Words matter. These are the best Robert Pinsky Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I love form, but I’m not interested in forms. I’ve never written a sonnet or villanelle or sestina or any of that. For me, it’s a kind of line. It’s a rhythm. It’s something musical.
I don’t like to have a calm, orderly, quiet place to work. I often compose while driving, compose in my head. It is true that I wrote my little book, ‘The Sounds of Poetry, A Brief Guide,’ almost entirely in airplanes and airport departure lounges.
Art will not solve your problems. It will not enable you to live merrily.
I delight sometimes in saying to – as when I’m a teacher, I love saying, ‘This is really important, so don’t write it down.’ To me, what you retain is a very important filter.
I’m far from immune to the American, perhaps historically male, prejudice toward practical and physical competence; I hope I’ve also considered that prejudice enough to have some distance from it.
Method involves a slavish addiction to laws, and we can only aspire to anarchy.
Poetry is a vocal art for me – but not necessarily a performative one. It might be reading to oneself or recalling some lines by memory.
I think art is not an ornament or refinement at the fringes of human intelligence, I think it’s at the center. It’s at the core.
I am a frustrated saxophone player. If I could, I would abandon all of my books, and I would trade it all if I could play the way people I admire play.
If what you want to do is make good art, decide what’s good and try to imitate it.
If I live near a dancer or a painter, or a clarinet player comes from my neighborhood, I take some pleasure in that, feel a little more as if I come from someplace in particular.
‘Write’ is almost the wrong verb for what I do. I think ‘compose’ is more accurate because you’re trying to make the sounds in your mind and in your voice. So I compose while I’m driving or in the shower.
Poetry is not easy. Or should I say, real poetry is not easy.
For an American, there’s no automatic place where people love the art of poetry. There’s not a social class that considers poetry its property the way in some countries there’s a snob value to the art.
If you want to make films, you’ll watch Kurosawa. If you want to play a violin, you listen to Seghetti. Same with somebody who has the ambition to play in the NBA. I watch a basketball game; I enjoy it. Somebody who really wants to learn to play is studying whatever is most magnificent that’s going on out there.
New Jersey is the most poetic state: close enough to New York to be urban and cosmopolitan, far enough to be desirous and unsure; densely populated, but full of farms and woods, with the most deer of any state.
Jazz and poetry both involve a structure that may be familiar and to some extent predictable. And then, you try to create as much surprise and spontaneity and feeling and variation while respecting that structure.
Autobiography is a genre notorious for falsehood.