Bigthink - User Ideas Feed

Robert Pinsky on the passing of time

Bigthink — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 20:37:15 +0100

: Each phase of life brings new information about life, Pinsky says gratefully.

Robert Pinsky Reads The Last Canto of Paradise

Bigthink — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:58:50 +0100

As I drew nearer to the end of all desire..

Transcript:

I end Gulf Music which has so much about it – about forgetting and remembering as parts of the same process. I ended with a poem that’s mostly a translation from the very end of Dante’s Paradiso. In it he sort of accepts forgetting. To me its like he is accepting the idea of his own death and it’s a sort of sweet or reconciled sense of absence and adds to virtual story of the civil everything and she wrote down everything that would ever happen. She sat down and she wrote it all. She wrote it on leaves and leaves are so thin that as soon as the daughter of the temple began to turn out, the breeze came in, scatters the leaves up in the air and it’s a chaos and people the civil because of the frustration of that and this is from the last canto of Paradise. As I drew nearer to the end of all desire, I brought my longings order to a final height just as I want. My vision becoming pure and to more and more the beam of that high light that shines on its own truth from then my seeing became too large for speech which fails at a sight beyond all boundaries at memories undoing as when the dreamer sees and after the dream ---the passion endures imprinted on his beam though he can’t recall the rest I am the same. Inside my heart although my vision is almost entirely faded droplets of its sweetness come the way the sun dissolves the snows crust the way in the wind it’s third of the light leaves, the oracle that the sipper wrote was lost.

Recorded On: 3/25/08

Robert Pinsky Reads The Forgetting

Bigthink — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:58:47 +0100

The forgetting I notice most as I get older is really a form of memory: The undergrowth of things unknown to you young, that I have forgotten.

Transcript:

The forgetting.

The forgetting I notice most as I get older is really a form of memory: The undergrowth of things unknown to you young, that I have forgotten. Memory of so much crap jumbled with so much that seems to matter we tended to Kelly, Captain Easy [inaudible] and all the forgetting that preceded my own Baghdad, Egypt, Greece, The planes, centuries of looting of antiquities, obscure atrocities. Imagine a big tent filled with mostly kids yelling for poetry in fact it happened. I was there in New Jersey at the famous poetry shop. I used to wonder what if the baseball hall of fame overflowed with too many 1000s of grades all in time and remembered. Hardly anybody can name all eight of their great grandchildren. Can you? Will your children’s grandchildren remember your name? You will see you little young jerks, your favorite music and your political figures too will need to get sorted in dusty electronic corridors. In 1972, Joll N. Ley was asked the lasting effects of the French revolution too soon to tell. Remember? Or was it milestone poetry made of air, streams to reach back to begets and aspiring forward into air, grunting to beget the hungry or overfed future. Isara Pound praises the emperor who appointed a committee of scholars to pick the best 450 new place and destroy all the rest, the fascist. The standup master Steven Right says he thinks he suffers from both amnesia and daysha woo[phonetic] “I feel like I have forgotten this before.” Who remembers the arguments when jurors gave pound, the only prize for poetry awarded by the United States government until then. I was in the big tent when the guy read his poem about how the Jews were warned to get out of the twin towers before the planes hit. The crowd was applauding and screaming. They were happy. It isn’t that they were anti-Semitic or anything. They just weren’t listening or no they were listening, but that’s certain way. In it comes you hear it and that self seemed second you swallow it or expel it, an ecstasy of forgetting.

Recorded On: 3/25/2008

Robert Pinsky Reads The City Dark

Bigthink — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:57:57 +0100

In the early winter dusk the broken city dark seeps from the tunnels.

Transcript:

The city dark in the early winter dusk the broken city dark seeps from the tunnels up towersAnd in gusty allies, the mathematical vale of generation has lit its torches to light the rooms of the maded and the unmadedThe two faded behind you and ford behind them in the matrix widening into the pastEight, sixteen, thirty two, many as to crystal dream sells illuminating the city Even for those who sleep in the street there are lights

Like a heavy winter sleep the long flint called the past spreads over the glinting dream blisters of the city asleep or awake as if the streets were an image of the channels of time with 64, 128.

