Jersey Breaks, Robert Pinsky
Jersey Breaks, Robert Pinsky
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Jersey Breaks
Becoming an American Poet

Author: Robert Pinsky

Narrator: Robert Pinsky

Unabridged: 9 hr 9 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/07/2023


Synopsis

In late-1940s Long Branch, a historic but run-down Jersey Shore resort town, in a neighborhood of Italian, Black, and Jewish families, Robert Pinsky began his unlikely journey to becoming a poet. Descended from a bootlegger grandfather, an athletic father, and a rebellious tomboy mother, Pinsky was an unruly but articulate high school C student, whose obsession with the rhythms and melodies of speech inspired him to write.

Pinsky traces the roots of his poetry, with its wide and fearless range, back to the voices of his neighborhood, to music and a distinctly American tradition of improvisation, with influences including Mark Twain and Ray Charles, Marianne Moore and Mel Brooks, Emily Dickinson and Sid Caesar, Dante Alighieri and the Orthodox Jewish liturgy. He reflects on how writing poetry helped him make sense of life's challenges, such as his mother's traumatic brain injury, and on his notable public presence, including an unprecedented three terms as United States poet laureate.

Candid, engaging, and wry, Jersey Breaks offers an intimate self-portrait and a unique poetic understanding of American culture.

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 Nancy

Growing up in a historic, perpetually declining American resort town, with families of year-round Hispanic and South Asian newcomers beginning to arrive, I could see that nearly everybody feels like an outsider, one way or another. from Jersey Breaks by Robert Pinsky In 1998 my husband gifted me The F......more

Goodreads review by Dan

My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher W. W. Norton & Company for an advanced copy of this autobiography on the making of a poet. Writers are constantly asked where they get their ideas from. A question that I have always wanted to ask was where did the idea that you were a writer come from? W......more

My father grew up on Sixth Ave. in Long Branch in the 20s, 30s and 40s. I visited my Grandpa and Grandma all the time, as we lived nearby. Pinsky may have known my family. I have asked him on Twitter, but received no answer as some poets are so awfully busy. ;-) I know many of the references of Long......more