Q & A: Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky recently edited a collection of poems by William Carlos Williams. Read this series of questions from Esther Lombardi, with Pinsky's answers.

EL: I read that you were born in Long Branch, New Jersey, in 1940. You’ve published six books of poetry, four books of criticism, and two books of translation. You were also named the United States Poet Laureate, and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Can you give us a little bit about your background? What caused you to want to become a writer, editor and teacher?

RP: People tend to do things they can do. (If they are fortunate!) I wanted to be a musician, but wasn’t musical enough. I had daydreams too of becoming an actor, an architect, a dancer, an industrial designer, a movie director--all things to do with Art, though I didn't have the concept Art when I was young. All along, from when I was maybe two years old, I had been thinking compulsively about the sounds of words.

In my heart, I don’t think of myself as a "writer," certainly not an "editor." "Teacher" is how I earn my bread: an honorable profession in which I manage to fit. But the only thing I am really expert at is playing with the sounds of words. In that sense I am a poet, period.

If by "background" you mean parents, etc., my mother and father were goodlooking, articulate, unhappy people who fought a lot about money, of which they had little. They did not attend college.

EL: William Carlos Williams once said, "By listening to his language of his locality the poet begins to learn his craft. It is his function to lift, by use of imagination and the language he hears, the material conditions and appearances of his environment to the sphere of the intelligence where they will have new currency." Williams pushed the boundaries of poetry, but he seemed adept at tapping into the commonplace experience (like the plum). Why did the straightforward writing by Williams so transform our conception of American poetry?

RP: To lift things up to the sphere of intelligence so that things have new currency! A thrilling definition of the artist’s ambition. Maybe less "straightforward" than like the path of an airplane taking off: the ground is the ground, the air is the air, the aircraft proceeds and elevates, heedful of the earth’s pull and the air’s currents.

In other words, he describes--and superbly attains--that interaction between imagination and the ordinary. So the writing is not simply "straightforward" but curly and back-crooked as well.

EL: What is your favorite poem from the William Carlos Williams collection? What about the poem do you enjoy? And, how does the poem relate to the body of work?

RP: Impossible to choose. I love "Fine Work with Pitch and Copper" because it puts the poet’s work with the roofer’s work in the surprising, elevating way we just mentioned. The road to the contagious hospital lyric in "Spring and All" for the New Jersey quality of the vegation, and for the way the blur of early springtime merges with the blur of looking from a car. "Last Words of My English Grandmother" for the sheer speed and penetration, technically. That poem and "Dedication for a Plot of Ground" for the American esteem and piety toward the immigrant generation.

EL: Speaking of William Carlos Williams, you once said, “What makes his poems persist is the art of ear and mind, the extraordinary sentences and rhythmns he made.” Are there particular sentences and rhythmns in the poetry of William Carlos Williams that you enjoy? Are there lines that stay with you: fragments of speech that capture moments, thoughts or images?

RP: "You far off there under / the wine-red selvage of the west." "Gaining and failing / they are buffeted / by a dark wind." "What shall I say, because talk I must?" "Her body is not so white as / anemone petals nor so smooth—not / so remote a thing." "No one/ to witness / and adjust, no one to drive the car."

There are many dozens of them that stick in the mind.

EL: What particular (or peculiar) challenges did you face in editing the William Carlos Williams collection?

RP: It was hard to leave things out—to realize that there wasn’t room for the whole of "Spring and All" for example. And there was the appetizing challenge of making his greatness the center, not the chestnuts or stereotypes.