Robert Pinsky and Poetry Northwest

What a lovely evening, to be in a room filled with 700-plus people all come to listen to Robert Pinksy talk about music and poetry. I didn’t know quite what to expect—I haven’t been to that many readings, being the poetry-newbie I am—but it seemed the rest of the crowd had been. At first I thought the crowd would be mostly middle-aged women, but soon the demographic filled out—much like the poets’ words as he started his talk.

He talked not just about music, though personal antedotes about his own childhood’s leanings into piano and saxaphone were part of the discussion, but of education. That core education must include not just science, math, and literacy, but art and music and poetry, else how will we learn how to communicate? That these were our first expressions of reaching forward and backward through time, communicating learning and ideas—building a society, humanity, one that dominates the natural world—even though our claws are weak, our skin tender, our physical prowess limited. He said we break the chains to this past to our detriment. “The arts are not ornament, they are core.”

Mr. Pinsky read several of past works with ties to music, wonderful lyrical pieces that thread his experiences with others’ (history and facts!) with sound and delight. He read from a new book, to be published in September, named “Gulf Music”, including a poem by that name. (I’ll buy the book.) And he closed with Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale. Hearing the communal sigh from a crowd crowned the evening.

The thing that stuck most with me was sound, he said that as poets that is what we have. Musicians have to have an expertise to play a composer’s work, but poetry can be read by anyone who can read. The only thing we can do as poets is to use the sound of words, that even meaning comes from the reader. He mentioned Frost’s admonation to listen to poetry first as though you were hearing it through a closed door, muffled words only whose meaning is unknown, there is just the sound.



A plug for Poetry Northwest: Subcribe. A 2-year (4 issues) is only $25 and supports not just greats like Robert Pinksy, but you and me.

And enjoy this Thursdays Poetry Thursday contributions here. Now that I finished school, I know I'll be spending more time with this group.