Biography of Robert Pinsky
Robert
Pinsky published books of poetry including
Jersey Rain
The figured wheel
New and Collected Poems from 1996
the want bone
history of my heart
an explanation of America
sadness and Happiness.
One of
his latest nonfiction books of literary criticism is entitled
the
Sounds of Poetry-a brief guide
Robert Pinsky’s imagination was captured when he heard the train conductor’s cry, “Passengers going to Hoboken, change trains to summit!” which prompted him to begin writing music. He became a saxophonist. He became enthralled with writing music and eventually writing poetry. Although, he admits that he wasn’t much of a saxophonist, because he got very angry and stressed when he played the notes incorrectly. Poetry was an outlet from his life. Pinsky was inspired by the wonderful work of John Coltrane, Alan Ginsburg, and Emily Dickinson.
During Pinsky's childhood he says, that his life was great, he had enough food, didn’t really live in poverty, and he had friends, some. “Thats the beautiful part of my life, having friends and having enough food. My life was full of fear. My father got fired from his rather low-paying job when I was seven years old, in 1947, and we had no money.”
In Pinsky’s life, he lived in a run down apartment, being the older of his two siblings, which made the house even more small. Pinsky’s life was humiliating because he lived in the part of town where there were drunks and lots of murderers. His mother said that, “We lived in a slum…It wasn’t where middle class people were supposed to be staying."
Robert was very insecure about all of that. Of course, worse came to worse, his mother, who had already been, “rather a strange and difficult person,” Pinsky says, fell on her head. Pinsky’s mother had a concussion and she was in the hospital for a couple of months.
Pinsky had a grandmother that lived four doors down and cooked for the Pinsky family most of the time, because the Pinsky’s were too busy or too poor, or too lazy. These problems in his family inspired him to write more and jazz really helped him explain what he felt.
Pinsky loved jazz, because the flow of it and how it made him feel. He said it was incredible, because jazz was so different, which he wanted to be throughout his life. Pinsky decided to start poetry because he wanted to explore new bounds.
His awards include an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, Poetry Magazine's Oscar Blumenthal prize, the William Carlos Williams Award, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. He is currently poetry editor of the weekly Internet magazine Slate. Pinsky teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University, and in 1997 was named the United States Poet Laureate and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.