Robert Pinsky
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Articles by Robert Pinsky
The Angel of Retail
You spirit of grace in the taffy machine’s chrome arms At Morris’s Candy performing a sarabande Unknitting and knitting again immaculate sweets. You spirit of order in a plank across uprights Between us patrons and visible bottles: a bar, The barrier presence attending to our pleasure. Angel of displays recurrent, mortal and porous, Dry goods and hardware and the fearsome eyeless Heads I remember at Dlugos’s Ladies’ Hats. New spirits of the body, Pilates and Threading, I needed explained.
Robert Pinsky: "Misrule Music'
Explore the April 2026 Issue Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. View More When charismatic indecency carries the day There’s not much comfort in the ancient cult That says the dance of misrule always prances At its one frantic ball—seems like forever Until the music stops, the flags come down, And ordinary corruption comes back, refreshed In laughter. “Hitler has only got one ball.” Misrule, ha ha.
Poetry Review: ‘The Poems of Seamus Heaney’ Is Complete, and Great Original
You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load. THE POEMS OF SEAMUS HEANEY, edited by Rosie Lavan and Bernard O’Donoghue with Matthew Hollis Seamus Heaney’s genius included a gift for dealing with binary conflicts, large-scale or personal or some of each. The fire of his ambition as an artist was balanced by a cool sense of absurdity, with flashes of gentle self-mockery.
Poetry Review: ‘The Poems of Seamus Heaney’ Is Complete, and Great
THE POEMS OF SEAMUS HEANEY, edited by Rosie Lavan and Bernard O’Donoghue with Matthew Hollis Seamus Heaney’s genius included a gift for dealing with binary conflicts, large-scale or personal or some of each. The fire of his ambition as an artist was balanced by a cool sense of absurdity, with flashes of gentle self-mockery. This new collection of his great work, at well over two inches thick, is “great” in a workaday sense of the word, as well.
This 1,200-Page Poetry Book Affirms Seamus Heaney’s Towering Genius
30 Of The Most Adorable Photos Of Cat Dads And Their Furry Friends There are plenty of stereotypes out there when it comes to guys and cats; they are sensitive, deep and caring, more likely to fancy staying home …
“Declared Intention”: My Immigration Story, and Ours
Culture / July 30, 2025 “Declared Intention”: My Immigration Story, and Ours Like many Americans, I may only be one generation away from birthright citizenship—a concept that defined this country’s promise for so many immigrants. Ad Policy Morris Eisenberg on a motorcycle in Little Rock.(Courtesy of Robert Pinsky) The complaint about us poets is that we make everything too complicated.
“Astounding Stories”
Fear of the foreign and the fear of being foreign. Terror of nuns from the Star of the Sea Lyceum Afloat in hooded habits with punishing rulers. Difference. Wanting “someone who looks like me” Is different in different spaces. Jews in Der Stürmer Don’t look like Paul Newman or Lauren Bacall. The nuns would teach you a lesson, said my mother. After her injury she and I spoke little, Concussed as she was, apart in the dim room, But we did share the sci-fi magazines.
Robert Pinsky: ‘Old News’ Original
Listen1.0x 0:001:34 Listen to more stories on hark Explore the June 2025 Issue Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. View More I’m more at home in The Past, want though I may To live in this lonesome place The Present Moment. I share a stack of magazines with someone Who reads the new ones from the top. The bottom, Salted with gilded ephemera, outspent ads And failing or faded fads, is just my meat.
“Izzy Kasoff,” by Robert Pinsky
Who was he, why was he the one assigned To drive me from the house to the cemetery? The two of us in his Buick or Packard or some Colonial make, De Soto, Pontiac, Plymouth. I don’t remember who had died, what aunt Or uncle or cousin we were going to bury. I don’t know why he spent the hour-long drive Lecturing a twelve-year-old about the faults Of Peggy Lee, whose singing he denounced. I barely knew who she was.
A Song on Porcelain Original
In many responses to the first days of the second Trump Presidency—expressions of an outrage denied the refuge of surprise—a historical analogy recurs: Is this how it felt to be a progressive liberal in Weimar Germany on January 30, 1933, when Hitler was appointed Chancellor? No analogy is perfect, but a different historical moment feels, to me, more immediate and more challenging as a reference point.
Home / Hogar
12/12 / Poetry Reading and Conversation with visiting poet-in-residence Nicole Cooley + local writer Caroline Cabrera / The Gallery at The Betsy-South Beach, Miami Beach, FL / Live and Live-Streamed on Instagram Live/Facebook Live at @swwimmiami / 7-8:30 pm EST / Free One workshop remains in our Workshop Series--SWWIM Lessons: From Prompt to Placement: “Surfing Submittable with Jen Karetnick – Keeping your head above water in the poetry submissions process” on 12/10 (register here).
