Robert Pinsky.

`I don't think of myself as tremendously public," says the most publicly visible U.S. Poet Laureate in the thirteen-year history of that position. "I have spent most of my life in a room like this one, in a house with my kids." We are sitting in Robert Pinsky's large attic study, drinking South African Rooibois tea while blue jays scream in the yard. A saxophone is propped on a stand near one wall.

Robert Pinsky is the author of five books of poetry, most recently, The Figured Wheel (Noonday Press), which brings together his four previous books along with new poems. He has translated the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, and his 1994 translation of Dante's Inferno (Noonday Press) put that 600-year-old poem on bestseller lists. He has also written three books of criticism as well as The Sounds of Poetry (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), which describes the sensual and intellectual pleasures that sound gives to the experience of reading poems. Known as a teacher whose enthusiasm is contagious, he is a professor in the Creative Writing Program at Boston University

Although he has been a private man for most of his life, Pinsky's writings repeatedly consider the civic responsibilities of poetry and the poet. "We still face the classic question or challenge of American poetry: What is, or would be, a democratic poetry?" he asks in an essay published in his book Poetry and the Worm (Ecco Press). And he shares with Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and Frank O'Hara a concern with representing, celebrating, and criticizing a vibrant, complicated nation.

Much of Pinsky's widespread public recognition is due to his regular appearances on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, where he reads and explicates poems that also often function as cultural commentaries. In January, for instance, in response to the snarled Senate debate on procedures for the trial of Bill Clinton, Pinsky read a nonsense poem by Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland.

But Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project has also received attention, earning him such media nicknames as "The People's Poet" and "Poetry's Preacher." The project collects video and audio recordings of Americans reading aloud the poems they love and talking about why they love them.

The project now includes favorite poem readings around the country, an extensive web site featuring videos and sound recordings of the readings at www.favoritepoem.org, and plans for a Norton anthology and a video archive.

Pinsky motions me over to his computer and pulls up the web site. He clicks on a small photograph of a woman in a driver's cap and sunglasses--Bridget Stearns, from Ketchikan, Alaska, one of the first people recorded as part of the project.

"Here in southeast Alaska, the winters are hard. And it's not unheard of for people to fall into a depression," says Stearns. "Last winter, it was my turn. I think this poem spoke to me because its theme is isolation, and one feature of depression is just that. You feel cut off from other people. You can see them out there mouthing words at you, but it's like they're through frosted glass.... But it has a little bit of a tone of defiance and bravery and a chirpiness that I liked."

We listen as she reads the Stevie Smith poem "Not Waving but Drowning."

   Nobody heard him, the dead man,
   But still he lay moaning:
   I was much further out than you thought

   And not waving but drowning.
   Poor chap, he always loved larking
   And now he's dead
   It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,

   They said.
   Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
   (Still the dead one lay moaning)
   I was much too far out all my life
   And not waving but drowning.

Stearns says that she shared the poem with friends in an effort to feel a connection with other humans. "It encouraged me to keep thrashing and to keep waving," she concludes. "It helped me."

Pinsky leans back in his chair. "Now, the teacher, instead of showing the kids a video of a professor talking about the poem, or the poet reading the poem, or an actor reading the poem in some impressive way," he says, "could just send the kids to that."

Pinsky believes that poetry belongs to a larger population than a specialized, professional elite. This has led him to defend poetry slams, promote National Poetry Month (which is in April), and applaud magnetic poetry (word sets that people play with on their refrigerators). In a 1998 New York Times op-ed, he wrote: "Poetry isn't only bodily, it is also civic. Poetry month and the posting of poems on subway cars may violate some notion of the form's intimate quality. But the civic space is where language and makers live."

Q: You've been called an "activist Poet Laureate." Why?

Robert Pinsky: I think that's true of me as it was true of Bob Hass before me and Rita Dove. We started a little sequence of people who were using the position in an activist way.

