Founder of the Favorite Poem Project, former United States Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky has made waves throughout the literary world as a multifaceted artist: essayist, poet, computer adventure game writer, and one of the most popular translators of Dante’s “Inferno.”
Robert Pinsky’s Early Days
Robert Pinsky was born on October 20, 1940, in Long Branch, New Jersey. By his teens or early twenties he knew he wanted to be a poet, according to a 1998 interview with The Cortland Review.
After graduating from Rutgers with a B.A., Pinsky went on to earn a M.A. and PhD in Philosophy from Stanford University. While there, he received a creative writing fellowship.
Sources in this Story
- Poets.org: Robert Pinsky
- The Cortland Review: Interview with Robert Pinsky
- YouTube: Robert Pinsky—Samurai Song
- Library of Congress: Robert Pinsky Online Resources
- Favorite Poem Project
- Mindwheel
- Slate magazine: Diary by Robert Pinsky
- Robert Pinsky.com: The Art of Poetry
Pinsky’s Notable Accomplishments
His first published work, in 1968, was a collection of essays. After winning a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 1974, he published his first book of poetry, “Sadness and Happiness,” in 1975.
Other collections of poetry and essays followed, and for each Pinsky received praise and awards. His 1984 book, “A History of My Heart,” was awarded the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and his poetry collection, “The Figured Wheel,” (1996) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.
Throughout his career, Pinsky has been praised for both his deep understanding of the human experience and the melodic form of his poems.
In 1994, after years spent poring over the original Italian text, Pinsky published his translation of Dante’s “The Inferno,” in which he painstakingly recreated in English the rhythm of the original verse. For this effort, he won the Los Angeles Times Book Award in poetry, the Academy of American Poets’ translation award, and was a Book-of-the-Month-Club Editor’s Choice.
The Librarian of Congress appointed Pinsky the 39th National Poet Laureate in 1997, for his “accomplishments in translation, his interest in making poetry accessible through digital technology on the Internet, and his own probing poetry.”
During his three terms as Poet Laureate, Pinsky established the Favorite Poem Project, in which 18,000 Americans shared their favorite poems by reading them aloud. Pinsky said he believes poetry is a “vocal art,” and he wished, through the project, to prove that—despite popular opinion to the contrary—Americans do read and enjoy poetry. He has published three anthologies and a DVD of the poems gathered through this project.
Since retiring from the post of Poet Laureate, Pinsky has continued to write and teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University.
The Man and his Work
- “The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966–1996”
- “Gulf Music”
- “Jersey Rain”
- “The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation”
- “Americans’ Favorite Poems
The Rest of the Story
Although poetry can sometimes be perceived as an old-fashioned medium, Pinsky is a technophile. In 1984, he wrote the script for a text-based adventure game, “Mindwheel,” in which the player must restore a world from chaos by probing the knowledge of four deceased residents. The game was released with a book (written by another author) that featured some of Pinsky’s poems as keys to the game.
Pinsky was also the poetry editor for the online magazine Slate. In 2015, he was named a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor at Boston University, where he had been teaching creative writing and English for a graduate creative writing program.
He also developed a Massive Open Online Course, consisting of mini-lecture videos, called the Art of Poetry in 2014. According to his web site, the course had 12,000 participants sign up when it was launched.
This article was originally written by Jennifer Ferris; it was updated October 20, 2017.