Poem | "Leadership"
Unfolding beneath its ambitious title, former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky’s poem is both canny and playful. In four spare stanzas, “Leadership” conjures a bar scene from the long-ago of youth and transforms anecdote into something like parable. —Jody Bolz, Poetry Editor LEADERSHIP Off-season in Provincetown. The sleepy bar Had a projector to show old movies upstairs. The cone of light, the reels. That long ago. What was the movie? “On the Waterfront” maybe.
“Old Movies,” by Robert Pinsky
In pearly grays the stars of my parents’ day Climb pixels of noir stairwells, in my haven. Or, shades of my own time: luminous Mastroianni The gay broadcaster fired by Fascisti, radiant Loren the betrayed and worn-down mother of six. It’s the day Hitler arrives by train to Rome. The movie shows real newsreels. Evil characters Never scared me—desirous Joan Fontaine A sly killer in “Ivy,” Charles Laughton breeding Human-animals in “The Island of Lost Souls,” Monsters, velociraptors.
Ferlinghetti: recuerdos del poeta centenario que encarna toda la cultura de Estados Unidos
Letras Libro de la semana 01:30 Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Nueva York, 1919-San Francisco, 2021) celebró su centenario el 24 de marzo con la publicación de El chico, la historia de su vida contada a través de instantáneas y arias. Ninguna biografía ha encarnado de forma más completa y apasionada las visiones y contradicciones, los logros y calamidades, la movilidad social y las animadversiones sociales de ese periodo vital.
At the Paramount
My heart is a streak of cloud Across a moon that Shatters in the lake it lights. It is also this palace with Its pilasters and sconces Pulsing to old music. A Roadmaster ventricle Pumps 28 cents per gallon Sunsets of greenhouse gasses. A dandelion root airbound Fractures courtyard lobby Pavers trod by descendants Of enslaved Africans And of serfs from Grodno To Taiwan with telltale Names like the blacklisted Sympathizers haunting Balcony and loge.
“Leo Gorcey,” by Robert Pinsky
The same name as the famous actor I Am one of the last people to remember. It’s possible the two of them were cousins. I called him Uncle Leo. That was the custom Among that generation on the margins: Young in America, improvising cousins. Soon the computer itself will tell these stories. He was a plumber. My mother said his fingers Had oil-burner soot ingrained under the skin. He was their Eighth Grade Valedictorian. I wonder if the name goes back to Gorczyn, A town in Poland a bit southwest of Lodz.
Forgiveness, by Robert Pinsky
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to signin or get access. The mind skitters, its one rudder Being its own voice. The great Fascist poet taught me free verse. Trying to concentrate on “The forgiving Of an unforgivable crime” in a lecture By Emmanuel Levinas, I drift into Keely Smith being Cherokee.
Gifts for Pentecost
Gentle reader, I pray that the Spirit filled grace of Pentecost is being made known to you today. Today’s post is brief; I have two Pentecost gifts for you, from Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) and Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004), separated by centuries, united by the same Spirit. Leaf Excised from a Psalter: The Pentecost, c. 1260, Flanders, tempera and burnished gold on vellum.
A Poet Whose Tone Was Personal and Whose Vision Was Vast
Book Review|A Poet Whose Tone Was Personal and Whose Vision Was Vast https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/21/books/review/adam-zagajewski-true-life-poems.html Poetry “True Life,” a collection of verse by the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, arrives in English translation almost exactly two years after his death. Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share. Feb. 21, 2023, 5:00 a.m. ET TRUE LIFE, by Adam Zagajewski.
“Soul Making,” by Robert Pinsky
Content This content can also be viewed on the site it from. Audio: Read by the author. Galactic broth visible light-years away Brews the first suns. Familial, I feel I know these lights. I see their pre-biotic Geometries of purpose the way I impose Human, nearly literary intentions Onto the microscopic animals, flexing Bizarre mandibles, that patrol my eyelids And guts.
Magic Mountain
Fame varies over time. For decades, the two most important kinds of performer in the U.S. were: bandleader and crooner. One person stood out as the most successful at filling both roles. Vaughn Monroe (1911–1973), as a bandleader and crooner, was in a class by himself. On Saturday nights, NBC Radio broadcast Monroe singing with his band, in live performances from a different college campus every week. His records sold in the millions. Tall and handsome, Monroe appeared in movies and on television.
Poetry and Social Class: Robert Pinsky on His Many Readings of Robert Lowell
“A book I didn’t like, and for years ignored, had opened new possibilities for people I admired.” Life Studies is Robert Lowell’s best-known and most influential book. It won the National Book Award for poetry in 1960. I read it in 1962 and I hated it. In a shallow way, my dislike was a matter of social class.
