Poetry Focus: Poem by Robert Pinsky

Pinsky as a young poet

Eyewear is very fortunate, this Tuesday in cold London, to be able to feature a poem from Robert Pinsky. This is from his Selected Poems. Robert Pinsky, a former Poet Laureate of America, is one of the greatest of living poets in the English language.

Rhyme

Air an instrument of the tongue,

The tongue an instrument

Of the body, the body

An instrument of spirit,

The spirit a being of the air.

A bird the medium of its song.

A song a world, a containment

Like a hotel room, ready

For us guests who inherit

Our compartment of time there.

In the Cornell box, among

Ephemera as its element,

The preserved bird— a study

In spontaneous elegy, the parrot

Art, mortal in its cornered sphere.

The room a stanza rung

In a laddered filament

Clambered by all the unsteady

Chambered voices that share it,

Each reciting I too was here—

In a room, a rhyme, a song.

In the box, in books: each element

An instrument, the body

Still straining to parrot

The spirit, a being of air.

Comments

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?

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In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and Silence of the Lambs . I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".

THE SWIFT REPORT 2023

I am writing this post without much enthusiasm, but with a sense of duty. This blog will be 20 years old soon, and though I rarely post here anymore, I owe it some attention. Of course in 2023, "Swift" now means one thing only, Taylor Swift, the billionaire musician. Gone are the days when I was asked if I was related to Jonathan Swift. The pre-eminent cultural Swift is now alive and TIME PERSON OF THE YEAR. There is no point in belabouring the obvious with delay: 2023 was a low-point in the low annals of human history - war, invasion, murder, in too many nations. Hate, division, the collapse of what truth is, exacerbated by advances in AI that may or may not prove apocalyptic, while global warming still seems to threaten the near-future safety of humanity. It's been deeply depressing. The world lost some wonderful poets, actors, musicians, and writers this year, as it often does. Two people I knew and admired greatly, Ian Ferrier and Kevin Higgins, poets and organise

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