The Fortnightly Interview: Answering History with Robert Pinsky
Joshua Corey chats with former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky
In the fall of 2024 I conducted this interview with former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky on the occasion of the publication of his latest poetry collection, Proverbs of Limbo. My father gave me a copy of The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems when it was first published in 1997, which was my introduction to his marvelously discursive work, as earthy as it is erudite. I’ve been an admirer ever since. There are other curious threads connecting us: both New Jersey Jews, both onetime students of poetry at Stanford–and Robert was the judge of the 2002 Barrow Street Press Poetry Contest, which led to the publication of my first book, Selah. So I was delighted to be able to sit down and have the following exchange with him over email. I’m even more delighted to share his characteristic wit and gravitas with you now as the first in the series of interviews we will be publishing here at the new home of TFR. –JC
In “Poem of Names” you write “In some ways Yeats was a jerk.” The irreverence is refreshing, but also consistent with your earlier work and with other shots at canonical figures that you take in the new book, like John Keats. As Poet Laureate who has had to play the Yeatsian role of "smiling public man," could you talk about being a public poet in a time when our appearing, to put in terms Hannah Arendt would understand, has been flattened into consumable images and metadata profiles? When social media threatens to replace "the social" itself?
For my generation of poets and poetry readers, Keats’s letters have had a kind of mystical authority—which is about 83% merited, I think. But for me it’s important to note the other 13%, with his conventional Jew-hating a useful example, with the great poet and great spirit being both dull and obnoxious. Important why? For reasons to do not with Keats but with myself: a reminder that no matter how good your work, how true your effort, how high your aspirations in art and life . . . you will, in various ways you cannot detect, behave like a shmuck.
If John Keats can be (at times, in ways) a shmuck, anybody can and everybody will.
Same goes for William Butler Yeats.
In “Forgiveness” you write, “The great / Fascist poet taught me free verse.” You’ve spoken about reconciling yourself to writers (Pound, Stevens, Keats) whose work you love, whom you even consider ancestors, but who held racist, anti-Semitic views. Could you elaborate on the “drift” from ethics toward aesthetics, and toward forgiveness?
Righteousness can be a corrupt or stupid pose (or addiction, or comfy chair or substitute for actual feelings) in the different forms that arise in different historical times. Emily Dickinson resisted the forms of her time and place, even as a teenager with packs of other teenagers praying for her to embrace the Evangelical righteousness that seemed to solve everything for that social class in western Massachusetts. She dared to read Emerson and to correspond with Unitarians, etc. William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson devised ways to avoid the murderous Royalist righteousness of their day.
I’m sympathetic with poets now in their twenties, tempted by the righteousness of damning the repulsive ways and beliefs (at their different levels) of Pound, Eliot, Moore, Stevens. Pound seems to have been one of the worst people who ever lived— in personal conduct, in self-adoration, in horrible political affiliations, in bullying self-aggrandisement and in his youth careerism . . . which makes him a wonderful example because he also said many excellent things about poetry, and wrote absolutely gorgeous verse-rhythms.
I love the letter where Bill Williams, who had been bullied by his impressive friend Ezra for years tells him: “people don’t admire you for your ideas, but in spite of them” or something like that. A lot of my contemporaries and elders took Pound seriously as a thinker about culture, economics, history, all kinds of things. I never could do that, I thought of him as a great verbal musician with no intellectual value in his writing. Except for his literary writing, ABC of Reading for example. A good parody of textbooks and a good textbook, both. A mindless virtuoso of verse, he is.
In my “Forgiveness” I enjoyed using him as that sort of complicated, slippery example. A pleasure to be irreverent in two different directions: toward accepting Pound as a thinker, and toward rejecting his insights into, say, quantity and stress in verse, just because he happened to be a nasty fascist swine.
In "Cataract" you reference the Native American man known as Ishi: “it wasn’t / His name he explained clearly he had no name.” “Geronimo” similarly references a Native American figure to explore the use and abuse of names. Could you say more about fascination with names, as fossil poetry, as tools of oppression or of liberation, and as magic?
American Jews of my parents’ generation and mine have given a lot of thought to names. I think of the mythology of names being changed at Ellis Island by clerks. Do you know what percentage of names were changed in that immigration process? Zero percent! Contrary to the myth, the name Pinsky or Eisenberg was on the ship’s documentation when the immigrant boarded in whichever European port. And that was that— but there are reasons for the myth. All of those wonderful stories, as fictional as the many jokes. (I like the joke explaining why so any Jews are named “Shane Fergusson.”)
