As a Stanford graduate student in the mid-1960s, Robert Pinsky got weekly phone calls from his mom in New Jersey. She was worried about her poetry-writing son out in California, and by the end of the conversation she usually managed to slip in a plea that he take the optician's licensing exam -- so he'd have "something to fall back on."
He never did take that exam, but Pinsky, MA '65, PhD '67, ended up with a career any mom could be proud of. Named U.S. poet laureate in 1997, this year's Commencement speaker has become a leading proponent of his resurgent art form. In April, Congress appointed him to an unprecedented third year as poet laureate. He has championed verse on the Internet (he's poetry editor of the online magazine Slate) and tapped into a surprisingly deep vein of populist poetic nostalgia with his Favorite Poem Project -- an audio and video archive of 1,000 ordinary Americans each reciting a beloved poem. More than 10,000 people submitted favorites, and hundreds have read their selections at poetry events around the country.
Launched in April 1998 as a 200th-birthday gift to the Library of Congress, the Favorite Poem Project grew out of Pinsky's belief that poetry is an art form that must be heard in the voices of everyday people. "The reader's body becomes the medium for the work of art," he says from his home in Newtonville, Mass., where he lives with his wife, Ellen, '64, and teaches in the creative writing program at nearby Boston University. "It's similar to the difference between reading sheet music and hearing the music performed." In fact, that's why he's so bullish on Internet distribution of poetry: with audio capability, web surfers can hear poems recited. Pinsky picked up some of these notions as a Stanford PhD student working with Yvor Winters, the imperiously brilliant critic and poet who died in 1968. "Winters emphasized the sound of the poem very much and read aloud beautifully -- in French as well as in English," he recalls.
At 58, the poet laureate has reached a high point in his prolific career as a writer and teacher. He's the author of five volumes of ambitious free verse (one book-length poem is titled An Explanation of America), three collections of essays, a popular verse translation of Dante's Inferno and a recent prosody handbook, The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide. After completing his studies at Stanford, he spent 13 years as an English professor at Wellesley College and nine years teaching at UC-Berkeley before settling at Boston University in 1988. Not bad for a grad student without a backup plan.
