Robert Pinsky’s new book of poems is Proverbs of Limbo. His spoken word PoemJazz album of the same title—Proverbs of Limbo—with musicians including Laurence Hobgood and Mino Cinélu, is available on Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music.
He grew up in Long Branch, N.J., a historic seashore resort described in his recent autobiography Jersey Breaks. Other works include the best-selling translation The Inferno of Dante and The Life of David, a prose book about the Biblical figure.
As United States Poet Laureate, he founded the Favorite Poem Project, with video segments in which American readers, of varying occupations, ages, and regions, read and discuss a poem. Robert Pinsky is the only member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters to have appeared on The Colbert Report and The Simpsons.
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It’s a funny thing, to introduce a poet who needs no introduction.
Robert Pinsky holds many impressive accolades—from serving as Poet Laureate three times to being friends with Bruce Springsteen—but I’m most struck by the seemingly endless number of writers he has mentored, inspired, and kept in touch with throughout his teaching and writing career.
I took two poetry workshops with Robert as a student in the Boston University MFA program. Each week, he arrived at Room 222 with a red folder under his arm, a leather briefcase in his hand, and a smile. His greeting was always the same: “So. What would we like to talk about today?”
Our cohort of six poets was a particularly shy group; in the beginning, we just looked at each other, waiting for someone to say something smart. But that wasn’t what Robert’s question was about. He wasn’t asking us to impress him. By giving us ownership over the start of each class, he was doing his part in challenging, as he puts it in our interview, “the guild” of elite creative writing institutions. He really just wanted to know what was on our minds, and how he could best support our writing.
Since graduating, I’ve met many of Robert’s past students. When we swap stories about our experiences at BU, we always agree: Robert’s poetic gifts are second only to his generosity of spirit. He wanted to discuss what we were reading, what we were writing. He was always happy to set up an office hour, always ready to send an email with detailed feedback on our poems, even after we’d graduated.
As so many times before, Robert took some time to chat with me in his office on Bay State Road this past February; this time, about his luminous new collection, Proverbs of Limbo. In publishing this conversation, I’m pleased to share Robert’s wit and wisdom, which I’ve been so lucky to receive, with a wider audience.
Note: All poems mentioned in this interview are from Proverbs of Limbo unless otherwise stated.
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Rachel Dillon: In preparing for this conversation, Robert, I spent time re-reading and annotating your books of poetry, your anthologies, and your works of criticism. This process was a privilege and pleasure; your readers are lucky to have so much of your mind on the page and out in the world.
While your poetics have changed across the decades, your trademark preoccupations shine in your newest collection, Proverbs of Limbo: the history and culture that binds and divides us; your quiet observations of the people around you; your weaving of a personal past with a universal present. In this new collection, you also spend time meditating on death and conceptions of the self.
In “Forgiveness,” you write: “The mind skitters, its one rudder / Being its own voice.” How did memory, voice, and the “skitter[ing] mind” contribute to your process in composing this collection?
Robert Pinsky: For me, poetry relies on roots in childhood. Back then, from when I learned how to read, the comic strips in the Long Branch Daily Record fed my imagination. For example, the obese blowhard Major Hoople, the star of Gene Ahearn’s strip “Our Boarding House.” As I say in “The Funnies, 1949” Major Hoople often wore a fez. I knew what a fez was, I think, but I didn’t know why he wore it, or what his wearing a fez meant—and I liked that I didn’t know it. There was a weird, exhilarating freedom in the not-knowing.
What is that? The same exhilaration or freedom might come while reading a detective novel that mentions street names in Los Angeles or New York. The story was set in places I knew of but didn’t know. As a child of a certain kind, I could sense a particular, rich world with its history, customs, art, streets, buildings that gave me a playground for improvisation. I didn’t love information, exactly, but I loved the fact that the information was there, and that I could try to imagine it. It’s similar to feeling a detailed, I suppose made-up world—certainly not an accurate world—from the sound, on the radio, of doo wop music or of an Italian opera.
Now, those singers and comic strip artists and detective novelists are all dead. And not only dead, but past. As you come closer to your own death, you approach memory and past-ness in a different way. You grow to be more forgiving toward yourself and your parents, and even toward Major Hoople. Maybe love him and, say, Gene Krupa or Eartha Kitt more than ever. You become gentle towards the child you were once kind of harsh toward, so maybe you grow more gentle toward yourself?
That early process of improvising from a little knowledge, the reimagining and appropriating a fragment of culture—it lives on, it recurs, but it feels different now in your 70s and 80s than how it used to feel in your 30s and 40s, certainly different than in your childhood. That changed perspective is explicit in the poem “Leo Gorcey.” By surviving, you have become one of the few people left who can recall someone who once was quite famous.