The ancestral net of 1000s only a couple of centuries back with its migrations and fortunes and hungers like an image of the city where they start to spelling lights have climbed and multiplied over the tenements and outlying suburbs like a far past of multitudes behind us in the glistering web of strands crossing 1000s and 10s of 1000s of lives coupled with their games, passions, misfortunes. Somewhere in the tangled ally ways who were, somewhere a spirit diffuse the wing like blind along the stretched wire branching the dark city air or bundled under the streets causing surely to some one phase like an ancient song do----lah soul soul. Somewhere the aspiring somewhere recognition back here one died of starvation, here one thrived, descendent the bitter city work and the shimmering maternal burden of music uncoiled outward and the avenues through smoky bars by televisions, beyond sleepers. Well the Bolivian of generation radiates backward and then forward homeward to the one voice or face like an underground pool through its delicate light shaft moonlit, a cistern of light echoing in a chamber cellared under the dark of the city pavement faintly glittering slabs.

This is related to our earlier conversation about the past and the future and each of us has --- each of us who is made by two people, who are made by four, eight, go back a couple of 100s of years, its 1000s of people. Eventually 10s and dozens of --- many many many thousands and you can bet that some are back there, you are the product and worried. Somewhere your products have a tremendous love match, somebody died of starvation, we are all descended from kings. That many people 50, 60, 1000. One of them was a king. One of them was a slave and I suppose in relation to your question earlier about an image for things with that sense of the immense wake that goes behind any one person widening, widening, widening what is it like? All those people, it’s like being an airplane over a city at night and you see all those lights all the bulbs in the city as if each light is a life and in deed in the city almost anything you name is happening as you look down that at and that’s like your pretty almost anything you name has happened back there and I guess that image of the city and picking a light and thinking what is in that room or is it a car or who is in the car. That’s like trying to imagine what is behind you.

Recorded On: 3/25/2008

Re: Can you separate the politics from the poet?

Bigthink — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:57:51 +0100

People love cliche, Pinsky says.

Transcript:

If we didn’t separate artists politics from the artist, we would lose a lot. So the Italian futurists became ordinary fashions, Ezra Pound wrote some really good things. We wrote was a lot --- had a lot more approval of stalling in most of us by us I guess it made me who would. So the first part of the question, can you separate an artist work from his politics. We do. The answer to this can you is yes. We do all the time and all the more so historically. So that Shakespeare’s ideas about Jews. Its not a political matter. Its cultural matter and there is an awful lot we would deprive ourselves if we start bringing the template over on political convictions to art. On the other hand when you are making art we are doing the art of your own time hearts and liberals nothing is forbidden to it. You can’t say this is too political or as politics in deed to ignore that aspect of life is to restrict your subject matter and off a lot. Just speaking for myself, I don’t think I have to become an expert in constitutional law or an expert in an American Foreign Policy to feel a desire to express the emotions I feel when I read the news paper and I try to do that as well as I can and then its somebody else’s job a year later or 50 years later to decide whether I did it stupidly or in a way it was moving or absorbing.

People love cliché. The audience will always --- there always will be an audience for cliché. Sometimes for a greater work of art not. Melville ruined his career. He was popular for White-Jacket and people wanted another White-Jacket. He probably could have written one. Probably would have become try. White-Jacket is pretty good book. It’s not Moby Dick, but he was popular. His publisher loved on. He had a leadership and he wrote this crazy book about wailing and no body could read it, no body could sell it. It was such a big flop that it wrecked him. It had a bad effect on his life. His settling was a very unsuccessful writer or he can try to do is try to do something fresh. I don’t believe there is anything that in theory somebody couldn’t write about well. There is no forbidden subject. Great comics can make anything funny. Art is on your never know when it might great ---- work is it always the pitfall of the traitor, the self important or this or that or the banal. Yes sure and in fact as in Melville’s case sometimes everybody is wrong. Usually if somebody says “none of them liked it. They didn’t get it what a big genius I was.” He probably didn’t even say that. Sometimes it’s true. We need to catch up to it. We don’t understand and the very literary critics who write about John Keats or Gerard Manly Hopkins or Melville I hope they think the equivalent to me to recognize Keats. The equivalent --- and they did that say this Gerard Manly Hopkins is something extraordinary. Equivalent people had their attention elsewhere and I think that all the time. I read poems submitted to slave or I mean editor I say “I will have to assume this is possible with Emily Dickson or Hopkins in here and I am missing it.” I may be making a mistake.

Recorded On: 3/25/08

The Poetry of American Prisons

Bigthink — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:57:47 +0100

The lifers, Pinsky says, are the ones who write the best poetry.

