Robert Pinsky: Improviser of Poetic Images, Sounds and Desires

However, Pinsky goes beyond reverence of ancient bards by expressing poetry as a storyteller. He improvises historical events, quotations, present sights and sounds, current events of everyday life into basic chords of poetry, which reaches into the depths of souls universally.

Robert Pinsky enthusiastically conveys the message that reading a poem out loud "engages the mind and the body in a genetically primary sensation that involves a column of air in the trunk and the production of syllables. The sensation causes comfort and alertness. Thus the individual body, not necessarily even the artist, can be a medium for art." http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9710/web/pin...

Published books of poetry include Jersey Rain, The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996, The Want Bone, History of My Heart, An Explanation of America, and Sadness and Happiness. One of his latest nonfiction book of literary criticism is entitled The Sounds of Poetry.

This poet has been awarded many honors. Among them are "an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, Poetry Magazine's Oscar Blumenthal prize, the William Carlos Williams Award, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship." (http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prm...

Even though Mr. Pinsky believes in the medium of the ancient ritual of story telling, Robert uses "modern technology to write his poems, employs modern urban imagery in his poems, but, like an old master, refers often to classical antecedents and universal themes told and retold over the centuries." http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9710/web/pin...

He believes that the computer is another way for poetry to be expressed. In the days of quills, ink, and parchment, words of poems were communicated. The computer and now the internet can also be used as tools for poetic expression.

Pinsky teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University, and in 1997 was named the United States Poet Laureate and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. His dedi-cation to the craft of writing poetry is exemplified through the Favorite Poem Project, which he initiated while in the position of Poet Laureate.

Pinsky stated in an interview "I have a project that I hope to complete, which is to create an audio and video archive of many, many Americans saying aloud a poem that person loves. I hope to have a very wide range of regional accents, a range of ages, professions, kinds of education, and it will not concentrate on poets or critics or experts. " http://www.poems.com/pinskint.htm

According to Alan Shapiro, "if Robert Pinsky is one of the most important poets in America today, it

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