His last bow

A laurel for Robert Pinsky

by Lloyd Schwartz

I'll try to be brief and silly," poet, translator of Dante and Czeslaw Milosz, editor, literary critic and commentator, and Boston University professor Robert Pinsky told the hundred or so friends, colleagues, and dignitaries at a luncheon in his honor at the Library of Congress, deflating the preceding encomium by Prosser Gifford, the library's director of Scholarly Programs. It was the last day of Pinsky's unprecedented three year-long terms as the nation's Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress -- unprecedented not only for duration but also for achievement. "He's had an extraordinary run," Gifford had said, praising him for showing us "the power of poetry in our everyday lives."

The luncheon was also one of the few occasions in Pinsky's stupefyingly hectic three-year round of readings, talks, performances, commencement speeches (he's become the recipient of numerous honorary degrees), and countless other public appearances where his wife, Ellen Pinsky, a clinical psychologist, was able to be present. He joked (a favorite Pinsky pastime), "I'm very happy today -- partly not to be doing this anymore."

Pinsky has been the most visible poet laureate in the history of the consultantship. If you missed him reciting his poem "Flight" in front of the White House, accompanied by John Williams music, in Steven Spielberg's New Year's Eve Millennial video, or on Charlie Rose debating with poet Richard Howard and Paris Review editor George Plimpton on the public versus private nature of poetry, then you've probably caught him as a regular on the Jim Lehrer News Hour reading poems in response to current events: Yusef Komunyakaa's moving Vietnam Veterans Memorial poem, "Facing It," on Veterans' Day; Gail Mazur's "Listening to Baseball in the Car" during the World Series; Robert Frost's bitterly ironic "Provide, Provide" ("Better to go down dignified/With boughten friendship at your side/Than none at all. Provide, provide!") for the recent precipitous stock-market fall; Frances Cornford's witty "The Newborn Baby's Song" for Mother's Day. He even appeared on Politically Incorrect to try to explain to a bewildered Bill Maher that Bride of Chucky was getting bigger audiences than the movie version of Beloved not because filmgoers had no taste but because it might actually be a better movie.

But Pinsky's most significantly visible work was the creation of the astonishing and poignant Favorite Poem Project, in which people from all over the country were invited to write and tell him why a particular poem was important to their lives (only professional poets were excluded). With poet Maggie Dietz (a former student of his), he edited Americans' Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology, which has just been published by Norton. Video tapes of Favorite Poem participants, produced by Juanita Anderson of Roxbury's Legacy Productions, are now being screened and televised and will be housed permanently at the Library of Congress. "This is one of the few things I'm glad to have done with my life," he said.

"Reading Ben Jonson in my assiduous and elaborate preparation on the airplane on the way here . . . ," he confessed (acknowledging what has become his legendary gift for improvisation), "I had hoped to find some poem or passage that would relate to the idea of poetry being the organ of memory for the representatives of the people -- but there was nothing so high-minded in Jonson." What he found instead was Jonson's version of an epigram by Martial on "the Happy Life." He then glossed each item with a plus or minus in relation to his own condition of happiness: "never at law" -- a plus; "a quiet mind" -- minus ("No way!"); "free powers" -- on the whole, yes; "body sound" -- plus; "seldom in office gowned" -- plus; "a wise simplicity; friends alike-stated" -- minus ("My friends are either wise or simple but not both"); "no sour or sullen bedmate" -- a definite plus. Given his chronic insomnia, he found it harder to relate to "sleep, that will make the darkest hours swift-paced." After the chuckles, he read the entire poem, movingly, without interruption.

Who could replace him? Among poets, this is as hot a topic of debate as Seiji Ozawa's replacement as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. There were hopes that the announcement would come at one of these events, as they have in the past. But this time no announcement was made. And perhaps it was appropriate to keep the focus on Pinsky himself. No public shoes could be harder to fill than his, and he will continue to be the most convincing and sought-after national spokesperson for poetry. His term is over, but he's still Miss America. A couple of poets made up the rhyme "Hello! I'm Robert Pinsky/I'm outsky -- but still insky."