Transcript:

Oh its American prisons are one of the few places in our culture where indisputably prisons that I have been in. Poetry is quite important. It’s an art. You don’t need a lot of equipment to do. If you memorize a poem, you need any equipment at all to recite it and you can write in your head. One of the guys at Guantanamo, I put this in the poem in my new book. Incised his poems in telephone cups, mentally got writing material modern is set to write them in soap, but then eventually they are memorized. That mean the poetry --- the very things that make it small and it also make it new and make it very essential to the fact that you don’t need a lot of equipment. The fact that I can be reciting to a poem by myself while I am inside while I am driving or taking a shower. Can’t do that with your electronic instrument I don’t think haze that you have once been using the shower, but you get what I mean and as far as I could see which is not so far in the poem ----- I am reading translations and a translation is done basically by legal interpreters. They are not translation as it a literary. As far as I could see as in prison, there is a range of sophistication. I did some teaching in medium security prison which had some lifers in it. Those guys were like graduate students. Some had published, they're lifers. There is lot of time to read. There are lot of time to think. There are lot of time to practice an art. They are not going anywhere and they become sophisticated writers. That’s moving in a way. Most moving to me were things opposite. Really young kids, very naïve writers, “oh mom I know I did something wrong. I wish I could make you a better song.” Very crudely rhymed, ernest. Sometimes you can tell that they'd not been so well in high school and they are innocent. May have done very nasty things or somewhat nasty things drugs and that was one of the things that struck you about in prison, where I was anyway, where is this terrific range and a centrality of the art. Those prisons were interesting play. Eventually I couldn’t stand it. Some people get into it. They do it for ever. It sounds like a joke and reminded me too much of junior high school. I couldn’t stand the regimentation. Every time I had to put a coin in a locker with my watch and take it out which book I could have and couldn’t do and I did something wrong every time and it was just like junior high school. I also did something wrong every time. It just was too depressing for me to really become one of the main people doing this. Its one of the few those poetry readings at the ---- I think they have migrated to another institution that time. It was Massachusetts Institution at Norfolk. Same prison Malcolm X was in. It’s still those people. It was racially much less segregated than your average I believe dining hall. It’s just that those guys have gone through American racial nuttiness and come out in the other side some how. So that you go to some --- seen the stupid scene at Princeton or somewhere and people are segregated by race and here these guys at the poetry reading --- I am not doing that. In prison these are bunch of some of the murderers, bank robbers, certainly drug dealers.

Recorded On: 3/25/08

The Guantanamo Poems

Bigthink — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:56:52 +0100

When poetry is written in soap.

Transcript:

I did not collect the poems written at Guantanamo. I had relatively little to do with that book. That book was collected largely by attorneys who had volunteered at that time to work with people, who were detained often with minimal ---- amazingly minimal legal process. People who were detained at Guantanamo, and I would assume with that, knowing very little about it. They are just tremendous range of people, a range culturally, a range of --- but I am sure ranges of people who are tremendously guilty of many things and people who are innocent of many many things. The editor at the press that was about to publish that book originally talked to me about writing an introduction and they sent me the manuscript and I tried conscientiously to read the poems and I hope I correctly recognize my own adequacy. I was not conveyed to provide an introduction to these poems. You would have to ----at the minimum you would have to know something about Arabic poetry, you would have to know little bit about these cultures and they come from cultures in which amateur poetries are very important component. For me with amateur poetry in this country, I have taught adult classes I have taught in prisons. I don’t say amateur with a sneer, in many ways it’s possible to idolize the country in which there is a lot of amateur poetry. It might be good for professionals like me, but I felt inadequate to write in the introduction and at the same time I felt strongly about the abuses of liberties and that military people were shocked. People of military --- legal military people were both and what was happening there and these guys were just in a tremendous fix to pick their end. They have been put in by the government of my country. I didn’t want to just say , “oh I am so sorry. This is not my field.” So I tried to write a blurb that would at least put my name in the book and say this is an urgent book for us to be aware of. We should think about these people. They shouldn’t just be sealed away in a part we are releasing from a government that we don’t recognize as a part of Cuba. If you have read that in vicinity or hiatus I can’t figure these you would say, “I can’t figure these people I don’t know what’s going on here.” anyway there they are and this part of Cuba that we release from this government. We refuse that if we have anything to do with and we must adjust ---- forget about them. They need to be thought about and I was speaking ----- because I had been appealed to and very aware that my gifts and knowledge, whatever they are as a poet, would not terrifically tremain to the contents of that book.

Recorded On: 3/25/08

The Mythology of America

Bigthink — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:56:49 +0100

The multiplicity of memory.

