Throughout his career, Robert Pinsky has been dedicated to identifying and invigorating poetry’s place in the world. As Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky became a public ambassador for poetry, founding the Favorite Poem Project, in which thousands of Americans — of varying backgrounds, all ages, and from every state — shared their favorite poems. Pinsky believes that, contrary to stereotype, poetry had a vigorous presence in the American cultural landscape. The project seeks document that presence, giving voice to the American audience for poetry. The original anthologies Americans’ Favorite Poems and Poems to Read, which include letters from project participants, became best-sellers.

Elegant and tough, vividly imaginative, Robert Pinsky’s poems have earned praise for their formal dexterity, unique music, and ambitious range. He is the author of six acclaimed collections of poetry, most recently Jersey Rain. His collection, The Figured Wheel, was a Pulitzer Prize nominee and received the Lenore Marshall Award and the Ambassador Book Award of the English Speaking Union. His other honors include Poetry Magazine's Oscar Blumenthal prize, the William Carlos Williams Award, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. He was elected in 1999 to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and is among the few members of that Academy who has also appeared in a cameo role on television’s “The Simpsons.” He is currently poetry editor of the weekly Internet magazine Slate. Pinsky teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University, and was named the United States Poet Laureate and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1997-2000).

Robert Pinsky on “The American Town: Dreams and Nightmares”

“The best novel ever written about Latin America,” says Gabriel Garcia Marquez in an interview, “is The Hamlet by William Faulkner.” When I read that sentence I realized that The Hamlet was possibly the best work I knew about my hometown of Long Branch on the New Jersey Shore.

The cultural richness and aridity of American provincial towns, the constricting yet enabling life of the provincial microcosm—these conflicts also give enduring life to works like Willa Cather’s My Antonia; Preston Sturges’s films The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero; and poems by Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, and William Carlos Williams.

The double nature of the “town” and its double mythology, the supportive human scale of community and the stifling provincial mores, the isolation from history and the immersion in it, is missed by the more single-minded vision of Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.

(Kenneth Tynan’s brilliant two-pronged parody, the narrator of Wilder’s work reflecting on Faulkner’s Jefferson, is germane: “Well, folks, reckon that’s about it. . . . Couple of people got raped, couple more got their teeth kicked in, but way up there those faraway stars are still doing their old cosmi
c crisscross, and there ain’t a thing we can do about it.”)

My idea for the lectures is to focus on a few of these works, looking back toward Twain and Hawthorne and Dickinson and Whitman. As a campanilista of Long Branch—summer capital of many American presidents, death-place of James Garfield and arguably the birthplace of the American idea of celebrity—I mean to include, and perhaps begin with, the considerable history of my own town.