A Conversation with Robert Pinsky

CDS > Events > "Poetry and Documentary Expression": A Conversation with Robert Pinsky

Photo of slide lecture "Walker Evans at 100"

“Poetry and Documentary Expression":
A Conversation with Robert Pinsky
Moderated by Tom Rankin
Tuesday, October 30, Noon–1:30 p.m.
Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University

Robert Pinsky’s visit is made possible by the Blackburn Creative Writing Fund, the English Department, the President’s Fund for the Arts, the Center for Documentary Studies, and the Religion Department, all at Duke University.

Robert Pinsky—an American poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator—served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1997 to 2000. During that time, he became a public ambassador for poetry, founding the Favorite Poem Project, in which thousands of Americans of varying backgrounds, all ages, and from every state share their favorite poems. Pinsky believed that, contrary to stereotype, poetry has a strong presence in American culture. The project sought to document that presence, giving voice to the American audience for poetry.

During an informal discussion at the Center for Documentary Studies, Pinsky will talk about the connections between the poetic impulse and documentary expression, as well as his own experiences with capturing detail, preserving moments, and living in a visual, felt environment. The conversation will be moderated by Tom Rankin, director of the Center for Documentary Studies.

About Pinsky’s work, the poet Louise Gluck has said, “Robert Pinsky has what I think Shakespeare must have had: dexterity combined with worldliness, the magician’s dazzling quickness fused with subtle intelligence, a taste for tasks and assignments to which he devises ingenious solutions.”

Details of other events with Blackburn Visiting Writer Robert Pinsky: http://www.english.duke.edu/

PODCAST

Tom Rankin (left) and Robert Pinksy. Photograph by Christopher Sims.

Tom Rankin (left) and Robert Pinksy. Photograph by Christopher Sims.

ROBERT PINSKY
Born in 1940 in Long Branch, New Jersey, Pinsky received a B.A. from Rutgers University and earned both an M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford University, where he was a Stegner Fellow in creative writing and studied under the poet and critic Yvor Winters. After graduating, he taught at Wellesley College and the University of California, Berkeley, before being appointed to the faculty of Boston University. He lives in Newton Corner, Massachusetts, and is currently poetry editor of the Internet magazine Slate.

Early on, Pinsky was inspired by the flow and tension of jazz and the excitement that he found in this musical form. He has tried to reproduce the incredible energy of jazz in his poetry, he has said, and the musicality of poetry was, and still is, extremely important to his work.

He is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Gulf Music: Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007); Jersey Rain (2000); The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 (1996), which received the 1997 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and was a Pulitzer Prize nominee; The Want Bone (1990); History of My Heart (1984); An Explanation of America (1980); and Sadness and Happiness (1975).

He is also the author of several prose titles, including The Life of David (Schocken, 2006); Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry (2002); The Sounds of Poetry (1998), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Poetry and the World (1988); and The Situation of Poetry (1977). In 1985 he also released a computerized novel, Mindwheel.

Pinsky has published two acclaimed works of traslation: The Inferno of Dante (1994), which was a Book-of-the-Month-Club Editor’s Choice, and received both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award; and The Separate Notebooks by Czeslaw Milosz (with Renata Gorczynski and Robert Hass).

In 1999, he co-edited Americans’ Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology with Maggie Dietz. Other anthologies he has edited include An Invitation to Poetry (W. W. Norton & Company, 2004); Poems to Read (2002); and Handbook of Heartbreak (1998).

His honors include an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, Poetry Magazine’s Oscar Blumenthal prize, the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship.

banner image:

Professor Alex Harris during a slide lecture accompanying the fall 2003 exhibition, Walker Evans at 100. Photograph by Christopher Sims.

Center for Documentary Studies
1317 W. Pettigrew Street
Durham, NC 27705

telephone: (919) 660-3663
fax: (919) 681-7600
email: docstudies@duke.edu

See: directions to the Center for Documentary Studies

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