Transcript:

We don’t have a myth of our origin. We have some history. We might mythologize the founding fathers. We mythologize our revolution, but there is not a myth in that sense. I say it’s not an original idea with me not out of modesty, but point out that Longfellow, one of the most popular artists in history of America, and then he was least as popular as Steven Spielberg is today. Longfellow set out to create myths quite consciously. That’s why he wrote the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, he knew it wasn’t an accurate piece of history, he wanted to give this a myth. His Song of Hiawatha was an attempt to do that in retrospect it isn’t the way we went, it isn’t exactly how we did it Though there are still lot of people who love those poems. Whitman understood the national spirit better and John Ford understood it better. Could be that --- you could argue that W.C. Handy understood it better, but it is initial and we have a lot of history and where we have so much history because of the different ethnicities that its almost in a panic we boil it down and reduce it. To me it’s a very interesting water shed dividing line in this particular week of our history that Barack Obama gave the speech in which he tried to talk about the multiplicity of his own ethnicity and his family. He said “I have relatives from the same group in the end.” I think one of his brother-in-laws is a Chinese, his mom was married to an Indonesian guy, and his grandmother is a white lady from Kansas and that’s a lot of history to come people, a plethora of history. In some ways it would be simpler to be Polish, country where most people are one religion. For example there are different destinies and memory is in different phenomenon for us than it might be for the Bengalis or the Polish and only thing I am an expert is the sounds of words. I am not a historian, I am not a cultural historian, but I can dare to observe, but that’s interesting. That multiplicity of memory and that perhaps plethora of history is where thinking about.

Recorded On: 3/25/08

Re: What is the Favorite Poem Project?

Bigthink — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:56:47 +0100

It is the medium on a human scale, Pinsky says.

Transcript:

That is one of the main ideas behind the favorite poem project that concept that the poem finds its combination in the audience’s body and that’s an important principle I think in a democracy because the dignity of the individual is reflected in fact that the medium is on a human scale. It’s on an individual scale. It’s not a mass scale. It’s on the scale of one person’s voice saying the poem. That’s related to the other reason I undertook the project. There is a kind of glib, often reactionary, attitude that all Americans are jerks, They're yahoos. They don’t like art. They don’t like poetry. They only like their cars, their expensive clothes, and their electronic equipment and they're jusy glutinous dopes. Well now I have letters from many many thousands of Americans saying why they love poem by (inaudible), why they love poem by insurance salesman who loves an Ashbery poem. This African American woman in Washington who loves this poem by Alexander Polk reads in your translation from the Russian. Stereotypes in general, and the stereotype of Americans in particular, as though some how there have been obvious or the Russians are superior to us because they have cultures in which poetry has a settled place. Then inferior it’s not necessarily superior. We are still making up a lot of our cultures we go along. So there is that if I dare use the word patriotic aspect of the favorite poem project as well.

Recorded On: 3/25/08

Re: Is hip-hop poetry?

Bigthink — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:55:51 +0100

The distinction lies in the performance?

Transcript:

I don’t, I am not interested in making real strict lines about what is poetry and what isn’t poetry, for me a crucial thing about poetry, as it means the most to me, is that it is written for anybody’s voice in a culture in which we worship performance. Which performance is our aristocracy, much better than the old aristocracy, much better to idolize somebody because they can throw ball like hell or run like hell because they are beautiful and sing wonderfully or dance wonderfully than because their the great great great grandson of some of some big shot much better, but we do worship it and here is an ancient art, it is based on the reader’s voice. That’s one reason the favorite poem project is so important to me. If some kid comes to poetry in that sense through performance of course that’s a very natural and it’s very natural that at first you do things that ape what is so powerful in the culture. You imitate what is being turned out very very effectively and very powerfully and I think performances can be great art. I just make a distinction between an art in which the medium is the audience’s body. When I said that Ben Johnson poem to you or say the Landor poem to you when I say: On love, on grief, on everything human thing, time sprinkles Lethe’sWater with his wing It’s not like an amateur singing tune by the real pop artist. That’s the combination of work of art. It’s when someone other than the artist gives voice to it and that’s different. It’s different than performance and both can be stupid. Both can be great art, but I do make a distinction between the art of the performer and the art of the poet. I don’t write poetry readings. If I give one I try not to be boring, but I write poems. I write with my voice for your voice.

Recorded On: 3/25/08

Re: How has the Web changed language?

Bigthink — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:55:48 +0100

Text is all around us, Pinsky says.

