by Clive Collins
On a June evening in 2001, the poet Robert Pinsky came to speak at Tokyo University’s Center for Pacific and American Studies. On June 30 this year, Pinsky retired from his teaching position at Boston University. Learning this prompted me to revisit an essay I was asked to write for the Center about that evening in Tokyo twenty-one years ago.
As Robert Pinsky entered the room, the first impressions were, not unusually, physical. In stature, a small, trim man, dressed in a summer suit, an impeccable shirt, and a patterned necktie, he seemed possessed of a physique not unlike that of a boxer in one of the lower weight divisions, but his head was monumental. The patrician nose was topped by a ledge of heavy brow that sat over the eyes. When he frowned, the eyes seemed almost, but not quite, to close, leaving a long dash across the upper face. It was the mouth that animated the whole, setting off a contagious plasticity. His smile was pure Hollywood: if you have seen Burt Lancaster in the film Vera Cruz, you will understand.
When he spoke that evening, his voice was strong, precise. When he read to us, it was these things, but as well it was resonant, trained, perhaps self-trained, in the reading of verse, and entirely without affectation.
He was introduced as Mr. Pinsky, though he quickly informed us he preferred Robert. Those titles he must own — the 39th Poet Laureate of the United States of America (1997-2000), Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress — he justified. He described the poet’s laurel wreath (laurus nobilis, corona laurea) as an emblem of memory. The Library of Congress, he said, was a repository of the memory of the people of the United States of America. Thus, the Poet Laureate is the guardian of the nation’s remembered past.
The role of the Poet Laureate in the United Kingdom is, despite the changes made by recent laureates (Andrew Motion, Carol Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage), relatively restricted in terms of official output. In the United States, the Poet Laureate seems freer to undertake a particular project. Pinsky’s project, he informed us, was the Favorite Poems project. “If a poem is written well, it was written with the poet’s voice and for a voice.”
Those words animate Pinsky’s project, which is at once a celebration of poetry, an exercise in the democratization of culture, a reconciliation of cultural contradictions, and an archiving of the disparate individual memories that together make up the consciousness of the nation.
These beliefs, Pinsky told us, impelled the Favorite Poems project, but it was, and is, given life by the Americans who responded to the request that they write in naming a favorite poem and give reasons for their choice. A selected number of people were then filmed as they spoke about themselves and the relevance of the poem they had chosen to their own life, and as they read their chosen poem.
So, we watched a Massachusetts construction worker read from Whitman’s “Song of Myself; a fugitive from Pol Pot’s genocide in Kampuchea who read Langston Hughes’ “Minstrel Man;” and a Japanese-American junior high school student from California who picked Kenneth Rexroth’s translation of “The lower leaves of the trees,” an untitled tanka by Sone no Yoshitada. W. H. Auden (1907-1973) wrote that poetry “survives / A way of happening, a mouth.” Indeed.
After these readings, Pinsky read four of his own poems: “ABC,” “Samurai Song,” “The Haunted Ruin,” and “Shirt.” As he read, his breath punched out the words. He is, after all, an ex-musician, saxophonist, an admirer of Hawkins and Coltrane.
The longest of these poems is “Shirt.” It begins with a naming of parts: “The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams / The nearly invisible stitches along the collar.”
The poem self-assembles like the garment it takes its title from, stitching up a cloth to cover contemporary sweatshop workers “gossiping over tea or noodles on their break;” with the dying workers at the Triangle Factory in New York in 1911; Scottish mill-hands swindled out of their wages and into a cod history of themselves; and American plantation owners and their slaves. It loops through time to connect in the present with “a Black / Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma / And she inspected my shirt.”
After the session was over, what did those of us who were there remember?
I remember the poet, his face, his voice. I remember the boy in Stockton speaking the words, “Awe spreads with / The summer twilight;” the young woman thinking of how her mother carried her in her womb as she fled through the jungle to safety; the man in the hard hat repurposing Whitman. And Irma in South Carolina, who inspected Robert Pinsky’s shirt. Poetry “survives / A way of happening, a mouth.”
I wish Robert Pinsky a long, happy, and productive retirement. As an undergraduate student in Northern Ireland, I was taught by the poets James Simmons and Andrew Waterman. Since then, I have been fortunate enough to hear a significant number of other poets read: Alan Ginsburg, Seamus Heaney, Andrew Motion. But the night I was present when Pinsky spoke and read is one I will never forget. He had a presence. He had a voice.
Pen & Paper image by Andreas Zapf from Pixabay
Editors’ Note: You can find more about Robert Pinsky at his website. To read more of his work, see his 2011 volume of poetry, Selected Poems. and his most recent collection, Proverbs of Limbo, published in June 2024. A longer version of Clive’s essay first appeared in 2001, in the newsletter of Tokyo University’s Center for Pacific and American Studies. Pictured in that newsletter is Pinsky (top above) with Professor Yoshiko Takita, now Professor Emeritus of the University of Tokyo. (A recent story about Pinsky’s retirement appeared in Boston University’s magazine, BU Today. According to that piece, The Favorite Poems Project now includes an estimated 18,000 audio recordings and roughly 60 videos.)
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