Robert Pinsky
American poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator.
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Craft is something you learn by studying models.When a student asks, what is a good book about traditional iambic verse, The Collected Poems of Ben Jonson. What is an excellent book about free verse? The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams. What is a good book about short line in ballad metre? The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson.
Poetry is a vocal art for me, not neccessarily performative, it might be reading to one self or recalling some lines by memory.The speaker bringing their own experience to it,changing it with their own sensibility.
All the mysteries of consciousness flower in the body.
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.
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.
I am very interested in memorization which is the process of incorporating a poem, so, I would say the kind of poetry I write is the kind that emphasises the physical qualities of the words.
I think what holds a poem like this together for me, if it’s held together, is largely meter; this one is in iambic pentameter and iambic pentameter whatever else it is, can be a very good glue. It is a very good way to hold things together. It’s like 4:4 you know.
Poetry is the most bodliy of arts, the medium of poetry is the column of breath rising from the diaphragm in the individual's chest to be shaped into meaning sounds inside the mouth of whoever undertakes to say the poem.
No aspect of poem is more singular, more unique, than its rhythm.
There are no rules. However, principles may be discerned in actual practice; for example, in the way people actually speak, or in the lines the poets have written.
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