(PNAN-ME) – The New York Times Book Review said about U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky recent volume of poetry: “Pinsky is our finest living specimen of this sadly rare breed, and the poems of Gulf Music (2007) are among the best examples we have of poetry’s ability to illuminate not only who we are as humans, but who we are—and can be—as a nation.”
On Monday, March 7, the Portland Museum of Art will present “Is Vision The Twin of Speech?” with Poet Pinsky at 6:00 pm at the Holiday Inn By the Bay. The title of his lecture is based on these lines in Leaves of Grass, section 25:
My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach.
With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds and volumes of worlds.
Speech is the twin of my vision, it is unequal to measure itself.
It provokes me forever, it says sarcastically,
Walt you contain enough, why don’t you let it out then?
Now in his third term, Pinsky will share his love of poetry, Walt Whitman and belief in the potential for poetry to be part of everyday life. As America’s a public ambassador for poetry, he has been dedicated to identifying and invigorating poetry’s place in the world. Founding the Favorite Poem Project, he sought to document that presence, giving voice to the American audience for poetry. Elegant and tough, vividly imaginative, Pinsky’s own poems have earned praise for their wild musical energy and ambitious range.
More on Pinksy. . . As the Poetry Editor for the online magazine, Slate, Pinsky appeared regularly on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. His poems appear in magazines such as, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Threepenny Review and American Poetry Review, as well as frequently in The Best American Poetry anthologies. Pinsky’s Tanner Lectures at Princeton University were published as Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry (Princeton University Press, 2002), and he currently teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University. He is a winner of the PEN/Voelcker Award, the William Carlos Williams Prize, the Lenore Marshall Prize, the National Foundation for Jewish Culture’s 2006 Jewish Cultural Achievement Award in Literary Arts and the 2008 Theodore M. Roethke Memorial Poetry Award. Also he has been one of the few members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters to have appeared on The Simpsons (Season 13, Episode 20) and The Colbert Report (April 19, 2007).