Pinsky's Worth the Money

We have a new Poet Laureate, and we should all be proud. Robert Pinsky, translator of Dante's Inferno and poetry editor of Internet magazine Slate, was named United States Poet Laureate on Friday. Pinsky, a 56-year-old native of Long Branch, New Jersey, teaches creative writing at the graduate center of Boston University. He has taught at Stanford and Wellesley in the past and is off to Northwestern to be writer-in-residence any day now.

Being Poet Laureate is not too stressful. The Librarian of Congress, currently James H. Billington, appoints the two-year post after asking around a bit. The Laureate is responsible for a poetry reading of his own work in the fall and offering official advice as "poetry consultant." For these duties, the laureate receives a $35,000 stipend, an office in the library's attic and tons of publicity.

The first official U.S. Poet Laureate was Robert Penn Warren, appointed on February 26, 1986. Since then we have had: Richard Wilbur, Howard Nemerov, Mark Strand, Joseph Brodsky, Mona Van Duyn, Rita Dove and Robert Hass. The Laureates usually seize on some civic issue to chat up, whether it be education, literacy or city poetry.

Pinsky is not a one-issue man. Since the press conference on Friday, he has mentioned several projects, running the gamut from poetry education to a survey of the current taste in verse. For two reasons, it is unfortunate that the press is largely pigeon-holing him as the man who will bring poetry to the Internet. For one, there is far more to Pinsky than the Internet; for two, the Internet may be his weakest side.

The big-wigs are deep into the Internet thing, that's for sure. James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress, referred to Pinsky's job at Slate as "his interest in making poetry accessible through digital technology on the Internet." Why mention digital technology? Why mention technology at all?

Billington is not to be blamed completely. Pinsky himself has slipped into wordiness on the subject. This bit from The New York Times is a true horror: Computers and poetry "share the great human myth of trope, an image that could be called the secret passage: the discovery of large, manifold channels through a small ordinary looking or all but invisible aperture."

But--and here's the thing--Pinsky does have something to say. Something to say about America, and he says it well. His 1979 collection, "An Explanation of America," is, believe it or not, actually moving. There is a ton in the book. It's a long-weekend affair; the book needs time to sit for a while. Pinsky divides the book into three parts, each part an aspect of the American experience: "Its Many Fragments," "Its Great Emptiness," "Its Everlasting Possibility." This should give you some sense of the tone.

Pinsky writes, in lines that should be famous, that "A country is the things it wants to see,/If so, some part of me, though I do not,/Must want to see these things." A list follows of these things America wants to see: a two headed calf, an out-of-focus blow job, new cars, celebrities, Disney-like animals. Pinsky is not a wimp.

Further on in the volume, Pinsky writes of estrangement in America, of an anonymous killer murdering a woman on a quiet Oregon highway. To this grisly image, he compares America's foreign policy, her intrusion in strange lands. Pinsky writes:

On television, I used to see, each week,

Americans descending in machines

With wasted bravery and blood; to spread

Pain and vast fires amid a foreign place,

Among the strangers to whom we were new--

Americans: a spook or golem, there.

I think it made our country older, forever.

I don't mean better or not better, but merely

As though a person should come to a certain place

And have his hair turn gray, that very night.

Such insight is worth the fraction of a cent it costs each of us. There should be some incentive for poets to think and write about America, and we should each be proud to contribute our tax money to the cause. Too often, we do not have the time, or the ability, to think and write for ourselves. We should be proud that our country has chosen to reward those who do have the ability. Moreover, we should be especially proud of the brave Robert Pinsky, our newest Poet Laureate.

Noah I. Dauber's column appears on alternate Tuesdays.