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At the foundling hospital
\" \"Since the death of Robert Lowell in 1977, no single figure has dominated American poetry the way that Lowell, or before him Eliot, once did. But among the many writers who have come of age in our fin de siècle, none have succeeded more completely as poet, critic, and translator than Robert Pinsky.\" --James Longenbach, The Nation The poems in Robert Pinsky's At the Foundling Hospital consider personality and culture as improvised from loss: a creative effort so pervasive it is invisible. An extreme example is the abandoned newborn. At the Foundling Hospital of eighteenth-century London, in a benign and oddly bureaucratic process, each new infant was identified by a duly recorded token. A minimal, charged particle of meaning, the token might be a coin or brooch or thimble--or sometimes a poem, such as the one quoted in full in Pinsky's poem \"The Foundling Tokens.\" A foundling may inherit less of a past than an orphan, but with a wider set of meanings. The foundling soul needs to be adopted, and it needs to be adaptive. In one poem, French and German appear as originally Creole tongues, invented by the rough needs of conquered peoples and their Roman masters. In another, creators from scorned or excluded groups--among them Irving Berlin, Quintus Horatius Flaccus, and W.E.B. Du Bois--speak, as does the Greek tragic chorus, in the first-person singular. In these poems, a sometimes desperate, perpetual reimagining of identity, on the scale of one life or of human history, is deeply related to music: The quest is lyrical, whether the subject is as specific as \"the emanation of a dead star still alive\" or as personal as the \"pinhole iris of your mortal eye.\" \"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The mind has cliffs of fall : poems at the extremes of feeling
A bold new anthology of poems that contend with the most extreme human emotions, from former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky.
Book
Magic Mountain
When I was in elementary school, many of us kids knew the lyrics, about the \"mighty herd of red-eyed cows... a-plowin' through the ragged skies, and up a cloudy draw,\" and the spooky refrain, \"Yi-pi-yi-ay, yi-pi-yi- o.\" Our parents danced to Monroe's music, including hits like his \"Racing with the Moon.\" At the moment I am typing these words, many thousands of people around the world are reading poems by Elizabeth Bishop, such as \"One Art,\" and \"At the Fishhouses.\" The title alludes to the sequestered asylum of Thomas Mann's novel, but the Magic Mountain of the poem is Berkeley itself, the Bay Area with its absence of real seasons-and by implication, Berkeley's apparent freedom from the historical agonies of Europe. In Berkeley, Czesław could take sardonic pleasure in a Polish newspaper photograph of people lined up for a block, around the comer from a bookstore in Warsaw, where the Soviet regime had banned his name for decades.
Journal Article