Transcript:

Who could have anticipated that text would become so important and that text would become, that the very word that texting as a verb would denote something in the life of people mostly under 25. It’s a good example of how unpredictable culture is. How it takes turn one would never expect and if one sings to being in far and trust to look around for things to be dismayed by you probably to pick the wrong thing something quite dismaying is very likely to happen, but I hope you are not inviting me to deplore the internet or technology. I deplore the lasting effects of the Iraqi adventure. I deplore our slowness to take climate change seriously. I deplore the decay and abandonment with the ideal of public education. There are plenty of things to be quite disturbed about as I realize I have a decade or two left here.I can’t particularly deplore technology and media that’s not a big problem and one of the best things I have ever done has now manifested largely by technology. The favorite poem project www.favoritepoem.org those videos, the books, the DVD with the videos that comes with an invitation to poetry from Norton. I have my writing. I have a family. I did that thing. That’s there somewhere but probably in third place. That ----- a lot of that was made possible. Lot of the people who wrote to me about why they love this poem by Mary Ann Moore or Bubler or Rooder those came through email. The computer made it possible to tabulate them and videography in the web lets disseminate them. So any teacher can tell a student go to www.favoritepoem.org somebody ask me what’s your ambition for your poem. So I say “well look at surf reading that Sylvia plus nick in the candlestick. I hope somebody read something by me that way.”

Recorded On: 3/25/08

Re: Have you developed a sense of what beauty is?

Bigthink — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:55:47 +0100

The closer you get, the harder it is to describe.

Transcript:

I have developed a sense of what beauty is and I can’t tell you anything about it, but I know that I have more of it than I used to and the longer I live the more I court it and pursue it and struggle with it, I do feel like I know more about it and one of the things I know about it is that I can’t describe it to you.

Recorded On: 3/25/08

Re: When does the specific become universal?

Bigthink — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:54:56 +0100

Anything is universal, Pinsky says.

Transcript:

Anything can become universal. Any moment any person’s idea at any one moment, any artifact, if you could understand it well enough would be a portal into the whole rest of the universe. I think this conviction in me I can associate it was probably already there on the old channel 13 in New Jersey there used to be a show when I was little called "What In the World?" and it was three or four people sitting in a studio. The set consisted of the chairs that was sitting on a kind of cocktail table and when of them might be an artist historian, one might be an anthropologist, one might be a museum curator and they are sitting there and there is a host and somebody brings in a thing. It might look like a ladle made out of bar or it might look like little statuette, might look like a model ---- modern pestle, but rattle or something and then these people they don’t necessarily know what it is. They know how to bullshit about it and one of them says these are --- these tools they show up their pre-Columbian ones. They are also ones in Samaria. It’s basically a tool for winnowing grain and I would say this one because of the material I would say it’s probably pre-Columbian rather than ---- but sometimes they are modern ones like that. The other guy says “no I think this is 19th century or early 20th century thing.” I have seen a lot of them a lot of south west American Indians use these. “oh I thought it ---- to me it still looks American.” They know how to yak about it. This thing has come as though out of the sky and they know things and that thing is a door way into all of this history and all these knowledge that they know. Well we can do that with this molded glass and why does so many seem to come from France almost everything comes from Asia. Well there probably is blah blah. If you know water …So it’s not that there is a quality in the object, so the object is a door way. Every object has a history. It has a past that’s a social context. It probably has a political meaning who got paid how much to bring the glass into this building and for ever it was made and how the materials get to warehouse and made. We will never know, but the more you look into it the more interesting it gets. That’s why the guy with a Polish name can write a bestseller about pencils.

I don’t know if one does find an image. I don’t know if its like making a collage and Picasso says it was part of the newspaper at that go will here. I never was a choreographer or a dancer, but I assume you start trying something you just do things with your body and then you get a hint. Something feels interesting to, it’s expressive or it’s complicated in way that makes you more further into it. You get into a place where there are no rules. You have hunches. You get feelings and it’s related to a material. I can remember during that period when I went back to the horn, Berkley jazz player [inaudible] gave me a few lessons and we got it in for talking about the notes say we would have a Sunny Roland’s course to bare origin or something. Somebody had transcribed exactly the notes, his play and we were talking about which notes were right inside the triad cord right inside the scale of the key of the moment and which notes were kind of far out. He is playing flat 13 or sharp 9 or flat 9 and have these discussions about that and one time there is this one note and Steve talked about it and I asked a few questions about it and he said sometimes your note just note ----- just feels right and I think that’s a big part of the process at making art is that you learn principles and structures and roles and you think consciously in order to get to the point we don’t have to think. I am sure there are analogies in sports is like the actor memorizes the lines so well. When she is saying the lines, she doesn't think about them. Just think about the emotion and that’s where you are trying to get.

Recorded On: 3/25/08

Underrated Poetry, Overrated Poetry, Timeless Poetry

Bigthink — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:54:50 +0100

Description: Who's more famous, Elizabeth Bishop or Vaughn Monroe?