Bob Hass had done very wonderful things with literacy. He had a big conference of nature poets and nature writers together with ecological writers. He continues to write the "Poet's Choice" column in The Washington Post, which is a terrific thing for poetry. Rita had done wonderful things with poetry and the schools and with African-Americans. I had these poets as models and I needed to do something that felt like me.

I have this enormous project--the Favorite Poem Project.

Q: How did you come up with it?

Pinsky: I have become very aware that other countries have a unifying folk culture or a social class that considers itself the aristocratic hereditary caretaker of art. And we are relatively free of either of those sources. I don't think this is cause either for national shame or for jingoism. It's what we are. In many ways, we are making our peoplehood up and our culture up as we go along. There is something improvisatory about it. And that creates special opportunities and circumstances for the practitioners of the art of poetry.

I remember an occasion when my good friend Frank Bidart and I were watching his extremely elegant video equipment. And he showed me a Willie Nelson concert tape. It's a very good concert tape. And at the end, the audience is tearing at their garments and screaming and weeping and Willie is on stage doing the final number and the credits are rolling. And Frank said, "Now, that's what a poetry reading should feel like."

And I said, "Well, it's easy for him. He doesn't have to do all his own material."

Then Frank said, "Well, we ought to give poetry readings and do lots of material."

And he and I have. We read nothing by ourselves. We read poems by Shakespeare and Elizabeth Bishop and Frank O'Hara and whoever we feel like--though we tend not to read anyone living. We enjoy it immensely.

The Favorite Poem Project is partly to demonstrate that there is more circulation of poetry and more life of poetry than there might seem with the stereotype.

I must say that the Favorite Poem readings, beyond my expectation, are very moving. There are hundreds of them. I've gone to seven or eight. I was at a reading in Atlanta the other day. We had kind of an angry seventies Amiri Baraka poem, followed by a woman reading a very short [Anna] Akhmatova (reading it to her brother who was destroyed psychologically by eleven months of combat in Vietnam), and a ten-year-old reading "Casey at the Bat," and the gardening columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reading a lovely little Edna St. Vincent Millay poem about spring and flowers.

These people are all up on the stage together, taking turns reading their poems. Each is essentially saying, "I have a treasure that I want to show the rest of you." None of them is a great artist. None of them says, "I made this." They're saying, "I have this treasure, something I value." And you can see them visibly respecting one another. So those people I just described were talking to one another very earnestly and solicitously and in a celebratory way after the reading. The audience senses this. These readings are good for communities.

In Provincetown, which is a Portuguese fishing community as well as a gay community, a Portuguese-American woman in her eighties read a love poem by the sixteenth-century poet Camoes, translated by her son who stood up with her and read the translation. They were followed by Musty Chiffon, the drag queen, and a tree surgeon reading D.H. Lawrence. And we had a kid who looked like she was about in junior high school who read a poem about the sea, and she said she'd lost several members of her family to the sea. And that was Provincetown. Each city has been different.

If you take any office building in any city in America, I can promise you that there will be people in the secretarial pool who have poems they love. I assure you there will be managerial people who will have poems they love. I can assure you that there are people on the custodial staff--folks who empty the wastebaskets and clean the floors--who will have poems they love. And I assure you that there will be people on the board of directors of that corporation who will have poems they love.

And you could have a reading bringing those people together. The poems would not all be in English. They would vary widely in kind and in literary quality. But as those people describe why that poem is of personal importance to each of them, you would see a very basic human phenomenon of communal support and appreciation and respect.

Q: What kinds of favorite poems are you getting?

Pinsky: It's all broken down on the web site, on the basis of about 10,000 letters. It will change. I hope that somebody will see the database and say "there's not enough Gertrude Stein, or there's not enough whatever," and write a letter in. The single most selected author so far is Robert Frost. Some of the authors in the top fifty are authors I don't personally much admire, but there are Americans who like poems by them.

Certainly, it is a demonstration that there are many, many Americans of many kinds for whom poetry and a particular poem have importance.

Q: Do you have a favorite poem?