RD: Building on your childhood memories, I’m interested in the role that Judaism plays in this collection. I am also Jewish, but I haven’t really practiced since I was a child; however, during my MFA year with you, rabbis kept wandering into my poems and I didn’t understand why. Does Judaism find its way into your poetry, or is it at the forefront of your mind as you write? Or, more broadly, how has your relationship with Judaism changed over time?
RP: My family and I were nominally Orthodox Jews. We kept kosher—two sets of dishes and of utensils, and all that. We went to the Orthodox synagogue. I went to cheder [Hebrew school] every day from when I was 10 years old, preparing to chant in Hebrew the portion for my bar mitzvah. Before and after classes, I played basketball at the Jewish Community Center. Covertly, I found the religious rules to be oppressive and hypocritical. When I became old enough to disobey them, it was a pleasure.
Again, one becomes less harsh, more forgiving. How could I not write about Jewish memories and materials? Without presuming to engage the immense history, as a personal matter, how could I spend my childhood not eating certain foods and not proceed, in adulthood, to realize the taboo’s importance, its possible meanings? My three children married non-Jews, but they and their children take a respectful interest in Judaism. They celebrate Chrismakkah and light candles. I’m glad of that.
In this new book of poems, Proverbs of Limbo, I refer a couple of times to John Keats’s letters. For English majors of my generation, those letters have a canonical, all but biblical authority—they hold a tremendous status. I too revere the letters, but Keats was also a young man of his time, place, and social class. At some point, I discovered in those brilliant, ardent letters, along with “negative capability,” some conventional, mild Jew-hating: politely anti-Semetic remarks, you might call them. I end the poem “Forgiveness” with one of those passages:
Even poor John Keats, in his letters,
Enjoys a little minor Jew baiting.
Who do I think I am to forgive him?
After all, I am him. He too was the child
Of a New Jersey optician and please do me
A favor, don’t tell me No he wasn’t.
RD: Hearing you read that aloud, my immediate reaction is: “the audacity!”
RP: Yes . . . or is there a temptation to say “chutzpah?”? It was fun to give the finger to a certain kind of manners, to my own reverence for Keats, to modesty, to merely correct disapproval of antisemitism. Those lines are important to me. Audacity aside, I hope the lines tell you: “don’t understand anything too quickly.”
When I think about contemporary students, the present culture, I’m interested in the rhetoric of colonization and applying it to myself. I may feel less like my students—who I admire—than like my older colleague Derek Walcott. Derek said the English colonizers made him read Shakespeare, and he’d settle for that okay. I may be closer to that than I am to the students and teachers I know who are resistant to English literature because it’s patriarchal and colonizing. It was a great, liberating thing for me to say “I don’t care if Dickens and Shakespeare were comfortable around antisemitism.” I’ve learned that “antisemitism” is itself an antisemitic phrase, dating back to the discredited pseudo-science of “Aryan” and “Hamitic” and Eugenics— shards and fens of culture that I enjoy thinking about in ways beyond mere disapproval. In this context, Major Hoople’s hat is named for a city. I can describe it as possibly “an orientalist token of affected high-class ease,” but with those words, like the fez, comes another interesting object—like Sunset Boulevard or State Street, or all of LA or Chicago or Fez. It all depends.
I join Ralph Ellison in choosing my ancestors, as he puts it. The racist Wallace Stevens and Ezra Pound are my grandparents. John Keats didn’t come from a low or high class background—his father worked in a pub. Keats was just another middle class guy, except he happened to be a great genius. I have the treasure of Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and his great letters, and King Lear, and they are mine, if I deserve them.
RD: I’m inspired by your deep study of the poets you love. You engage with their lives off the page. You talk about Keats like he’s a friend you just got off the phone with.
RP: I do believe that if you’re really serious about a poet, and serious in your own work, it’s important to read everything they’ve ever written, and everything you can find about them. Read all of their work, and then make your own choices about which poems you like best, and what should be said about them.
RD: That reminds me of the opening lines of “Vocal:”
Infinite information here in my phone.
Here in my head a congregation of dead
With numbers I’ve had by heart, each with a tune
These lines feel like a roadmap for Proverbs of Limbo, which is filled with benevolent hauntings by friends, celebrities, ancestors, and, of course, poets.
RP: I was recently in the studio with jazz musicians recording for our PoemJazz album. And like a musician suddenly quoting or sampling a Gershwin tune in a Sonny Rollins song, I found myself saying: “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, / Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains…” [the opening lines of Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale]. These poets, these poems, they’re in there, wedged under my imperfect skull. And sometimes they come out.
