Bøker av Robert Pinsky

In late-1940s Long Branch, a historic but run-down Jersey Shore resort town, in a neighbourhood of Italian, Black and Jewish families, Robert Pinsky began his unlikely journey to becoming a poet. Descended from a bootlegger grandfather, an athletic father, and a rebellious tomboy mother, Pinsky was an unruly but articulate student whose obsession with the rhythms and melodies of speech inspired him to write.Pinsky traces the roots of his poetry, with its wide and fearless range, back to the voices of his neighbourhood, to music and a distinctly American tradition of improvisation, with influences including Mark Twain and Ray Charles, Marianne Moore and Mel Brooks, Emily Dickinson and Sid Caesar, Dante Alighieri and the Orthodox Jewish liturgy. He reflects on how writing poetry helped him make sense of life's challenges, such as his mother's traumatic brain injury, and on his notable public presence, including an unprecedented three terms as United States poet laureate.Candid, engaging and wry, Jersey Breaks offers an intimate self-portrait and a unique poetic understanding of American culture.

Quick, joyful, and playfully astringent, with surprising comparisons and examples, this collection takes an unconventional approach to the art of poetry. Instead of rules, theories, or recipes, Singing School emphasizes ways to learn from great work: studying magnificent, monumentally enduring poems and how they are made- in terms borrowed from the "singing school" of William Butler Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium."Robert Pinsky's headnotes for each of the 80 poems and his brief introductions to each section take a writer's view of specific works: William Carlos Williams's "Fine Work with Pitch and Copper" for intense verbal music; Emily Dickinson's "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" for wild imagination in matter-of-fact language; Robert Southwell's "The Burning Babe" for surrealist aplomb; Wallace Stevens's "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm" for subtlety in meter. Included are poems by Aphra Behn, Allen Ginsberg, George Herbert, John Keats, Mina Loy, Thomas Nashe, and many other master poets.This anthology respects poetry's mysteries in two senses of the word: techniques of craft and strokes of the inexplicable.

This latest edition of the Cambridge-based literary magazine introduces, in addition to an exciting mix of poetry, ideas essays, fiction, and comics, a new focus on science and on food writing with the new "Zest!" section.

The new Resistance Issue of Pangyrus Literary Magazine features many of the artists who've lit up the stage during Resistance Mic!'s first and second seasons at the OBERON in Harvard Square: Robert Pinsky, Steve Almond, Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, Kazim Ali, Kim Stafford, Brenda Hillman, Regie Gibson, Anne Champion, Krysten Hill, Jennifer Jean, Tim McCarthy, and many more. Full of hope, outrage, humor and insight, the magazine is the necessary companion to impossible times.

The poems in Robert Pinsky's At the Foundling Hospital consider personality and culture as improvised from loss: a creative effort so pervasive it is invisible. An extreme example is the abandoned new-born.

Explores the dreams and nightmares of small towns - their welcoming yet suffocating, warm yet prejudicial character during their heyday, from the early nineteenth century through World War II. This book considers how small towns can be small-minded - in some cases viciously judgmental and oppressively provincial.

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.

Sadness and Happiness: Poems by Robert Pinsky.

Contains a selection of poems from the poet's career.