Democracy, Culture and the Voice of P..., Robert Pinsky
Democracy, Culture and the Voice of P..., Robert Pinsky
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Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry

Author: Robert Pinsky

Narrator: Lloyd James

Unabridged: 1 hr 47 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/16/2010


Synopsis

The place of poetry in modern democracy is no place, according to conventional wisdom. The poet, we hear, is a casualty of mass entertainment and prosaic public culture, banished to the artistic sidelines to compose variations on insipid themes for a dwindling audience. Robert Pinsky, however, argues that this gloomy diagnosis is as wrongheaded as it is familiar. Pinsky, whose remarkable career as a poet itself undermines the view, writes that to portray poetry and democracy as enemies is to radically misconstrue both. The voice of poetry, he explains, resonates with profound themes at the very heart of democratic cultureThere is no one in America better to write on this topic. One of the country's most accomplished poets, Robert Pinsky served an unprecedented two terms as America's Poet Laureate (1997-2000) and led the immensely popular multimedia Favorite Poem Project, which invited Americans to submit and read aloud their favorite poems. Pinsky draws on his experiences and on characteristically sharp and elegant observations of individual poems to argue that expecting poetry to compete with show business is to mistake its greatest democratic strength - its intimate, human scale - as a weakness.As an expression of individual voice, a poem implicitly allies itself with ideas about individual dignity that are democracy's bedrock, far more than is mass participation. Yet poems also summon up communal life. Even the most inward-looking work imagines a reader. And in their rhythms and cadences poems carry in their very bones the illusion and dynamic of call and response. Poetry, Pinsky writes, cannot help but mediate between the inner consciousness of the individual reader and the outer world of other people. As part of the entertainment industry, he concludes, poetry will always be small and overlooked. As an art - and one that is inescapably democratic - it is massive and fundamental.

About Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky is the author of numerous books of poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Figured Wheel, and prose, including The Sounds of Poetry. He served as United States Poet Laureate from 1997 to 2000, during which time he founded the Favorite Poem Project. He has edited several anthologies, most recently The Book of Poetry for Hard Times. Pinsky teaches at Boston University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Jeffery on February 10, 2009

Before a rapt audience, Robert Pinsky recently stepped to the podium of the Fullerton Room of the venerable Art Institute of Chicago. He acknowledged the richness of the place and the art itself 21st century Chicago has become. With his understated grace and usual dignity, the former Poet Laureate o......more

Goodreads review by Kent on November 22, 2009

The essay distinguishes the job of reading poetry from reading anything else. The important thing for Pinsky is understanding the special qualities of verse. Yes, there's music. But Pinsky takes it beyond the music alone, and proposes that my reading a poem to myself is akin to a personal performanc......more

Goodreads review by Jo on December 29, 2018

A hop-scotchy polishing-up of a lecture by the author......more

Goodreads review by Kent on January 08, 2014

Pinsky recognizes the power of the poetic voice to impact democracy, but more importantly to express democracy and culture. Just the right mix of the academic and the real life.......more