RD: Names of people and places are frequent occurrences in your poems, but Proverbs felt like it was peppered with more proper nouns and personal anecdotes than your prior collections. Your memoir Jersey Breaks was published in 2022; did writing a memoir change anything about your understanding of poetry?
RP: I hadn’t expected to quote my poems in the book. I had made a sort of rule not to. But I learned that in order to tell the story of my life, I had to tell how I’ve rebelled against the things I was told about poetry. Part of a life-pattern. I needed to include the feeling that poetry is a freedom to talk, or to make a spoken collage of life events. When I wrote the title poem of Sadness and Happiness, I tried to channel or celebrate a talking ebullience—writing that poem and its welcome by people I respected, was an event in my life. I needed to include that event in my memoir.
RD: I love that you think of a poem’s conception as a “life event.”
One of my favorite poems in Sadness and Happiness is “Poem About People.” The poem has this kaleidoscopic ending:
…The weather
Changes in the black of night,
And the dream-wind, bowling across
The sopping open spaces
Of roads, golf courses, parking lots,
Flails a commotion
In the dripping treetops,
Tries a half-rotten shingle
Or a down-hung branch, and we
All dream it, the dark wind crossing
The wide spaces between us.
When I revisited this early poem after finishing Proverbs of Limbo, I found myself getting emotional. Holding your work across the decades in proximity to your new collection, I see how so many of your newer poems are in conversation with your past and the widening “spaces” between moments in time. How might the poet Robert Pinsky of Sadness And Happiness (1975) see the poet Robert Pinsky of Proverbs of Limbo (2024)?
RP: I’m not sure, but compared to that old young Robert, I may have a different kind of recklessness. I don’t have to reckon with as much of a future life as I once did. It’s different when you reach an age where you can’t know if you have two minutes or ten years left—of course that’s always been true in theory, but the statistics change the reality. You don’t worry so much about the coming years, or about gaining recognition, or preserving it. Those kinds of minor, somewhat trivial anxieties fade a bit. You become aware of good luck. I’ve had more time to enjoy recognition than the aforementioned Keats. Freedom from some kinds of anxiety is part of being in my eighties—as is acquiring new kinds! Sadness And Happiness, in my twenties, strove to find a different kind of freedom.
RD: Let’s talk about voice. I’m struck by the consistency of your voice across the decades; that consistency is not always the case over a poet’s career. The only exception might be An Explanation of America.
RP: An Explanation of America is the strangest of my books. I think about it a lot now, because in that book-length poem I explicitly, in a way naively, consider fascism, nativism, racism, bleak or restrictive open spaces… all as currents in American life. A poet friend who helped me while I was writing it, someone who knows the book very well, recently told me: “when you wrote this, I thought your fears about the rise of fascism might’ve been a bit paranoid or exaggerated. But it turns out you were right.” I don’t take pleasure in that, but in a book that tries to think about the world inherited by our children and grandchildren, I maybe did intuit a menace, the possible blossoming or re-blossoming of something foul.
RD: You’ve compiled two anthologies of poems, maintain a personal anthology, and can recite a seemingly endless list of poems from memory. One of our year-long assignments in workshop was to create our own anthologies. You encouraged us to travel through the centuries and find lesser-known poems by well-known folks because, as you put it, “a poet’s work becomes distorted when they are known for the two or three poems that everyone knows.”
There is certainly a list of poems that the public sees as “classic” works by Robert Pinsky (I immediately think of “Shirt” and “Samurai Song,” and also the one you read on The Simpsons). At this point in your literary career, do you think about how those poems might distort how readers see you as a poet today?
RP: Frankly, I think objecting to any sort of attention would be foolish—and kind of unseemly, in a way. Attention is so sought-after in the world, so much more in demand than supply, to have received any at all is kind of miraculous.
I guess all recognition has more than one side to it, good or bad. There was one year, quite a while ago, when the SAT used “Shirt” for an essay prompt. It was hard not to think: “So, if you work very hard at your art, as a reward you may be used to torture the young!”
RD: I remember someone told me once that she saw Mary Oliver read. She said Mary refused to read “Wild Geese” because she was so sick of it.
RP: Elizabeth Bishop got tired of “The Fish.” In a variation on that, she hated seeing it in tackle stores, with her not making any money from the contraband re-printing. I contrast that to Thom Gunn, who was always pleased to see his “Night Taxi” poem on the overhead visor in a taxicab. Thom also enjoyed seeing his poem “Jamesian” posted on the subway: “Their relationship consisted / In discussing if it existed.”
RD: Wait, say that again?
RP: “Their relationship consisted / In discussing if it existed.” That’s it. Part of an organization’s poetry-in-the subway project. Thom liked looking up at that poem, one time, and seeing that someone had written underneath it, with a magic marker: “yeah, I’m not getting much either.”
