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ROBERT PINSKY
"Poetry is the art of one human voice. Without denigrating art on a mass scale -- I love my TV, my computer, and my VCR -- there's a craving and a satisfaction available in an art that in its nature is on an individual scale."
The current U.S. Poet Laureate and the first to serve for more than two years, Robert Pinsky grew up in Long Branch, New Jersey. His Favorite Poem Archive will gather a database describing what poetry means to us, as a nation, at the close of the twentieth century. He teaches at Boston University.
"To Television"
Not a "window on the world"
But as we call you,
A box a tube
Terrarium of dreams and wonders.
Coffer of shades, ordained
Cotillion of phosphors
Or liquid crystal
Homey miracle, tub
Of acquiescence, vein of defiance.
Your patron in the pantheon would be Hermes
Raster dance,
Quick one, little thief, escort
Of the dying and comfort of the sick,
In a blue glow my father and little sister sat
Snuggled in one chair watching you
Their wife and mother was sick in the head
I scorned you and them as I scorned so much
Now I like you best in a hotel room,
Maybe minutes
Before I have to face an audience: behind
The doors of the armoire, box
Within a box -- Tom & Jerry, or also brilliant
And reassuring, Oprah Winfrey.
Thank you, for I watched, I watched
Sid Caesar speaking French and Japanese not
Through knowledge but imagination,
His quickness, and Thank you, I watched live
Jackie Robinson stealing
Home, the image -- O strung shell -- enduring
Fleeter than light like these words we
Remember in: they too are winged
At the helmet and ankles.
"ABC"
Any body can die, evidently. Few
Go happily, irradiating joy,
Knowledge, love. Most
Need oblivion, painkillers,
Quickest respite.
Sweet time unafflicted,
Various world:
X = your zenith.
If You Could Write One Great Poem,
What Would You Want It To Be About?
(Asked of four student poets at the Illinois
Schools for the Deaf and Visually Impaired)
Fire: because it is quick, and can destroy.
Music: place where anger has its place.
Romantic Love -- the cold or stupid ask why.
Sign: that it is a language, full of grace,
That it is visible, invisible, dark and clear,
That it is loud and noiseless and is contained
Inside a body and explodes in air
Out of a body to conquer from the mind.
"The Want Bone"
The tongue of the waves tolled in the earth's bell.
Blue rippled and soaked in the fire of blue.
The dried mouthbones of a shark in the hot swale
Gaped on nothing but sand on either side.
The bone tasted of nothing and smelled of nothing,
A scalded toothless harp, uncrushed, unstrung.
The joined arcs made the shape of birth and craving
And the welded-open shape kept mouthing O.
Ossified cords held the corners together
In groined spirals pleated like a summer dress.
But where was the limber grin, the gash of pleasure?
Infinitesimal mouths bore it away.
The beach scrubbed and etched and pickled it clean.
But O I love you it sings, my little my country
My food my parent my child I want you my own
My flower my fin my life my lightness my O.
What has television's quickness given to you? Taken from you?
Questions
1. The specific language describing Sid Caesar and Jackie Robinson in "To Television" gives us important information about each and develops our understanding of Hermes, "Quick one, little thief." According to this poem, what qualities link Caesar, Robinson, and Hermes?
2. Hermes -- a Greek messenger god -- is also described in "To Television" as "escort / Of the dying and comfort of the sick." How does television perform these functions in this poem?
3. The title "ABC" seems to imply an elementary, predictable experience. In what ways does the poem fulfill or evade this implication?
4. What value would you give to X in "X=your zenith"?
Activities
1. Use the alphabet to write a series of stories, sketches, or poems of your own. In your first effort, let the sequence of the alphabet determine every third word. In your second, every other word. In your third, every word.
2. With a group, try different readings of "ABC." Make notes of what you notice in each reading. Discuss what your group could now offer to increase anyone's pleasure in hearing and speaking this poem.
3. Create your own list of metaphors for television or some other object or institution -- radio, computer, automobile, shopping mall, school, etc. -- that has both personal and social significance.
4. Draw the whole scene described in "To Television."
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