Pinsky: There is a list of probably fifty. It rotates. "Sailing to Byzantium" [by William Butler Yeats], "Ode to a Nightingale" [by John Keats], "Eros Turannos" [by Edward Arlington Robinson], "To Earthward" [by Robert Frost].

Q: You've written about "the saving vulgarity of poetry." What do you mean by "vulgarity"?

Pinsky: I think the word for me has to do with the fact that there's kind of a built-in universality to the art, which needs so little equipment. It's basically somebody's breath and mouth. Though it's an intellectual art, it's also a bodily art. There is a cerebral, intellectual part of it and there is also an animal part of it, and that gives it a peculiar intimacy.

Q: Do you have a vision of a just and liberated society?

Pinsky: I'm not sure how to answer because the history of my century is a history in which the visionary has repeatedly collapsed into nightmare. I am almost genetically incapable of becoming a true conservative or a reactionary. I was raised in an immigrant town in this country. I certainly aspire to a better society than what we have--more just economic arrangements, more equitable distribution of material goods and agricultural goods.

But Pol Pot was a visionary. And Hitler was a visionary. Stalin, perhaps, wasn't a visionary, but he cleaved to a vision.

As I reflect on the history of my century, I feel a hesitation about the notion of a sweeping vision. I think it's a powerful electoral issue and philosophical issue right now if you think about how much we owe to a kind of gradualistic, ameliorist sense of politics.

Q: What about an example like Martin Luther King Jr.?

Pinsky: King's vision was not global or ideological. Its bases were theological rather than economic, cosmopolitan rather than nationalistic, and so ameliorative rather than revolutionary that left liberals were dismissing him as irrelevant in The New York Review of Books.

Q: How do you understand the political work of poetry?

Pinsky: I tend not to think of the political nature of a work of art in relation to advocacy. I guess I'm enough influenced by literary theory to think that advocacy is not the same as the political significance. One obvious political meaning of poetry that we've already touched on in this conversation is that every poem implies: Who does poetry belong to? So it's an implicit definition of what social group or ambience is the providence or the receptor of the work. And I like it when it's kept a very open and complicated and funny question.

I would love to make works in which the conception of what is high or low or middle socially or intellectually or aesthetically becomes more moot and shimmering.

Q: So what you're talking about is changing language?

Pinsky: I think all good writing changes language. I'm not very interested in writing that is competent or earnest, but doesn't change the language very much.

Q: You focus on the city in your poetry. Why are so many people attracted to that right now?

Pinsky: I think Americans, just as we are feeling tender and protective about the natural environment, we're feeling tender and protective about the neighborhood life and the downtown life that once were taken for granted. And the great romance of the city, from Baudelaire through Carol Reed, is not a romance that we can repose in. It has some of the affectiveness of a wounded thing as well as a very powerful thing.

Q: What was your childhood like?

Pinsky: I grew up in a town [Long Branch, New Jersey] that had a very strong historical fabric going back to the nineteenth century. It was the summer capital for several presidents. The hotel was the Garfield Grand Hotel. Garfield died in Long Branch. Lincoln had come to Long Branch. It was Woodrow Wilson's summer capital, as well.

My family had been in the, town for a few generations. My grandfather had been a well-known bootlegger and now he had a bar across the street from the police station and the town hall. My other grandfather washed the windows in many of the stores in Long Branch. So, though you'd have to call them working-class figures in many ways, they were important figures in the town, as was my father.

My father and mother graduated from Long Branch High, the same way I did, my brother and sister did, and our cousins. So I was aware of the historical context--both in the macro and in the micro sense. And I've often thought that my response to books like Faulkner's The Hamlet, Ulysses, and One Hundred Years of Solitude partly is determined by that sense of a town or community that self-consciously sees itself as solemn and grand.

Long Branch was a largely Italian town, and there was a beautiful, expansive Italian culture of food, music, and communal life. There was a new honkytonk boardwalk in Long Branch and a summer racetrack--so that flash and glamour and money came down from New York. And I'm grateful for all of those things.

