Robert Pinsky’s poems are known for their intellectual energy, musical language, and deep engagement with American culture. His work often blends personal reflection with history, philosophy, and social observation, creating poems that feel both thoughtful and alive with sound. Pinsky has a strong sense of rhythm, and many of his poems are driven by speech-like cadences that echo conversation, jazz, and oral storytelling.
A central feature of Pinsky’s poetry is its curiosity. He is fascinated by how language works, how traditions are formed, and how individual lives connect to larger cultural systems. Poems like “Shirt” explore everyday objects to uncover histories of labor, class, and violence, while other poems draw on Jewish heritage, classical literature, and modern American life.
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| Robert pinsky |
Pinsky’s tone is often reflective but never distant. He invites readers into complex ideas through clarity and humor rather than abstraction. As U.S. Poet Laureate (1997–2000), he emphasized poetry as a shared public art, launching the Favorite Poem Project to bring poetry into ordinary people’s lives.
Overall, Robert Pinsky’s poems combine intelligence, musicality, and moral awareness, showing how poetry can think deeply while still remaining accessible and human.
Antique
I drowned in the fire of having you, I burned
In the river of not having you, we lived
Together for hours in a house of a thousand rooms
And we were parted for a thousand years.
Ten minutes ago we raised our children who cover
The earth and have forgotten that we existed.
It was not maya, it was not a ladder to perfection,
It was this cold sunlight falling on this warm earth.
When I turned you went to Hell. When your ship
Fled the battle I followed you and lost the world
Without regret but with stormy recriminations.
Someday far down that corridor of horror the future
Someone who buys this picture of you for the frame
At a stall in a dwindled city will study your face
And decide to harbor it for a little while longer
From the waters of anonymity, the acids of breath.
Avenue
They stack bright pyramids of goods and gather
Mop-helves in sidewalk barrels. They keen, they boogie.
Paints, fruits, clean bolts of cottons and synthetics,
Clarity and plumage of October skies.
Way of the costermonger's wooden barrow
And also the secular marble cinquefoil and lancet
Of the great store. They persist. The jobber tells
The teller in the bank and she retells
Whatever it is to the shopper and the shopper
Mentions it to the retailer by the way.
They mutter and stumble, derelict. They write
These theys I write. Scant storefront pushbroom Jesus
Of Haitian hardware—they travel in shadows, they flog
Sephardic softgoods. They strain. Mid-hustle they faint
And shrivel. Or snoring on grates they rise to thrive.
Bonemen and pumpkins of All Saints. Kol Nidre,
Blunt shovel of atonement, a blade of song
From the terra-cotta temple: Lord, forgive us
Our promises, we chant. Or we churn our wino
Syllables and stares on the Avenue. We, they—
Jack. Mrs. Whisenant from the bakery. Sam Lee.
This is the way, its pavement crackwork burnished
With plantain. In strollers they bawl and claw. They flourish.
Furniture, Florist, Pets. My mongrel tongue
Of nudnik3 and criminentlies,4 the tarnished flute
And brogue of quidnuncs5 in the bars, in Casey's
Black amber air of spent Hiram Walker, attuned.
Sweet ash of White Owl.6 Ten High. They touch. Eyes blurred
Stricken with passion as in a Persian lyric
They flower and stroke. They couple. From the Korean,
Staples and greens. From the Christian Lebanese,
Home electronics. Why is that Friday "Good"?
Why "Day of Atonement" for release from vows?
Because we tried us, to be at one, because
We say as one we traffic, we dice, we stare.
Some they remember that won't remember them—
Their headlights found me stoned, like a bundled sack
Lying in the Avenue, late. They didn't speak
My language. For them, a small adventure. They hefted
Me over the curb and bore me to an entry
Out of the way. Illuminated footwear
On both sides. How I stank. Dead drunk. They left me
Breathing in my bower between the Halloween
Brogans and pumps on crystal pedestals.
But I was dead to the world. The midnight city
In autumn. Day of attainment, tall saints
Who saved me. My taints, day of anointment. Oil
Of rose and almond in the haircutting parlor,
Motor oil swirling rainbows in gutter water.
Ritually unattainted, the congregation
File from the place of worship and resume
The rumbling drum and hautbois7 of conversation,
Speech of the granary, of the cloven lanes
Of traffic, of salvaged silver. Not shriven and yet
Not rent, they stride the Avenue, banter, barter.
Capering, on fire, they cleave to the riven hub.
Shirt
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.
One hundred and forty-six died in the flames
On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes—
The witness in a building across the street
Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step
Up to the windowsill, then held her out
Away from the masonry wall and let her drop.
And then another. As if he were helping them up
To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.
A third before he dropped her put her arms
Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held
Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once
He stepped to the sill himself, his jacket flared
And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down,
Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers—
Like Hart Crane’s Bedlamite, “shrill shirt ballooning.”
Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly
Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked
Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme
Or a major chord. Prints, plaids, checks,
Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans
Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian,
To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed
By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor,
Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers
To wear among the dusty clattering looms.
Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader,
The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter
Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton
As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields:
George Herbert, your descendant is a Black
Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma
And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit
And feel and its clean smell have satisfied
Both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality
Down to the buttons of simulated bone,
The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters
Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape,
The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.
Revisionary
The globe on a tilted axis means The News.
As the icon spins the angle seems to shift.
Science has found ancestral Neanderthals.
We have a bit of their blood. They painted caves
Better than sapiens, as we named ourselves.
History has found the Jews who fought for Hitler.
Thousands of Part and what were called Full Jews.
A few were generals.
As the globe revolves
Different mixes keep passing into the light
Or into the dark, and then back out again:
The unexpected, over and over again.
Jefferson’s July 2 draft blamed George III
For violating the liberty of “a People
Who never offended him” shipped off to be
“Slaves in another hemisphere.” For many
“Miserable death in transportation thither.”
On the Fourth of July, that passage was left out. Thither.
In draft after draft of Puddn’head Wilson Twain
Linked and tore apart stories: The conjoined twins
From Italy come to town. In that same town, two
Blue-eyed babies. The nursemaid fair-skinned Roxy
Secretly swops the babies cradle to cradle,
Different nightie to nightie and fate to fate.
The one is her son. He sells her down the river.
Samurai Song
When I had no roof I made
Audacity my roof. When I had
No supper my eyes dined.
When I had no eyes I listened.
When I had no ears I thought.
When I had no thought I waited.
When I had no father I made
Care my father. When I had
No mother I embraced order.
When I had no friend I made
Quiet my friend. When I had no
Enemy I opposed my body.
When I had no temple I made
My voice my temple. I have
No priest, my tongue is my choir.
When I have no means fortune
Is my means. When I have
Nothing, death will be my fortune.
Need is my tactic, detachment
Is my strategy. When I had
No lover I courted my sleep.
First Things to Hand
In the skull kept on the desk.
In the spider-pod in the dust.
Or nowhere. In milkmaids, in loaves,
Or nowhere. And if Socrates leaves
His house in the morning,
When he returns in the evening
He will find Socrates waiting
On the doorstep. Buddha the stick
You use to clear the path,
And Buddha the dog-doo you flick
Away with it, nowhere or in each
Several thing you touch:
The dollar bill, the button
That works the television.
Even in the joke, the three
Words American men say
After making love. Where’s
The remote? In the tears
In things, proximate, intimate.
In the wired stem with root
And leaf nowhere of this lamp:
Brass base, aura of illumination,
Enlightenment, shade of grief.
Odor of the lamp, brazen.
The mind waiting in the mind
As in the first thing to hand.