Transcript:

People should read Johnson more. I don’t know about the ratings. I love Landor. Lotof people don’t read Landor. When I did the thing the Jazz musician I did Landor’s great two line poem. On love, on grief, on everything human thing, time sprinkles Lethe’sWater with his wing that a wing can sprinkle as well as fly On love, on grief, on everything human thing, time sprinkles Lethe’s water with his wing He is telling you to put your teeth on your lip three times. He is probably not even thinking about, but it happens on love, on grief, on every human thing, time sprinkles Lethe’s water with his wing and in the second line doing water with his wing. It’s really great writing. As small as a poem could be. Yeah that’s a very very moving poem. I think that the young poets I mean overrate all their contemporaries and everybody alive. I feel like I am representing some old idea of the art when I recite Johnson and Landor to you.

I mean quite gifted poets who really --- if you have heard about older poetry they will say “oh you mean like [inaudible]Decaron and Mary Ann Moore, William Carlos Williams” the whole history of the thing so I think that the present is overrated always. Certainly it is at the moment.

Because it’s evanescent. It’s not going to last that long. Elizabeth Bishop is already pretty much outlasted Vaughn Monroe. I bet a young person like you then can I do with one row was. At one time at American popular culture the two most important categories of entertainer Rocrooner and Ben Leader. Those are the two things to be Crooner Ben Leader. One person was both, very prominent as both. His name was Vonman Ro. He was born in the same year as Elizabeth Bishop and for a good part of their lives if asked anybody who is more famous Ben and Ro or Elizabeth Bishop, its how Ro for sure. I dare say that right at the second within a few miles of us. There are many hundreds of people are thinking about Elizabeth Bishop and probably you and I are the only to think about Von and Ro and you don’t know Didly of adam.

It’s very hard to say what makes anything any human being does survive. What did I get from grandparents and my great grandparents? What are my kid’s grandparents going to know about me or care about that me and my generation have done. Most guesses it that are at least a little bit off often they are terrifically off and yet as an animal as a species for entirely dependant and things were transmitted from generation to generation. The technology that you and I are using right now is part of the human need to pass things on beyond anyone lifetime. We develop song and poetry and dance and religion and story telling and a whole host of things to keep things going. What are the best marriage customs? What are the best burial customs? What should you eat when? All of this. The animal is dependant upon. The animal is a very ineffective animal except for that ability to remember longer than its own life time and yet to predict what to use in internet world? What the content will be? Very mysterious and then we use these words like think and immediately that we got from the dead and only rarely do we begin to understand even little about their insides and their history. That’s life. Recorded On: 3/25/08

Re: Which poets informed your poetry?

Bigthink — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:54:47 +0100

: The honey of Ben Jonson.

Dante and the Problem of Translation

Bigthink — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:53:59 +0100

Not ever word has a direct translation.

Transcript:

The Inferno...that translation was a hypnotic kind of writing. It was so much fun as well as agony to try to solve an English equivalent of the structure and there is the exhiliration of knowing that I might miss something. I had something going from me that no one had ever done. Most of the translations that I know indeed all of the translations I know the ones I admire the ones I thought that were not so good we are kind of slow. Dante moves along, The Commedia is very rapid in Italian. The church arena is like a super charger lets you move from an opus film to a narrative to a conversation to philosophy, to a lyric very quickly and by translating his sentences rather his lines and by using rhymes that were rhymes for English like rhyming for, war, and car not for, door whore and with familiar rhymes making it hammer, summer and glimmer not hammer and glamour and slammer. Very involved. I had the technical means and working on that translation I possibly was thinking about Dante’s profound insights and the greatness of the poem in some part of my mind, but consciously and mostly I was thinking about the equipment of --- if you put a hinge hear and pull over the thread there, this part will come up and there can be a little rubber bumper there. It was like building a ship in a bottle or having a wonderful knitting pattern or sewing pattern or designing a guard where you are the calculating the shade, where the wall will be and the heights of the different things. It was the best puzzle. It was the best challenge of technique I had ever encountered plus it was exactly like writing. Only I didn’t have to think about what to say next.

Translate as I have said before is a misnomer, you can’t translate from Italian to English or Japanese or to Swedish. Translate means transliterate means to carry it across. You can’t carry a meaning across. The word in Italian is the word in Italian. An English word is a different word. Pan is not bread. We are pointing the same to the same reality. The words are different. They are rhyme with different things they come with different roots. The better word is the old word. People would use and Englishing ---- I did an Englishing of the Inferno and when you English it you try to be as faithful as possible to the literal meaning and you try to devise an equivalent for the form.

