Robert Pinsky Quotations

When I was a kid, there was unhappiness in my family - was dealt with partly by escaping to television. And from a very early age, for whatever reason, I became scornful and resistant to and angry about that. And some other time in my life, I realized that there's a lot I loved in television.

When I was a teenager, just about the only thing I could do right was play music. In my graduating class, I was certainly not voted 'Most Literary Boy.' I can assure you I was not voted 'Mostly Likely to Succeed.' I was voted 'Most Musical Boy.' And the music led to the poetry.

New Jersey is the most poetic state: close enough to New York to be urban and cosmopolitan, far enough to be desirous and unsure; densely populated, but full of farms and woods, with the most deer of any state.

Poetry is not easy. Or should I say, real poetry is not easy.

Poetry is a vocal art for me - but not necessarily a performative one. It might be reading to oneself or recalling some lines by memory.

I am a frustrated saxophone player. If I could, I would abandon all of my books, and I would trade it all if I could play the way people I admire play.

I think art is not an ornament or refinement at the fringes of human intelligence, I think it's at the center. It's at the core.

Jazz and poetry both involve a structure that may be familiar and to some extent predictable. And then, you try to create as much surprise and spontaneity and feeling and variation while respecting that structure.

I think my first experience of art, or the joy in making art, was playing the horn at some high-school dance or bar mitzvah or wedding, looking at a roomful of people moving their bodies around in time to what I was doing. There was a piano player, a bass player, a drummer, and my breath making the melody.

Method involves a slavish addiction to laws, and we can only aspire to anarchy.

To me, writing is a matter of voice. I think like that. The expression I sometimes use to myself is 'actual song.' That what I do is somewhere on the line between speaking to you as I am now and actual song. And the things I love when I say one of those poems to myself - it's a little bit like singing, it's a little bit like speaking.

'Write' is almost the wrong verb for what I do. I think 'compose' is more accurate because you're trying to make the sounds in your mind and in your voice. So I compose while I'm driving or in the shower.

Vivid and reflective, documentary and visionary, re-imagining the city of New York with the same urgency that ponders the opening words of Genesis, this is a passionate, artful and re-readable book.

The wonderful 17th Century poet, Robert Herrick, wrote a poem entitled, 'To Live Merrily and to Trust to Good Verses.' Easy to say, Robert Herrick; not always easy to do. But it's a good slogan, I think.

The test of whether it's poetry is: does it sound beautiful when you say the words over, in your mind or your voice, with no skilled performer, no music, just the sounds and meanings in the words themselves,

All questions of process require an answer that begins with a very important sentence, and the sentence is: 'Everybody is different.' Whatever way of working you name - methodical, haphazard, gets up early in the morning, sleeps all day, works at night, revises immensely, never revises at all - someone has made great work with that way.

It's true that school can poison things - some people hate W.C. Williams' little poem about the wheelbarrow because somebody bullied them with it in school,

For an American, there's no automatic place where people love the art of poetry. There's not a social class that considers poetry its property the way in some countries there's a snob value to the art.

For a lot of people, well-meaning teaching has made poetry seem arcane, difficult, a kind of brown-knotting medicine that might be good for you but doesn't taste so good. So I tried to make a collection of poetry that would be fun. And that would bring out poetry as an art, rather than the challenge to say smart things.

The best argument for teaching poetry is to put a three-year-old or a four-year-old and read Dr. Seuss, or Robert Louis Stevenson, and to feel how the child and you are engaging in something that's really basic to the animal, which is passing on in these rhythmic ways, something that came from somewhere.

I'm far from immune to the American, perhaps historically male, prejudice toward practical and physical competence; I hope I've also considered that prejudice enough to have some distance from it.

I love form, but I'm not interested in forms. I've never written a sonnet or villanelle or sestina or any of that. For me, it's a kind of line. It's a rhythm. It's something musical.

If you want to make films, you'll watch Kurosawa. If you want to play a violin, you listen to Seghetti. Same with somebody who has the ambition to play in the NBA. I watch a basketball game; I enjoy it. Somebody who really wants to learn to play is studying whatever is most magnificent that's going on out there.

If I live near a dancer or a painter, or a clarinet player comes from my neighborhood, I take some pleasure in that, feel a little more as if I come from someplace in particular.

I delight sometimes in saying to - as when I'm a teacher, I love saying, 'This is really important, so don't write it down.' To me, what you retain is a very important filter.

I don't like to have a calm, orderly, quiet place to work. I often compose while driving, compose in my head. It is true that I wrote my little book, 'The Sounds of Poetry, A Brief Guide,' almost entirely in airplanes and airport departure lounges.

Poetry is the most bodily of the arts.

The poetry I love is written with someone's voice and I believe its proper culmination is to be read with someone's voice. And the human voice in that sense is not electronically reproduced or amplified.

For Aliki Barnstone, poetry seems a natural medium. The vision and cadences of these poems suggest a sensibility for which poetry is as inevitable as breathing or eating.

Even in the scorched and frozen world of the dead after the holocaust The wheel as it turns goes on accreting ornaments.

To talk about the reality of life here and the work that you do here at the university.

Autobiography is a genre notorious for falsehood.

The last thing a young artist should do in poetry or any other field is think about whats in style, whats current, what are the trends. Think instead of what you like to read, what do you admire, what you like to listen to in music. What do you like to look at in architecture? Try to make a poem that has some of those qualities.

Poetry’s medium is the individual chest and throat and mouth of whoever undertakes to say the poem.

An artist needs not so much an audience, as to feel a need to answer, a promise to respond....a good feeling about his art.

Poetic language is singularly appropriate for recounting the life of the king who is traditionally accepted as the author of the poetic psalms, some of which are included in the narrative.

In the particular presence of memorable language we can find a reminder of our ability to know and retain knowledge itself: the brightness wherein all things come to see.

If a poem is written well, it was written with the poet's voice and for a voice. Reading a poem silently instead of saying a poem is like the difference between staring at sheet music and actually humming or playing the music on an instrument.

The medium of poetry is not words, the medium of poetry is not lines-it is the motion of air inside the human body, coming out through the chest and the voice box and through the mouth to shape sounds that have meaning. It's bodily.

The medium of poetry is a human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the mouth. In this sense, poetry is just as physical or bodily an art as dancing.

In jazz, as in poetry, there is always that play between what’s regular and what’s wild. That has always appealed to me.

There is something cathartic about having absolute loss articulated.

Art will not solve your problems. It will not enable you to live merrily.

An underestimated element in poetry, that reading aloud makes clear, is the pause. I mean especially the force of a pause or a couple of pauses close together, contrasted with a longer unit of grammar.

If what you want to do is make good art, decide whats good and try to imitate it.

Sometimes the ideas that mean the most to you will feel true long before you can quite formulate them or justify them.

The heart grows brutal feeding on fantasies.

Deciding to remember, and what to remember, is how we decide who we are.

Whatever makes a child want to glue macaroni on a paper plate and paint the assemblage and see it on the refrigerator - that has always been strong in me.

A sentence is like a tune. A memorable sentence gives its emotion a melodic shape. You want to hear it again, say it—in a way, to hum it to yourself. You desire, if only in the sound studio of your imagination, to repeat the physical experience of that sentence. That craving, emotional and intellectual but beginning in the body with a certain gesture of sound, is near the heart of poetry.

When I had no roof I made audacity my roof.

Poetry's medium is not merely light as air, it is air: vital and deep as ordinary breath.