Robert Pinsky: "Change Trains at Summit"
As a child in the age of commercial jingles on the radio, I was fascinated by the anonymous parodies we would learn on the playground at school: “Pepsi-Cola is the drink / To pour down the kitchen sink. / Tastes like vinegar, looks like ink— / Pepsi-Cola is sure to stink.” Like a folk song, the anonymous lampoon had a communal genius.
Cataract | Robert Pinsky
It doesn’t fall it gathers the doctor explained That’s just what people named it when I took off The bandage blinded by the unblocked light At first I panicked brightness falls from the air The lens that you were born with flexes but darkens Film noir betrayals Niagara none can well Behold with eyes what underneath him lies The new lens rigid plastic but clear the fog Condenses to fall as tree-drip to feed the Sequoias Yosemite they say means killer a Miwok Word one group called another the...
Review: ‘Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph,’ by Lucasta Miller
The Poetry Issue Robert Pinsky reviews Lucasta Miller’s “Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph.” April 15, 2022, 12:01 a.m. ET Credit...Mark Harris KEATS A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph By Lucasta Miller Early in her book about John Keats, Lucasta Miller calls Lord Byron an “aristocratic megastar.” That funny epithet is accurate for Byron’s more-than-superstar celebrity in his day. It also suggests the many ways Byron was the opposite of Keats.
My Faithful Mother Tongue
Jamaica Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson on Antigua in 1949. When she was sixteen, her family interrupted her education, sending her to work as a nanny in New York. In time, she put herself on another path. She went from the New School in Manhattan to Franconia College in New Hampshire, and worked at Magnum Photos and at the teen magazine Ingenue.
“Culture,” by Robert Pinsky
Audio: Read by the author.
Redux: No Human Tongue
By The Paris Review September 14, 2021 Redux Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. This week at The Paris Review, we’re marking the seven hundredth anniversary of Dante’s death on September 14.
Masking in schools protects and preserves in-person education
port-masks-2 Contributed • August 23, 2021 By Rebekah Gass and Robert L. Pinsky As a community, we should all be able to agree that our children need in-person school and want it to be as safe as possible. By Rebekah Gass and Robert L. Pinsky As a community, we should all be able to agree that our children need in-person school and want it to be as safe as possible.
“At Mt. Auburn Cemetery”
Audio: Read by the author.
John Donne’s “A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy’s Day, Being the Shortest Day.”
Arts has moved! You can find new stories here. A poem for the winter solstice. Photograph by Matzei/Wikimedia Commons. At this time of year Slate has in the past presented classic poems about Christmas and New Year's Day. For 2012, here is a poem set at, and in some sense about, the winter solstice.
Poem | At One
The English word atonement sounds abstract And kind of Latin, but really it’s just “at one.” At-one-ment…. Religion bewilders me again. At one with the blessëd Lord who blesses you. Circle of blessing on the siddur’s left-hand page: Blessëd is He who blesses us to bless His blessing that we may bless the earth and the wine In his blessëd name that made the blessëd All That makes a blessëd circle, because it’s all One.
Czeslaw Milosz | Poetry Foundation
Czeslaw Milosz ranks among the most respected figures in 20th-century Polish literature, as well as one of the most respected contemporary poets in the world: he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. Born in Lithuania, where his parents moved temporarily to escape the political upheaval in their native Poland, he left Poland as an adult due to the oppressive Communist regime that came to power following World War II and lived in the United States from 1960 until his death in 2004.
“Beach Glass,” by Robert Pinsky
Who knew this too could become endangered or extinct? They gave me a little pail so I collected beach glass and shells. Who knew the sound in a seashell wasn’t your own blood— No more than the ocean? It was the shell’s chambers breathing, A voice of air: Not churning breakers, nor a pulse in your ear. In the sun’s furnace glare, the cloudy smooth gemstones Couched an interior fire. Like shells, progeny of the beach. Back then, who knew talcum powder could ignite cancer?
A ‘no’ vote on Question 1 ensures safety of Maine’s most vulnerable
Robert F. Bukaty | AP Robert F. Bukaty | AP Steven Michaud, president of the Maine Hospital Assn., speaks at a news conference with doctors opposed to Question 1, the religious and philosophical exemptions referendum on vaccinations, at the State House, Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2020, in August, Maine. By Robert L.
The Sweetest Dream That Labor Knows: Williams and Frost
The poetry of William Carlos Williams and the poetry of Robert Frost are more similar, in spirit and practice, than conventional ideas about them might convey. As examples of what I mean, here are two poems about work. Mowing and roofing, in these poems, have implications for the work of writing, but in both poems the physical labor itself is also respected, in attentive detail.
The Writer's Almanac for Sunday, October 20, 2019 - Garrison Keillor
A Prairie Home Companion An Evening of Story and Song Love & Comedy Tour Old Friends Prairie Home Christmas Show Solo The Gratitude Tour December 21, 2019 Saturday 7:30 p.m. Atlanta, GA Atlanta, GA December 21, 2019 7:30 p.m. Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Christmas with the actors, Fred Newman, the house band, and Heather Masse at Center Stage. 2nd of 2 shows.
