Robert Pinsky

Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky appeared on poet Grace Cavalieri’s Poet and the Poem program at the Library of Congress on Nov. 10, 1999, to recite poetry and promote his Favorite Poem Project. He discussed his well-known theory that poetry is a vocal art or, as Cavalieri described it, a “musical celebration of air.”

“The medium of the poem is the audience’s body,” he explained. “It is the vocal art, but not necessarily a performative art. So though the medium of the poem is breath, it’s air—that is the medium, the things between the feelings and ideas of the poet and the reader—it is the reader’s breath—your voice or my voice—saying Emily Dickinson’s words or Yeats’ words, it is not necessarily Emily Dickinson or Yeats performing their poem, or a trained and wonder actor performing the poem, it’s whoever wants to say the poem. And that seems to me to be primary and it does give poetry a particularly intimate and personal place, but it also means the art is inherently on a human scale. It’s by its nature on the scale of one person.”

Pinsky also spoke of his love of doing difficult things; it is a “normal proclivity of the human animal to like to engage difficulty and cope with it.” Cavalieri asked why, if there a universal attraction of difficulty, all students don’t do well in school, to which Pinsky replied, “They are all good students, not necessarily in school or in the subjects studied in school. They are students of fashion, or of sports, or of evil, alas.”

To learn more about Robert Pinsky, read his profile on findingDulcinea.