Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Who is very short compared to Tyler Meier.
[LAUGHTER]
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much for coming out tonight, Robert, for coming back
to us.
I am so honored to introduce to you Robert Pinsky.
This is an opportune time for us to welcome Robert Pinsky back
to Tucson, not only to celebrate his wonderful new book, Proverbs
of Limbo, but to be reminded of all
he has done to nourish the civic life of poetry
in America, the necessity of poetry to democratic life.
He's the much awarded author of nine books of poetry,
9 books of nonfiction, if I'm counting right,
a highly praised translation of Dante's Inferno, inventor of I
don't know what to call it, a novel that is,
a video game in which the reader player determines
what happens next.
And a collaborator with jazz players in performance,
and a professor at BU's graduate creative writing program.
A man of immense talent, energy, and generosity.
Appointed to the position of US Poet Laureate
in 1997, where he served three terms,
he launched the Favorite Poems Project, putting a call out
not to poets and intellectuals, but to the general populace
to send in their poems, hoping maybe you'd
get 100 poems to build an archive
at the Library of Congress.
He was flooded, and what came in became a feature
on the PBS NewsHour.
Where you might see a guy in a hard hat leaning up
against a caterpillar backhoe reciting Walt Whitman.
[LAUGHTER]
Thanks.
Early in my writing life, I'd been fascinated
by his second book, an explanation of America that
came out in 1979 because I was struggling with wanting
to write a long poem.
This was a work that was philosophical, learned,
tied to landscape and the shopping center, Malcolm X
and Horace, and yet a poem that's
intimate in explaining the nation to his daughter.
I asked him how he held it all together,
he gave me this advice walking the narrow side streets
in Provincetown Mass, a story I told my students for years,
and I probably made this up by now.
You're skating on a long, narrow pond in the winter,
and you want to get to that hut at the far end
where they're serving hot chocolate.
But you notice over here there's a little stream
coming in you want to go over there and explore it.
You notice over here birch trees falling down
at the edge of the pond.
You skate over there and you keep--
but ultimately, you get down there.
Sounds a little like jazz.
Sort of?
Ring any bells?
In 2002, he published this marvelous small book, Democracy,
Culture, and the Voice of Poetry,
a book worth revisiting now, for it
yokes the private life of writing poetry
with its public reception among readers or audience.
An analogy for American democracy
with its individualism and collectivity.
An inspiring book that speaks eloquently of the place
of poetry in American life.
His new book, Proverbs of Limbo, has a kind
of punctuated rhythm of conversation and jazz,
sweeping experience and emotion up
into riffs of our in-betweenness.
New Jersey childhood and Jewish heretive, Akhmatova and Debbie,
Jackie Robinson and Ezra Pound, family, aging, death.
He begins with "Poem of Names," and the naming is such a welcome
recurring riff allowing him to dispense with that pedagogical
pretense of referring to the speaker of the poem,
but rather claiming it is I, Robert Pinsky.
These words are those of Robert Pinsky speaking.
And names abound in the book and unexpected richness
of human detail.
Look, real people here among us, Uncle Leo,
who was a plumber with dirty fingernails,
and who was the valedictorian of his eighth grade class
but left school to join the family plumbing business.
And it's an authenticity that seems to say, let's
cut the bullshit, while at the same time
embracing the life of the mind of the street
and of the life of history.
In an influential essay, titled The Responsibilities
of the Poet, he said that it was our responsibility
to understand the tradition from which we came as poets, to pick
it up and make it new, to pass it
on to those who come after it.
A task he has done with great panache and honor.
Please welcome dear Robert Pinsky back to Tucson.
[APPLAUSE, CHEER]