“Poem of Names,” by Robert Pinsky
Audio: Read by the author. The chains of begats and births, the chains of names Are meaning itself. The chains of deaths and doings. The black rain fell on Osamu Shimomura. On the walk home it turned his white shirt black. “My grandmother got me quickly into a bath. It likely saved me from death by radiation.” Tougaloo’s Ernst Borinski would not discuss His family, killed by Nazis: “An area I Have liquidated, for my mental health.” His grave at Tougaloo a kind of shrine.
My Picture Left in Scotland by Ben Jonson
I now think Love is rather deaf than blind, For else it could not be That she, Whom I adore so much, should so slight me And cast my love behind. I'm sure my language to her was as sweet, And every close did meet In sentence of as subtle feet, As hath the youngest He That sits in shadow of Apollo's tree.
Poetry and American Memory
The poet laureate reflects on what makes the American people "a people"—and what our poetry can teach us about the "fragile, heroic enterprise of remembering." Robert Pinsky October 1999 Issue Illustration by Gary Kelley Who do we Americans think we are? This is a cultural question, and it is worth asking: many of the great issues in American public life are ultimately cultural issues.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti Celebrates His 100th Birthday With a Novel
Fiction March 21, 2019 LITTLE BOY By Lawrence Ferlinghetti Lawrence Ferlinghetti celebrates his 100th birthday on March 24 with the publication of “Little Boy,” his life story told in flashes and arias. No one’s biography has more completely or ardently embodied the visions and contradictions, the achievements and calamities, the social mobility and social animosities, of that life span.
Robert Pinsky discusses Samuel Johnson’s classic poem On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet.
Here is a great poem that may mark a significant divide, between readers who treasure Samuel Johnson’s “On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet” and those who don’t much like it. The theory would be that the poem exemplifies an extreme polarity: pre-modern vs. modern; conventional vs. postmodern; rational vs. irrational; cooked vs. raw; Apollo vs. Dionysus; cool vs. funky. As to technique, metrical vs. free would be the least of it.
Shirt by Robert Pinsky
The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams, The nearly invisible stitches along the collar Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break Or talking money or politics while one fitted This armpiece with its overseam to the band Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter, The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union, The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.
Opinion | Robert Pinsky: Patriotism for an Age of Unreason
The next bit, as our car passed through the New England countryside, moved me as an English major, a native of New Jersey and the grandson of immigrants. Childhood diphtheria left Rodino with a pronounced speech defect that he worked to correct by, in his quoted words, “reciting Shakespeare through a mouth full of marbles.” Mythology does build around politicians. “Born in a log cabin” used to be the label for that.
H. D.
H.D.’s life and work recapitulate the central themes of literary modernism: the emergence from Victorian norms and certainties, the entry into an age characterized by rapid technological change and the violence of two great wars, and the development of literary modes which reflected the disintegration of traditional symbolic systems and the mythmaking quest for new meanings. H.D.’s oeuvre spans five decades of the 20th century, 1911-1961, and incorporates work in a variety of genres.
Letters, Inventions, and Questions by John O'Connor
I was asked once to lead two poetry writing workshops in the same day: one in a graduate education class, the other—even more daunting—in my son’s second-grade class. I didn’t have time to plan two lessons, so I decided to create one I could use with both classes. The second-grade teacher advised that I keep the activity text short.
Three Golden Rules for book reviewing: What are they?
Possibly the most famous book review, ever, was written by the young Irish wit and polemicist John Wilson Croker. Croker is still remembered, though obscurely, as a founder of modern political conservatism. What's more, according to some sources, John Wilson Croker invented the very term "conservative." The opening passage of Croker's review, published in the September 1818 Quarterly Review, displays his formidable and venomous approach. What he writes is smart as well as odious.
William Blake's two poems called "The Chimney Sweeper" create art by keeping us uncomfortable.
Here is a pair of poems more familiar than many I've presented here in the monthly "Classic Poem" feature—familiar, maybe, yet with an unsettling quality that seems inexhaustible. As in much of William Blake's writing, what I may think I know, he manages to make me wonder if I really do know. "Blake's poetry has the unpleasantness of great poetry," says T.S. Eliot (who has a way of parodying himself even while making wise observations).
“Repetition”
Writer, blighter, fighter—what do you want? I want to repeat myself. The fumbling heart, Thud-thud. The microbe clangor in every cell. I want to publish a book with on every page The one same poem. Not by me. But mine. The Lamentation of the Fiery Furnace, Or of the Passage. The Chorus of the Many, The Celebration of Ancestors Not By Blood, Thud-thud. The Few.
Embassy Architecture by Robert Pinsky
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