The most beautiful translation of the Commedia is by Longfellow who is a great master of sound and who was by profession a professor of Italian. He had lectured on Dante so often that probably in the course of his lectures and reading, he had translated a lot of the poem without even intending too. He translates it into blank first. It’s very useful as a trot those scholarships go with some cruxes differently from the way Longfellow does. It’s beautiful. You eat any 10 or 12 or 15, 20 lines of it, it’s gorgeous. It’s hard to read a lot of it particularly for an American reader, its Miltonic blank verse that he uses, so the word order that enables him to follow the Italian word order quite well line for line, but it does not flow in an idiomatic way for an modern American reader. So it’s very beautiful, it’s a good thing to read to remind yourself of the beauty of the poem and I admire it and respect it very much.

Recorded On: 3/25/08

Re: How do you compose?

Bigthink — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:53:55 +0100

How do you know a poem is done?

Transcript:

For me it has to be the sounds. For me there is a constant sort of flood of ideas and perceptions and you are not writing a poem until you manage to slow the flood down or shape a little bit by thinking of what’s flood backwards. Duffle what is it inside out? fold? So you unfold whatever has been cramped into the duffle bag of your consciousness blah blah. So it’s like noodling at a piano or smooshing paint around or I suppose a carver widdling or just getting the clay and the table clicking about how you or do response to different shapes that you make your hands into. So it starts very much with a physical sense of the language though you hope and starts with a kind of a very short easy way to say. You hope something that started in emotion. Something your heart or some thought you have had. You didn’t know who is starting upon. You don’t feel like you are making a work of art until you have the physical materials there. So someone’s painting or someone’s Jescarf [phonetic] or an actress performance starts with the position of the body or particular circumstance or particular tune. That’s when the work of art starts that the emotion, the ideas may have started when you are three years old.You write with your breath then your ear, so if you go back in the silly duffle bag palm you fiddle with it and you think why should fiddle mean a word than it’s just something aimless. Woofer said about near other fiddled burned. Is there any historical reality and where are those double "ff" words affable ineffable and then you go back to what you actually want talk about and it turns out to be yes, so what if so why does any of this matter and you say “well there is something about work and fiddling.” It sounds like its not serious work. It’s moving serious work. It’s said to be the most brutal of all the trades. It’s dangerous. They are always very hot or very cold. The material themselves compared to wood that you are framing with or plaster on your dry wall and the materials are kind of obdurate and ugly and in a way it’s a simple of civilization. What’s civilization? Duffle. The roof of a civil when he asked me if he can use the bathroom. I tried to be then yeah. So you are thinking vaguely about work and you are thinking vaguely about this befuddling set of consonants and vowels and you are hoping that between work, roofing and fiddling you might say a sentence where aligned that actually sounds meaningful and beautiful to you.You run your hand over it if you are sandpapering and you play it in tempo with the cords in your left hand putting the base and you trace the harmony. It’s physical to say the poem aloud. Sometimes you try to say it yourself when the light is out you really go to sleep and if you come to part you can do you turn the light on. Ask yourself is that a part I can better. So it’s you try it on just like if you have made an airplane.

Recorded On: 3/25/08

Re: What are your favorite words?

Bigthink — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:53:47 +0100

Anything with a good etymology.

Transcript:

I tend to like combinations of Latinate word and Anglo-Saxon words like smooth and crunchy as Wallo Steeven says tipped by the conservation swallows wings. So something like in a radical blaze or irritable edge. I like that contrast.

Well the word Thing is a very big factor in my new book. I tend to use the dictionary to look up words I know the meaning of and thing was originally a verb thing on it means to meet, to discuss, to argue, to be in accord, so thing on --- I think its an Iceland that the parliament building is called the thing’s sted, the place where you thing and the history of the word is I get it is that thing the noun was the issue the matter discussed in accord or a parliament or agreement and from being the issue or the matter discussed, it gradually became a physical thing. So that when we say he has a thing about her or there is a thing going on here we are actually harking back to the origin of the word. Also I like the history of immediately. It’s related to the news media. Everything that’s medium is in between, the medium of film, the medium of the internet, the medium of TV. Each of those media comes between the audience and an event or reality something is either hot or cold its medium to do it immediately means nothing in between, do it right away and that’s an example of --- it should be quite obvious, but one will say the word a 1000 times before realizing that its made of other words.

It’s a blessing and a curse to think about every word that you say. Its interesting those are both dramatic. Blessing and curse because they had to do with magic. It’s more beautiful ---- it’s like life and happy. They are basic foot. Pedestrian is more legal when it comes in the Latin I was on foot. I was a Pedestrian.

Recorded On: 3/25/08

Re: When did poetry first spark your interest?