RD: In “Branca,” you assert: “This poem is not a poem of the speaker” and double down on this assertion soon after: “These words are those of Robert Pinsky. Speaking.” In another poem, “Repetition” there are the lines: “…the same poem / All not by me but mine.” Where does the difference between poet and speaker lie throughout this collection?
RP: A lot of the jargon around creative writing is useful and instructive, but there’s something false or hackneyed about it, too. The professionalism of poetry in the academic world might deserve a little satire. Or I’m prejudiced because I’m not a product of creative writing? I didn’t teach it until I was in my 40s. When I was offered a job at Boston University, I asked Seamus Heaney, “What do you think about creative writing?” And Seamus said, in a characteristic way, “It’s fine, as long as it doesn’t become a guild.” In some ways it may have become a guild, with its rules and terminology. Let’s hope the MFA is not a guild’s membership card.
In the lines you just quoted, I defy this idea of the “speaker.” As I said a minute ago about “Sadness And Happiness,” poems are (among other things) things, something people say, that I say. Maybe a way of resisting the guild?
RD: I know we share a love of wandering Mount Auburn Cemetery, and your poem “At Mt. Auburn Cemetery” was one of my favorites in Proverbs. Before we talk about it, I have to ask…will you be buried there?
RP: Yes, Ellen and I have a niche by Willow Pond.
RD: One of my Mom’s greatest gifts to herself was a plot at Mount Auburn. She’ll be on Mimosa Path near the big sphynx.
RP: Our plot is at the bottom of a hill, near the Mazurs, high up above the pond. Mike is buried up there now, but Gail, Mike, Ellen, and I used to joke that someday those two would be looking down on us!
RD: Your Mount Auburn poem really touched me. It reminded me a lot of WS Merwin’s work, as well as George Herbert’s “Church Monuments,” a poem I’ve heard you recite a few times.
In this poem, your body is “walking among the graves for exercise,” while your mind considers the deaths of friends alongside the death of Bobo, a cat who liked to play with your copy machine. At the end of the poem, you write:
When people say I’m ashamed of being German
Said Arendt I want to say I’m ashamed of being
Human sometimes when Bobo made his copies
Of nothing I’d crumple one for him to chase
And combat in the game of being himself.
I’m struck by this idea, the “game of being” one’s self. Talk to me about what this means to you; I’m interested, too, if the Herbert poem was on your mind at all as you wrote this one.
RP: Yes, for years whenever walking in the cemetery I have needed to quote “Church Monuments,” especially when he says about the headstones of jet and marble,
What shall point out them,
When they shall bow, and knee, and fall down flat
To kiss those heaps, which now they have in trust?
The gravestone over the centuries falling gradually onto the graves, in a way like emotional mourners. As the cat plays at being himself by stalking the crumpled paper, I play at being myself by wondering at my ancestor George Herbert.
RD: Death plays a major role in this collection. In “Poem of Names,” you describe a “conversation” in which your grandchildren ask about your death. You describe this as a “compliment,” and connect it to the moment your father Milford told you that “you are my life after death.” Later, in “Country Music,” you end on “The world’s beginnings, my own endings, / And having the heart to tell them apart.” How might Proverbs of Limbo reflect your relationship to endings? And, in ending this conversation, is there anything else you’d like to share about this collection?
RP: We people study our own presence and absence, sometimes with memory as a guide. A recurring theme for me is memories of my father, who was in his death, as in some other ways, notably fortunate. When he was around my age, he reunited with my mother after a separation, and one night after dinner she was scolding him as was their custom, and after listening some more he lay down on the living room carpet, dozed off, and never got back up. I imagine saying to him: “You lucky bastard! You were handsome, athletic, and now of course you go in an easy, mild way!”
Death has become more of a practical consideration for me. You try your best to think about absence, and the world without you. Children and grandchildren might make it easier, as well as adding hostages to Fortune. I care terribly about the anxieties and lives of my children, my students, all the kinds of human life and art that matter. Not that self-pity doesn’t come into it also!
Other than that, I don’t think there’s much else to share. I think we’ve done it.
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Rachel Dillon is a teacher and writer living in Boston, where she is the Book Events and Programming Manager at Beacon Hill Books & Cafe. She has taught writing in high schools, museums, and colleges throughout New York and Massachusetts.
Rachel was recently awarded the Susan Kamil Scholarship for Emerging Writers from the BINC Foundation. She has also received support from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, The Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and the Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship. She was a finalist for the Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize and the Manchester Cathedral Poetry Competition.
Her work can be found in Asheville Poetry Review, Volume Poetry, Broadsided Press, Solstice Literary Magazine, and elsewhere via her website (rachelmdillon.com).