The patronymic or tribal or religious or governmental meanings are so intense and so many-storied — what did Napoleon do about French names, and how was that related to the requirement of a saint’s name. And were names incorporating “God” or “Rose” or “Garden” or “Leaf” ironic, mean inventions by tax collectors, or proud assertions beyond the patronymic formula? It would be good to have scholarly knowledge of such things, but in the meanwhile, we poets can do our best with what we have, maybe with jokes and calamities? . . . in Proverbs of Limbo I try to go beyond “Goldberg” by including it with “Branca” . . . So much to say. The “real”names of Chico and Harpo, for example . . . and do you remember Caspar Weinberger and was he or wasn’t he?
In your celebration of American diversity I hear strains of Walt Whitman, but you seem more attuned to the difficulty of achieving e pluribus unum. I'm curious about how profoundly your Jewishness seems to affect the Whitmanian centripetal and identitarian centrifugal energies in this book, building to the claim “Every city a Jerusalem, every person a Jew” ("Place Name Echoes"). Is a Jewish-American poet especially qualified for the Whitmanian project circa 2024?
I’m tempted to answer this terrific question with just a syllable—“Yes.” Resisting that evasive pose, I’ll note that the lines you cite quote a Polish poet. Adam Zagajewski’s great, much-admired poem [“To Go to Lvov”] involves a kind of exile from his personal Jerusalem. (I’m proud to have publshed Adam’s poem for the first time in the United States, when I was Poetry Editor at The New Republic.)
There is something remarkably fluid and static about “Jewish” in the American context, I guess. Why is it nearly a guilty pleasure for me to like learning that the father of Fred Astaire (“real” name Austerlitz) had in the Old Country converted from Jewish to Catholic. . . . what an inadequate term is “conversion”! In the USA, it seems that Jews have converted, or been converted, from Non-White to white?
Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” has any number of ironic valences, so how are we to read your title “Proverbs of Limbo”? Is limbo a figure for our fraught historical interregnum, a “time of monsters,” as Antonio Gramsci put it?
I’m never sure to what extent Blake’s “mills” are factories . . . a bit early for the Industrial Revolution? . . . and how much they are churches. I like the ambiguity, I guess. That a limbus is a border certainly gives weight to the idea of monstrous transition . . . and was it a Caribbean insight, and/or pun, that made the word also denote a dance that tests limber-ness?
“Branca” disavows the idea of a poetic speaker, rather than the poet in his own voice. And “In Barcelona,” also seems to reference the idea of persona as related to the “art of conversation / Projecting in turns onto the screen of being.” What are you trying to suggest about the play of persona in poetry?
In every trade or business, it is difficult to avoid the callouses and sorenesses and blindnesses of each particular trade or craft. Hatters went mad. Sailors like the actor Steve McQueen likely got cancer from scraping rust and asbestos from the hulls of ships. We teachers of Creative Writing and English have “the speaker” . . . a useful, maybe necessary term when trying to think about the vocal art of poetry. But it can become a stupid bit of jargon, maybe? In Ben Jonson’s poem, the death of Jonson’s seven-year-old child is pondered by The Speaker?
An eminent prose writer admired the poem “Branca” in The New Yorker, but was mystified by that inside-baseball part you quote, about “the speaker.” Mysterious to that reader outside of our craft or guild.
There’s something beguiling and canny, verging on the uncanny, about how the poems in this new book navigate dark historical circumstances—something reminiscent of Jewish black humor but not restricted to that. I think of the last two lines of the first stanza of “Privacy”: “Each week a new law to amuse the public. / (“Jews are no longer permitted to own a cat.”); I also think of the offhand “bad election” referenced in “Adagio.” How, or maybe why, do you choose to meet horror with humor?
I appreciate this question a lot. It confirms something I worked hard for, writing Proverbs of Limbo. A couple of comparisons occur to me.
First, Emily Dickinson’s comic sense has inspired me from early on in my writing life. Her way of resisting mere righteousness, that quality that so easily becomes self-righteousness. The deadpan of “It was not Death, for I stood up,/ And all the Dead lie down.” Respecting something true for her in Christianity she not only resisted conventional piety, she mocked it in an understated way, as when the “Debauchee of Dew” makes “seraphs swing their snowy Hats—/ And Saints to windows run—/ To see the little Tippler/ Leaning against the — Sun!” That blend of absurdity and understatement. Invoking spiritual goods while not claiming them as her property or her right. That’s been a model for me, maybe unattainable.
