About Robert Pinsky
Robert Pinsky (born October 20, 1940 in Long Branch, New Jersey) is an American writer, poet, literary scholar, and literary critic who was the US Poet Laureate from 1997 to 2000 and was thus a poetic advisor to the Library of Congress. He is the author of nineteen novels and many poetry collections. Among his works there are also many essays, as well as a number of translations of some poets such as Dante Alighieri and Czeslaw Milosz. The major artists from which he drew inspiration for his works are T. S. Eliot, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Matthew Arnold and W. H. Auden. From 1997 to 2000, he worked as a consultant at the Library of Congress. He teaches at Boston University and is editor for Slate magazine. He is the translator of nearly twenty acclaimed books. He received his B.A. from Rutgers and his Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford, where he was a Stegner Fellow in creative writing and studied under the poet and critic Yvor Winters. Pinsky’s first collection, Sadness and Happiness, was compared to the work of Rainer Maria Rilke, James Wright, and Robert Lowell. His book-length poem An Explanation of America links modern America and the ancient Roman Empire of Augustus and Horace.After the literary critic book Landor's Poetry (1968), Pinsky, who was also the poetry editor of The New Republic magazine, himself wrote three volumes of poetry, entitled Sadness and Happiness (1975), The Situation of Poetry (1976) and An Explanation of America (1979). In 1980 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and continued his writing career with the collection of poems History of My Heart (1984). After the literary criticism Poetry and the World (1988), he published two other volumes of poetry, The Want Bone (1990) and The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 (1996). In addition, he received the 1995 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for poetry for the volume of poetry The Inferno of Dante.
Pinsky is also the author of an interactive fiction game called Mindwheel in 1984, developed by Synapse Industries. During his career he has received much praise, prestigious US awards such as the National Endowment for the Humanitiese and important literary offices such as the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. He received the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry in 2004 and was also nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1996 for The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems. He is also the founder of several associations, literary circles and projects, among which the Favorite Poem Project is the most important. Pinsky also appeared in the cartoon episode The Simpsons.
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During each of his record three terms as poet laureate, Robert Pinsky was the most visible laureate to hold the position. He often gave as many as three readings a day, all over the United States. “I think poetry is a vital part of our intelligence, our ability to learn, our ability to remember, the relationship between our bodies and minds,” he told the Christian Science Monitor while in office. Pinsky wrote: “Poetry is, among other things, a technology for remembering. But this fact may touch our lives far more profoundly than jingles for remembering how many days there are in June. The buried conduits among memory and emotion and the physical sounds of language may touch our inner life every day... Poetry, a form of language far older than prose, is under our skins.”
