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Big Time Rhymes By Cole Louison The top word entered in the Lycos search engine is Pokemon. Number eight is poetry. At his crowded lecture on Monday, March 27, Robert Pinsky explained how we all eat, sleep and breathe art everyday and unintentionally answered the question asked in the title of last September's LA Weekly cover story: "Is Poetry Dead?" "The Sounds of Poetry" lecture had been moved from a the Textor lecture hall to Emerson Suites, an area roughly three times the size of Textor that's usually reserved for incoming student info sessions or concerts. The house was full. At around 20 to eight, the doors closed and Howard Erlich, Dean of the H&S school took the stage. He talked briefly about the new lecture series and its importance to the college and introduced Michael Twomey, chair of the English department, who introduced Pinsky. I had been looking for Pinsky earlier but couldn't find him, and was surprised to see a dark-suited, clean-cut man rise from the tweeded English professors around him and take the podium. He didn't have the wild hair and worn clothes of poet Saul Williams, who spoke in the same room last year, or the strange cosmetic aura of celebrity Cokie Roberts. He could have passed for a successful mortician or a tenured business professor. In fact, Pinsky is on the creative writing faculty at Boston University, and works with giants of American literature like Nobel prize winners Saul Bellow and Derek Walcott. Every student he's ever had has been assigned a 35-page answer to the question: What does the word poetry mean to me? Currently, Pinsky is at work on The Favorite Poem Project, the building of a mammoth collection of audio and video tapes featuring people reading and talking about their favorite poems. He has been in charge of selecting and editing the material for a book of the same title, and the project's website: www.favoritepoem.org. Over 10,000 people have taken part in the project so far, and Pinsky said the only thing slowing down the project now is lack of funding. Though a major goal of the project is to draw attention to the importance of poetry, another is simply bringing different people together. Pinsky explained how the great variety of peoples in America contributes to the great variety of stories in the culture, but also stated there were great similarities in the messages of the different stories. So far, the project's messengers have included senators, children, a homeless man, an elderly woman, and a man who learned to read when he was 40 years old. The project also stresses the importance of reading poetry aloud. This is essential, said Pinsky, because poetry is a vocal art. "The medium for a poem is not the words, it is not the lines, it is certainly not the images," he said. "The medium for a poem is the column of air inside the reader's torso, the shapes of the sounds in the mouth." Poetry, Pinsky explained, is the most bodily of the arts. He gave dance as an example of a less bodily art because the art of dance is reserved for the select few bodies that can tolerate the physical demands of the medium. Anyone, on the other hand, can have the experience of reading a poem to themselves or someone else, an experience that unites people, Pinsky said. "When we say a poem we are saying, 'I have a treasure, and I'm going to show it to you in my breath.'" Later in the talk, Pinsky shifted his focus from the very personal, emotional power of poetry to the growing importance and popularity of the medium in the United States today, citing a recent increase in poetry book sales, poetry readings, and poetry classes around the country as proof of our culture's need and love of verse. Pinsky then broadened his subject matter to the arts, calling people's appetite for the arts "infinite." He explained that someone who listens to the radio on the way to work, watches television and has pictures on their wall exemplifies America's artistic craving. He asked the audience to picture a 15-year-old standing in a parking lot. "Now, put the case of a musical instrument in their hand. Don't you feel better?" Pinsky's talk branched from poetry to art, to the great achievements of America in everything from wars to music. The greatest single achievement of this country, Pinsky said, is jazz. He became a poet, he told a member of the audience, because he was no good at saxophone. Currently the 39th U.S. poet laureate, Pinsky is the only writer ever to land the position for three consecutive years. A collection of his poems called The Figured Wheel won him a Pulitzer Prize nomination and he's also the recipient of the Ambassador Prize in Poetry and the Harold Morten Landon Prize for his 1995 translation of Dante's Inferno. Cole Louison is out of here. |