Q: Do they influence your writing?

Pinsky: Almost everything I write is about the history of things and where things come from. There are a lot of parades in my writing. There was a circus that came to Long Branch, went right down my street because I lived near downtown--a circus parade with elephants and horses and dancing girls and clowns and lions in cages--right by my house. And the racetrack was exciting and special, the merry-go-round, great hot dog stands on the boardwalk. I hope a sense of gaiety and diversity and cultural excitement and cultural mixing--there were a lot of black families in my neighborhood as well as Italian and Jewish families--I hope that the vitality and aspiration of that ambience comes into my work.

Q: Did anything happen to you early on that changed or deeply molded your life?

Pinsky: My parents were witty people. They had good taste in clothes. They were good dancers. They were prized and sort of like impoverished royalty. My mother listened to the opera on Saturday mornings. They were very funny as well as very terrifying in their fights, or crazy spells. I was an only child for five or six years, and I was a very adored only child of parents who felt themselves to be visibly beautiful and exciting people. I was a part of that charm. I was encouraged to be right. And I'm grateful to them for that. I think it's good for people to be adored.

My mother fell on her head in 1951. And the family life was severely crippled and fractured by that event.

Q: What happened?

Pinsky: She had a very severe concussion. Whether for physiological or psychological reasons, for many years she suffered from vertigo, hypersensitivity to sounds and to light, and she was very deeply unhappy for a long time, and erratic.

There was a certain tension between my parents, a dissatisfaction. We didn't have much money--in a two-bedroom apartment, with eventually two children and a baby. It was not what my parents would have considered at all a desirable part of town. So, the scarcity of money was a part of it.

Q: Has the fact that you grew up working class been important to your writing?

Pinsky: I think it has given me perhaps an appreciation of my good fortune. I have an acute sense of amazement that I can earn my bread by teaching poetry and by writing these things that occur to me and that I put in a certain shape or form to sound a certain way, and people pay attention to it. It may be that if my mom and dad had gone to college or been writers, I'd be less amazed by it.

Q: How did you start writing poetry?

Pinsky: I was the sort of kid who had fantasies of being an artist of one kind or another. If I saw a Fred Astaire movie, I came out trying to dance. I had fantasies of designing buildings or cars or lamps or domestic objects. I had fantasies of being a painter, an actor, and a musician. (I went rather far with that fantasy. I played in a band, played at dances and inglorious gigs as a high school student.) And all along, I'd been thinking about the sounds of words obsessively. I was writing songs and thinking about the longs and the shorts of the syllables and how they were different from the stresses and the unstresses, and pitch on the one hand and duration on the other, and cadences and sentences. When I got to college, I found out that poetry was an art based on these things. Very quickly, fantasies of being a great musician changed to fantasies of being a great poet.

Q: Do you like being a poet, or would you rather be something else?

Pinsky: I like being a poet very, very much. If I could play the saxophone the way Dexter Gordon does or Sonny Rollins does, I would probably rather do that. But I can't.

I think the rhythms in a lot of my writing are an attempt to create that feeling of a beautiful, gorgeous jazz solo that gives you more emotion and some more and coming around with some more, and it's the same but it's changed and the rhythm is very powerful, but it is also lyricism. I think I've been trying to create something like that in my writing for a long time. II

   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.

--Robert Pinsky

Reprinted from The Figured Wheel, with permission of the author.

Anne-Marie Cusac is Managing Editor of The Progressive. To submit a poem to the Favorite Poem Project, write a letter that includes your name, address, occupation, age, a bit of background information, the name of the poem, the name of the poet, and if possible your phone number, fax number, or e-mail address. Write a few sentences about why you love this poem. Send submissions to: Robert Pinsky, The Favorite Poem Project, Boston University, 236 Bay State Road, Boston, MA 02215, or e-mail [e-mail]. Poems submitted by their authors will not be accepted. The official deadline for entries is April 30, but Pinsky says the project will allow for submissions that straggle in after that date.