[ Music plays ] Narrator: Near Long Branch, New Jersey, at Monmouth University, a native son has returned to read poetry in concert with jazz musicians.

Robert Pinksy is a three-time U.S. poet laureate.

He grew up in this shore town, as did his parents before him.

Pinksy: Somebody asked me this afternoon, "Do I have any poems about Long Branch?"

And I responded, "All of my poems are about Long Branch."

Often only I could tell what they are.

This next poem -- poem is called "Creole."

And it will mention that one of the things I think is great about our hometown is that it is very mixed.

The ethnicities traditionally in Long Branch are all jumbled together.

[ Jazz music plays ] I'm tired of the gods.

I'm tired of the gods.

I'm pious about the ancestors: afloat flowed in the wake widening behind me in time, those restive devisers.

[ Jazz music plays ] My father, Milford Pinksy, had one job from high school until the day he got fired at 30.

[ Jazz music plays ] He and my mother met at Long Branch High School.

He and I -- this sounds impossible -- My father and I had the same homeroom teacher, Miss Scott, as though Miss Scott always got that part of the alphabet.

We had been living in a two bedroom apartment with three kids and renting it, and so that moving here to 16 Wooley Avenue was thrilling.

For what it's worth, that upstairs right hand window was the room where my brother and I slept on a trundle bed.

I'm sure it was a big moment for my parents to, to move to 16 Wooley Avenue from the two family house at 36 Rockwell Avenue.

Milford is a variant on the names of poets.

Milton.

Herbert.

Sidney.

Names that certain immigrants used to give to their offspring And Creole -- Creole comes from a word meaning to breed or create in a place.

Each time I'm aware of my father and how these streets were like a universe for him and that so much has deteriorated and changed, especially the downtown.

He had an optical office there and his father had a bar, the Broadway Tavern.

And the people with the shoe store, the kitty store, a lot of categories that don't exist anymore, people he knew.

This building on the right, the yellowish brick, that was the Garfield Grand Hotel named after two presidents who came to Long Branch.

[ Jazz music plays ] Sometime going from high school to college, I started realizing I wasn't going to be musical enough to have a musical career.

So almost without any transition, I went from wanting to be a great musician to wanting to be a great poet.

[ Jazz music plays ] And I never really lost a love for music, but it wasn't my métier anymore.

[ Jazz music plays ] Like all improvisation, it's simultaneous planning and surprising and responding to one another, listening very carefully.

I'm a non-singing vocalist, and what we do is I play with these guys.

We play in all senses of the word.

Sweet Babylon.

Coarse sugar of memory.

Salt Nineveh of barrows and stalls.

Candy Memphis of exiles and hungers.

Your bare feet, gray tunic of a child.

Hemp woman, whore merchant, the barber with his copper bowl.

Salt Nineveh of barrows and stalls.

Candy Memphis of exiles and hungers.

Healer, dealer, drunkard.

Fresh water, sewage -- wherever.

You died in the market sometimes your soul flies up out of you -- a hunting for buried Cakes here in this city.

[ Jazz music plays ]