by Jill Huber
NJJN Bureau Chief/Monmouth

April 14, 2009

Robert Pinsky was U.S. Poet Laureate from 1997 to 2000, has received numerous other honors and awards for his poetry and essays, and has shared his belief in the beauty and power of words with audiences around the world.

But the warm welcomes he receives whenever he returns to his native Monmouth County are among the most cherished acknowledgements of his life’s work.

“It’s always nice to be home,” said Pinsky, who was born in Long Branch. He spoke to NJ Jewish News before an April 2 appearance at Pollak Theatre on the Monmouth University campus in West Long Branch. “My local roots are among the many things that have influenced my work and the person I became. Whenever I come back, I feel encouraged and accepted by people here. That connection has always meant a great deal to me.”

More than 400 people heard Pinsky read selections of his work and discuss life from the perspective of an American-Jewish poet. His visit to the university, part of the school’s Visiting Writers Series, also was sponsored by the Jewish Heritage Museum of Monmouth County. Pinsky’s last visit to MU was in 1997, when he received an honorary degree and delivered the university’s commencement address.

Pinsky received his undergraduate degree from Rutgers University in New Brunswick and graduate and doctoral degrees in philosophy from Stanford University, where he was a Stegner Fellow in creative writing. He teaches graduate creative writing at Boston University and lives in Cambridge, Mass.

He grew up in a “nominally Orthodox” Jewish home in which there was great respect for the religion, but not necessarily strict observance of its many customs and religious dictates.

Although the family did not attend religious services on a regular basis, Pinsky has childhood memories of a house of worship (which he declined to identify) that was more than a gathering place for prayer.

“I regarded the synagogue and the Jewish religion as more than a set of doctrines,” he told NJJN. “When I was a kid, I didn’t always like Judaism and Christianity because they tried to tell me who I was or who I wasn’t. But a lot of the religious philosophy stays in the heart and mind and helps people learn compassion and understanding — these things are not innate.

“My parents were part of a very assimilated, very secular generation, but the Orthodoxy still had a great effect on me,” he continued. “Orthodox Jews believe in doing things by the book, and the nominal aspect was a pragmatic and secularized approach. The concept of going to extremes and finding shortcuts along the way remains a significant idea for me.”

Extremes — and their outcomes — are prevalent themes in much of Pinsky’s work. Many selections in 2007’s Gulf Music, his seventh volume of poetry, reflect his observations of those who escalate war while promoting peace, and who endorse the concepts of personal and political freedom while denying civil liberties, he said.

“There are definitely notes of anger and frustration in those poems,” said Pinsky. “Some of it is frustration at my own absence of expertise to analyze and understand the decay of civil liberties and truth-telling in government. I’m an old-fashioned character; I read The New York Times and the Boston Globe every day. There are lots of things that are hard to ignore these days, and these things have an effect on my writings.”

World affairs are among the many “windows” in his life, he added.

“I was born to two Jewish people in 1940 in Long Branch — that’s my personal window,” said Pinsky. “But I can look out of that window, and if I get to know others and they become my friends, we can look out of our windows and learn from each other’s ‘bright confusion.’ People can’t figure out everything by themselves.”

Pinsky defines poetry as the making of a work of art from the sounds of language.

“I’ve always tried to write things that have a quality of sound that makes them fun to hear,” he said. “My poetry is not ponderous — it moves very rapidly, and I try to maintain a flow of energy. I’d rather my poems go fast than slow. Going slowly is how you lose readers, and that drives me crazy. I’d rather they ask me what I’m talking about instead of dozing off.”

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