Robert Pinsky Says Words with his Voice on the SPL Podcast
March 11, 2013
Big news! This week on the Scottish Poetry Library podcast, former Poet Laureate of the United States Robert Pinsky discusses poems, poetry readers, jazz and his curious family history, he talks about his enthusiasm for his Favorite Poem Project – “For me a poem is a work of art that’s so intimate and so internal that its medium is any reader’s voice,” he talks about all sorts of stuff in a voice that could announce this summer’s blockbusters. In a wide ranging interview, he speaks about his formative years – “I grew up among very verbal, eloquent, skillful joke tellers and complainers and arguers and liars” – and the way he tries to capture music in language. He also reads a number of his poems and talks about his passion for poetry. “I never defended poetry. I don’t believe in commercials for poetry. It is so fundamental, so large, so central… It’s an insult to poetry to advocate for it or defend it.”
This is a pretty special conversation that I enjoyed the heck out of, and I hope you do too! Click the little triangle for some of the best words you’ll hear today.
Golan Haji is a Syrian poet, with a postgraduate degree in pathology. He has published a number of books includingCalled in Darkness (2004), which won the ‘Al-Maghut’ prize in poetry, and Someone Sees You as a Monster (2008). His next collection, My Cold Faraway Home, will be published in Autumn 2011. He has also translated various works into Arabic including the Scottish classic – Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He lives in Damascus.
“Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was a poet with an exceptional ability to distill ‘amazing sense’ from ‘ordinary meanings.’ Her poetry is now considered among the finest in the English language.
Jane Wald is the Director of the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Mass. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College, studied historical archaeology at the College of William and Mary and received a graduate degree in American history from Princeton University. Prior to her tenure at the Emily Dickinson Museum, Wald served as assistant director of development and marketing at Old Sturbridge Village and director of The Evergreens, under the Martha Dickinson Bianchi Trust. Upon the merger of the Homestead and The Evergreens in 2003, she became the museum’s associate director.
Tevis Kimball is the curator of special collections at Jones Library, Amherst, where she is also acting Director.
Henk lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, U.S.A., where he’s studying towards his MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Massachusetts. Currently, he works as an adviser to undergraduate students.