Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry

The University Center for Human Values Series

by Robert Pinsky

The place of poetry in modern democracy is no place, according to conventional wisdom. The poet, we hear, is a casualty of mass entertainment and prosaic public culture, banished to the artistic sidelines to compose variations on insipid themes for a dwindling audience. Robert Pinsky, however, argues that this gloomy diagnosis is as wrongheaded as it is familiar. Pinsky, whose remarkable career as a poet itself undermines the view, writes that to portray poetry and democracy as enemies is to radically misconstrue both. The voice of poetry, he shows, resonates with profound themes at the very heart of democratic culture.


There is no one in America better to write on this topic. One of the country's most accomplished poets, Robert Pinsky served an unprecedented two terms as America's Poet Laureate (1997-2000) and led the immensely popular multimedia Favorite Poem Project, which invited Americans to submit and read aloud their favorite poems. Pinsky draws on his experiences and on characteristically sharp and elegant observations of individual poems to argue that expecting poetry to compete with show business is to mistake its greatest democratic strength--its intimate, human scale--as a weakness.


As an expression of individual voice, a poem implicitly allies itself with ideas about individual dignity that are democracy's bedrock, far more than is mass participation. Yet poems also summon up communal life.. Even the most inward-looking work imagines a reader. And in their rhythms and cadences poems carry in their very bones the illusion and dynamic of call and response. Poetry, Pinsky writes, cannot help but mediate between the inner consciousness of the individual reader and the outer world of other people. As part of the entertainment industry, he concludes, poetry will always be small and overlooked. As an art--and one that is inescapably democratic--it is massive and fundamental.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Essays, Theory

112 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Robert Pinsky is an American poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator. From 1997 to 2000, he served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Pinsky is the author of nineteen books, most of which are collections of his own poetry. His published work also includes critically acclaimed translations, including The Inferno of Dante Alighieri and The Separate Notebooks by Czesław Miłosz. He teaches at Boston University and is the poetry editor at Slate.
wikipedia

Reviews

[Jeffery Mcnary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before a rapt audience, Robert Pinsky recently stepped to the podium of the Fullerton Room of the venerable Art Institute of Chicago. He acknowledged the richness of the place and the art itself 21st century Chicago has become. With his understated grace and usual dignity, the former Poet Laureate of the United States paused, looked around the filled to capacity auditorium, and launched,

I drowned in the fire of having you, I burned
In the river of not having you, we lived
Together for hours in a house of a thousand rooms
And we were parted for a thousand years.
Ten minutes ago we raised our children who cover
The earth and have forgotten that we existed

It was not maya, it was not a ladder to perfection,
It was this cold sunlight falling on this warm earth.

When I turned you went to Hell. When your ship
Fled the battle I followed you and lost the world
Without regret but with stormy recriminations.
Someday far down that corridor of horror the future
Someone who buys this picture of you for the frame
At a stall in a dwindled city will study your face
And decide to harbor it for a little while longer
From the waters of anonymity, the acids of breath

Then silence. And caught in my seat by the crashes of his verse, I heard Pinsky say, “ ‘Antique’, from Gulf Music, it’s the second to last poem in the book.” Almost whimsically he continued, “I was angry at the time I wrote it. I was angry with, with Bush, and Cheney, and Gonzales, and our foreign policy. Then it just became something else. It evolved into something else.” More silence. And from what I could tell, no one exhaled.

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

The essay distinguishes the job of reading poetry from reading anything else. The important thing for Pinsky is understanding the special qualities of verse. Yes, there's music. But Pinsky takes it beyond the music alone, and proposes that my reading a poem to myself is akin to a personal performance I do for myself. The poem has personal reverberations. It makes me think more intently on how I make a poem for myself.

My only criticism is that the essay is not really long enough for even this booklet. I would rather see it as the opening for a longer collection of essays.

[John Cates]

I don't (or am unable) to read poetry for pleasure or insight - although I try - I read this in the hope that it might help - it didn't - which is not to say it's bad it just didn't reach me - People whose opinions I respect remind me that I'm missing out on the wide wonderful world of poetry, encourages me to stick with it - I shall

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pinsky's book is rooted in the Favorite Poem Project, and it has a great deal to claim about poetry in America and in cultures that are segmented or fragmented due to differences. This book will be one I return to and hope to add to my own personal collection. I'm hoping to pick up some more nonfic books about poetry in the coming year.

[Jo O'Donnell · Rating 2 out of 5]

A hop-scotchy polishing-up of a lecture by the author

[Cathyann · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting and fresh perspective on the voice of poetry in America today.

[Dr G · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reasonably interesting but really nothing revelatory.

[Kent Winward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pinsky recognizes the power of the poetic voice to impact democracy, but more importantly to express democracy and culture. Just the right mix of the academic and the real life.