An Interview with Professor Robert Pinsky, Former US Poet Laureate

December 13, 2010

Recently, Professor Robert Pinsky, internationally-acclaimed poet and teacher of creative writing at Boston University, agreed to answer a few questions via email for the New Vilna Review. Dr. Pinsky was U.S. Poet Laureate from 1997-2000, during which time he created the Favorite Poem Project, an innovative endeavor which sought to highlight the importance of poetry in American culture and the lives of Americans. He recently appeared on stage at an event organized by the New Center for Arts and Culture in Watertown, Massachusetts, with artistic collaborator Professor Tod Machover of MIT, to discuss their work on a new opera entitled “Death and the Powers: The Robots’ Opera.” 

NVR: You recently participated in an event sponsored by the New Center for Art and Culture, in which you discussed your collaboration with MIT Professor and musician Tod Machover, on a new opera entitled “Death and the Powers: The Robots’ Opera.” This theatrical piece imagines a world in which it has become possible for one very wealthy man (and members of his family) to escape death by transferring his consciousness from the organic to the electronic –how does this idea resonate with you personally? Do you feel there is cultural, spiritual or artistic value to be found in the finitude of mortal existence?

When John Keats says, in “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird” he is not necessarily or entirely saying the bird is better off. Because its song and its consciousness are the same as those of its ancestors and its descendants, it is not born for death. Because as a human, hungry consciousness I am born for death I enter into an intense, manifold relation with my ancestors (among them John Keats) and descendants (among them, I can imagine, someone as unthinkably different from me as I am from John Keats.)Being born for death is central to who I am.

NVR: What sort of figure is Simon Powers (the lead in this opera)? Is he insane? A narcissist? Fearful? Does he have parallels elsewhere in the world of literature or theatre?

His predecessors might include Faust. I imagine him as a charming megalomaniac, a charismatic bully, a sensitive, intellectually curious vulgarian, a lover of music and poetry and money.

NVR: At one point the character of Simon Powers muses: “They were all amazed/How a tinkerer like me/Could be such a shrewd investor” which could be seen as evocative of the Emancipation and the ways in which Jews went from being marginal figures at the edges of European society, to playing significant roles in business, the arts, academia and other fields – is Simon Powers Jewish? Does Jewish history or culture play a role in the subtext of your libretto?

Simon Powers is a literary figment, who happens to be neither Jewish nor not: the libretto does not specify. His creator, who is pleased to avoid worship and ritual, is pleased to have grown up eating Jewish food, hearing Jewish jokes, etc. Simon could easily be Armenian or Taiwanese or Nigerian or Italian. He might even be a Protestant, but we can deduce from his kinds of energy that his family has had nothing to do with Andover, Princeton, all that baloney.

NVR: When you participated in the Tanner Lecture on Human Values at Princeton University in 2001, you addresses themes of cultural similarity and difference, noting in part that “On one hand, we are afraid of becoming so much like one another that we will lose something vital in our human nature—and on the other hand, we are also afraid of becoming so different, so much divided into alien and murderously competitive fragments, that we cannot survive.” How does this tension, this idea of simultaneous repulsion and attraction in terms of how we identify with our fellow humans, influence how you see the role of Jewish history, culture and identity in your own work?

That is right at the center, for me. An interesting thing about Jews is the tendency to find all other Jews either not Jewish enough or too Jewish. In my kosher childhood home we felt above those who failed to have separate dishes for dairy and meat, but we also felt above those who had two refrigerators. The kosher Golden Mean, claimed by every family! That is a rich, productive frame of mind, I think.

NVR: Your are perhaps best known in some circles for the amazing work you have done with the “Favorite Poem,” project, which has served to highlight the incredible richness and diversity not only of poetry itself in the United States, but the ways in which readers and listeners experience these poems – What new insights did you gain from this project into the nature of American culture in the early 21st century? Has it had an influence on how you think of your own identity as a Jew and an artist?

The Favorite Poem Project videos at www.favoritepoem.org confirm the vitality of poetry and of American culture. So do the three FPP anthologies published by Norton.

I am not a great one for thinking about “my identity as a Jew and an artist.” I think about what I see and hear, and about what I might write or do. Identity means the same, always the same . . . not one of my terms.

The project is a natural manifestation of how I have thought about art and the world and other people all my life. In a way, it is my version of my grandfather's bar, in Long Branch, New Jersey, where my family has lived for three or four generations. Dave Pinsky, before the bar, was a bootlegger there. Milford Pinsky, my father, was a noted athlete at Long Branch High School, where he met my mother. He and I had the same home room teacher, Miss Scott.

NVR: Looking into the near future, are there any themes or topics specifically relevant to Jewish life in the coming decades that you think are well-suited to exploration in the arts?

The answer should probably be in political terms, and I don't think I am competent to make it.

NVR: Is there anything else you would like to add?

My new Selected Poems will be published this Spring. In preparing it, I have been using my The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996, and looking at that book's cover: a Torah Ark from the 1920's, made in Jerusalem at the Bezalel Art School. The ark is an interesting work of art: all of the materials are from the Middle East, and the imagery, too, avoids expectations of the European diaspora. No six-pointed star, for instance. (Working on The Life of David, I learned that the “Star of David” is fairly recent-- not only unknown to David, and not mentioned in Torah, but also not mentioned in the wisdom literature.) That approach, fresh but historical, is attractive. I've seen this ark at the Spertus Institute, in Chicago: touchingly, it is actually a model, a few feet tall, never built to full scale. Still in progress or potential-- as we can all hope to be?

Above photo of Robert Pinsky by Vernon Doucette. For more information on the “Favorite Poem” Project, please click here. For more information on the opera “Death and the Powers: The Robot’s Opera,” please click here.

Copyright The New Vilna Review 2010.