,

Bisexual, or heterosexual, the sonnets

Provide no evidence on the matter. He writes   

Romeo an extravagant speech on tears,

In the Italian manner, his teardrops cover

His chamber window, says the boy, he calls them crystals,   

Inanely, and sings them to Juliet with his heart:

The almost certainly invented heart

Which Buddha denounces, in its endless changes   

Forever jumping and moving, like an ape.

Over the poor beast’s head the crystal fountain   

Crashes illusions, the cold salt spume of pain   

And meaningless distinction, as Buddha says,

But here in the crystal shower mouths are open   

To sing, it is Lee Andrews and The Hearts   

In 1957, singing I sit in my room

Looking out at the rain, My tear drops are

Like crystals, they cover my windowpane, the turns   

Of these illusions we make become their glory:

To Buddha every distinct thing is illusion   

And becoming is destruction, but still we sing

In the shower. I do. In the beginning God drenched

The Emptiness with images: the potter   

Crosslegged at his wheel in Benares market   

Making mud cups, another cup each second

Tapering up between his fingers, one more   

To sell the tea-seller at a penny a dozen,

And tea a penny a cup. The customers smash

The empties, and waves of traffic grind the shards   

To mud for new cups, in turn; and I keep one here   

Next to me: holding it awhile from out of the cloud

Of dust that rises from the shattered pieces,   

The risen dust alive with fire, then settled

And soaked and whirling again on the wheel that turns

And looks on the world as on another cloud,

On everything the heart can grasp and throw away   

As a passing cloud, with even Enlightenment

Itself another image, another cloud

To break and churn a salt foam over the heart   

Like an anemone that sucks at clouds and makes

Itself with clouds and sings in clouds and covers   

Its windowpane with clouds that blur and melt,   

Until one clings and holds—as once in the Temple

In the time before the Temple was destroyed   

A young priest saw the seraphim of the Lord:

Each had six wings, with two they covered their faces,

With two they covered their legs and feet, with two   

They darted and hovered like dragonflies or perched   

Like griffins in the shadows near the ceiling—

These are the visions, too barbarous for heaven   

And too preposterous for belief on earth,   

God sends to taunt his prophet with the truth

No one can see, that leads to who knows where.   

A seraph took a live coal from the altar   

And seared the prophet’s lips, and so he spoke.

As the record ends, a coda in retard:

The Hearts in a shifting velvety ah, and ah

Prolonged again, and again as Lee Andrews

Reaches ah high for I have to gain Faith, Hope

And Charity, God only knows the girl   

Who will love me—Oh! if we only could

Start over again! Then The Hearts chant the chords   

Again a final time, ah and the record turns   

Through all the music, and on into silence again.

SPEAKER:
That was Robert Pinsky recorded at WBUR in Boston in 2007. The poems are used by permission of HarperCollins. You have been listening to the Essential American Poets Podcast produced by the Poetry Foundation in collaboration with poetryarchive.org. To learn more about Robert Pinsky and other essential American poets, and to hear more poetry, go to poetryfoundation.org.