Second, maybe it’s relevant that the poem “Privacy,” with the line, “Each week a new law to amuse the public” is based on a prose passage by Czesław Miłosz. In a way, the tone is inspired by Eastern European thinking in general, and in particular by Czesław, a Polish poet, older than me, who became my friend in Berkeley days. Miłosz like Polish poets Herbert and Szymborska, and in my own generation Adam Zagajewski, seemed to offer something important to American poetry. In Krakow, I discovered that the food I thought of as “Jewish” could also be called “Polish.” Maybe something similar is true of comedy? Zagajewski, when I first met him in the 1980s, was living in Paris. When interviewers talked to him about that as part of resistance to the repressive regime in Warsaw, Adam said “No, I came here because of a woman.”
You’re not afraid of the sorts of multilingual puns and layers of allusion that I associate with the high modernists, but there’s something more appealingly modest or off-hand about the way you play with etymologies or the poetic and historical resonances of proper names. Is this a deliberately deflationary approach to the big shmucks of modernism? Or does your “mixed chorus on every page” (“Repetition”) suggest a kinship?
Maybe the goal was to find a way to resist the pomposity of Pound, Eliot, their followers, that was different from the way found by Ashbery, O’Hara and their followers. A way to include the mysteries and powers of history plainly, without making it quasi-epic or sacerdotal or semi-satirical: just . . . plain.
“Soon,” remarks the speaker of “Leo Gorcey,” “the computer itself will tell these stories.” I’m curious about how and whether, as someone committed to the American demotic, you’ve engaged with new technologies. The Favorite Poem Project would not have been possible in its present form without the Internet; now we have so-called AI, large language models, producing poems that many readers can’t distinguish from human writing. Here, for example, is a limerick I asked ChatGPT to write about you:
There once was a poet named Pinsky,
Whose insights were sharp, never flimsy.
He forgave Pound’s vexations,
Wove names into nations,
And danced on the edge of a whimsy.Doggerel, but not terrible! What’s the future of poetry in the age of AI?
I read where Noam Chomsky says that AI is a form not of intelligence but of plagiarism. But maybe it’s plagiarism so highly organized and hyper-informed that it’s intelligent. My first encounter with this principle may have been musical— decades ago, my electronic keyboard impressed me, scared me a little, with its ability to produce rhythm sections: not just drums but backgrounds capable of tracking harmonies. As you say, this limerick is neither great nor bad—just a little . . . well, a little mechanical.
As with good musicians— we can hope-- with good writers and readers, the vocal element of poetry rises above clever imitations.
“Talking” references Russian poet Anna Akhmatova’s quietly defiant “Requiem,” in which she attests to poetry’s power to bear witness to the horrors of Stalinism. Your poem ends with a moment of natality, new possibility, with the infant poet’s “tongue already studying its mission.” Is that poetry’s answer to history?
This question about justice and history, for me, is deeply related to the previous question about Artificial Intelligence. The last lines of “Talking” think about the personal, individual and theoretical roots of Akhmatova’s art: she was born not only with the organs and muscles of speech but with a brain that had already received the vibrations of speech. That vocal, auditory root of poetry is a kind of answer to history in the sense you mean. Maybe that is related to my stubborn custom of capitalizing the first letters of lines. (As old-fashioned as wearing a monocle, as I’ve heard it described.) A way of asserting that I write in vocal units, not just typographical units. “The new tongue already learning to breathe,// Her tongue already studying its mission”— a kind of evolutionary riposte to Stalin and Stalinism, already there in the newborn Akhmatova.
The last poem in the new book, “At the Sangoma,” takes on questions of ancestry and legacy. A sangoma is a Zulu healer, who employs divination to cure physical, mental, and spiritual ills. Is the poet a healer? Is the poet’s first task to heal himself?
When my wife and I were in Africa we had an appointment with a Sangoma. The Zulu man who brought us to that consultation (it was impressive in a personal way) said something that entered my memory: “In our Zulu culture we do not worship our ancestors, we consult them.” That formulated something like a credo for me. As with Dickinson or Eastern Europe, my ambition would be to incorporate, adapt, modify and respect something of value.
As Yogi Berra is said to have told a young ballplayer who was using the batting style of Roberto Clemente, “Don’t copy him if you can’t imitate him.”
If you could travel back and time and offer your younger self advice, what would it be?
Robert, you are quick to judge. That is better than nothing . . . but remember to give judgment the authority of understanding.