That evening, his poetry reading at the Library's famed Coolidge Auditorium, his last official act as laureate, began with "Generosity and Intelligence," a poem written for the Tufts Medical School commencement at which his daughter Caroline was getting her doctorate in veterinary medicine, and ended with an older poem called "The Hearts" ("The legendary muscle that wants and grieves"). James H. Billington, the perspicacious Librarian of Congress who appointed Pinsky in 1997, interrupted the standing ovation with his formal remarks. "It's not just what he's done for poetry but for this country. He's left a legacy that will remain with us." Presenting the poet with a volume on the history of the Library of Congress, the librarian indicated that Pinsky's three-year term had covered 167th of the library's existence. "I like that `167th,' " Pinsky responded. But his final words as poet laureate were "www.favoritepoem.org" -- the Web-site address of the Favorite Poem Project.

"WHEN I WAS A CHILD I wanted to be a knight," Pinsky admits in "Autumn Quartet," a poem "on my birthday," from his new collection of poems, Jersey Rain (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Surely he writes this line in the Quixotic self-consciousness of having tried to fulfill this goal. The author of a collection of essays called Poetry and the World, he has himself ventured out into that world to fight the good fight on behalf of poetry, to challenge anyone who thinks poetry is not central to our lives. He even seems to have won that battle. Truck drivers, housewives, construction workers, skydive instructors, Cambodian refugees, nurses, military personnel, programming analysts -- even lawyers and politicians -- have come forward to express their love and need for William Shakespeare, John Keats, Andrew Marvell, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robinson Jeffers, Langston Hughes, Marianne Moore, Constantine Cavafy, Robert Hayden, Frank O'Hara, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Louise Glück, and Adam Zagajewski, among others.

One of the things that has made Robert Pinsky such a good poet laureate is that he understands what poe-try is for. In the alphabetical opening line of his poem "ABC" ("Any body can die, evidently"), he writes the always underlying truth of why poets need to write at all: to create something lasting in the face of their -- of our -- mortality. It's a heroic task. A quest. Like their author, perhaps more than most poems, Robert Pinsky's go out into the world and take on the large -- the largest -- issues. We can read this impulse in their very titles: "Sadness and Happiness," "An Explanation of America." He even wrote an "Essay on Psychiatrists."

But then he also looks into his own idiosyncratic and complex inner life and writes a "History of My Heart." And it turns out that the line between public and private is not so absolute. He could with equal accuracy have called "An Explanation of America" "History of My Heart," just as his heart's history is in many ways also an explanation of America.

Pinsky is no snob. Has anyone written more eloquently about the eloquence of popular culture? In his poems he talks not only, like most poets, to himself or to other poets but also, with democratic warmth and intimacy, and gratitude, to the common things of this world: to the hammer he bought the day before; to the piano he learned to play music on; to television, thanking it for "brilliant/ And reassuring" Oprah Winfrey, for Sid Caesar "speaking French and Japanese not/Through knowledge but imagination," and for the chance to watch -- live -- "Jackie Robinson stealing/Home." "If they could merge," he told the Library of Congress audience, "they'd be the perfect person."

Poetry, for Pinsky, is also a search for order and meaning, as opposed to the arbitrariness of, for example, the alphabetical order he often fills his poems with. "I'm a sucker for serenity and discipline -- I have so little of it in my experience," he told the audience. He wants poetry to mean something, so he writes an "Ode to Meaning" in which he has a conversation with Meaning itself:

My poker friends
Question your presence
In a poem by me, passing
the magazine
One to another.

Longing for order, idealizing order ("My family life," he admitted, "made me a square forever"), he asks Meaning: "What is Imagination/But your lost child born to give birth to you?"

At his reading, he referred to the Library of Congress as "the greatest house of memory that ever existed." Memory and the past: "like rain -- they give us life." Then, subdued and with a gently melancholy nostalgia, he read the title poem -- the last poem -- of his new book, with its opening lines that echo the beginning of Inferno.

At the heart of the imaginative and meaningful colloquies of his poems, there's always the acknowledgment of a tragic paradox -- the way "Time,/Which pushes up the blades of grass from earth/And makes them green, will wither them in winter" ("Steel Drum Variations"). Time has proven Robert Pinsky our best poet laureate, the inevitable right choice, the fruition of everything this position was ever meant to be and more. And his extraordinary poems remind us that he has always embodied the very ideal he proposes for what a poet can do. The knight he once dreamed of becoming is no other than the poet he has always been.