Bigthink — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:52:52 +0100

Words have always fascinated Pinsky, though it was his failure as a saxophone player that finally pushed him into poetry.

Transcript:

I don’t think I ever got into a thing called poetry writing poems the way somebody in a more traditional college educated family might. From as long as I can remember I have thought about the sounds of words. I can’t remember a time where I wasn’t making little tunes out of the sentence and tuned ------ I can’t stop doing that and as long as I can remember I was thinking about consonants and vowels and also where words come from and there is a sentence that ends with a rhyme come from and when I learned how to read I liked reading the dictionary I not only like learning stuff from it I like the style of it. I like any of several varieties of blah blah. Two denoting as in one, but with the two, I like that and it didn’t occur to me that ---- and I like both when other people did it when I can do it to make up alternate obscene or ludicrous words to popular songs. I always like all that and it was much later that I learned there was an art based on all of this.

It was a gradual failure as a saxophone player. My ambition through my teens was --- I don’t know if its ---- its probably not as dignified as my ambition. My day dreams were to be a great jazz player. The main obstacle to --- the only obstacle to that was deficiency of talent and I did play in a band in high school. It was professional in the sense that we blew into the instruments and people gave us money. Actually I was the only one blowing in instrument. It was basically a drummer, base player, piano player and me. We played Latin music at the beach club, swimming pools in the summer and we play high school dances, bars.It wasn’t very glorious. My day dreams were glorious and when I went away to Rutgers there was one particular occasion I went back and I auditioned with these guys at a bar in Atlantic islands and as Wordsworth I might say I stunk up the place and my mind turned toward poetry. So almost overnight those day dreams of being a terrific musician changed into day dream of being a terrific poet. At that time I was reading, starting to be aware of this other art.

Yes and still quite badly. In my study I always have a keyboard with headphones, so that only I can hear what I do and from time to time including right now I take out the saxophone and have a set up and I honk in that usually when I try to make sure there is no one the house. My wife is a psychotherapist with an office in the house and I only will if I even think that there might be a patient in the house and I am quite sure that I am just using the key board with the headphones.

I don’t want to kid the music and I don’t want to embarrass myself and I am happy I took lessons for a while with the guy and I like playing with the Jamie hydrosol tapes which are rhythm sections. I am content. I am happy with that.Charlie Simik and I did the thing with mixing poetry and Jazz with some musicians a couple of months ago the jazz standard and to do something like that again in May. I like going on stage with musicians. I have done some narratives for classical music. I did a series of appearance of the tuckers string quartet. I am content to pretend to be one of the musicians and I prefer that to pretending to be a musician. I pretend to be a musician in the privacy of my own home.

Recorded On: 3/25/08

Growing Up Jewish

Bigthink — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:52:50 +0100

Description: It would take four Russian novels to explain why Pinsky's mother missed his bar mitzvah.

Transcript:

I grew up very aware that they are infinite number of degrees and ways of being Jewish. It has occurred to me that just about every Jewish person thinks that there are Jews who are too Jewish and others who are not Jewish enough and it goes right from the people who have four refrigerators who think the people with eight refrigerators are excessive down to the people who never go on the holy holidays, but they like telling Jewish jokes and I had quite a lot of the range in my family, my dad’s father Dave Pinsky when I was a kid, he had a bar called the Broadway tavern and he had been a bootlegger in the --- when liquor was illegal, he was in the liquor business and when I knew him he was married to a Methodist woman and had a wife three and he had a Christmas tree that wihtout exaggerating its probably seven or eight hundred feet tall and my other grandfather ----- the house was Kosher though my parents were kind of secular people in a nominal way we are affiliated with the orthodox synagogue and we did have to set the dishes and we didn’t have bacon in the house. If my dad and I want to order a pizza with pepperoni on it, we had to eat it off the piano bench, couldn’t put it on the table, that degree of being Jewish.I think people often make the mistake of inventing a kind of nice ethnic mom and dad for everybody if you are Italian or Jewish or you are Wasp or you are Irish until you actually know a person I think we make the mistake of filling any kind of cliche [phonetic] from some sitcom or movie and I didn’t have a nice old Jewish mom and dad. Like most people they were weird.

I have a problem which I observe that for reasons that are hard to explain my mom missed my bar mitzvah and 10 years later she missed my brothers. Just didn’t take in of the ceremony and that sounds if the family was divorced or they lived all over the place. No. Just at the crucial moment you realize you don’t have the right hat, you stay home something or other and you don’t just explain things like that. You have to write four Russian novels to explain them.

Recorded On: 3/25/08