Change Trains at Summit: Becoming a poet

Abstract

Change Trains at SummitBecoming a poet Robert Pinsky (bio) i used to follow the self-imposed rule that you should not presume to call yourself a poet. "It's for the world to say," said Robert Frost. So for years, even after I began publishing my work, I would avoid "I am a poet" and say instead, "I write poems." But in the meantime the exalted word poet went its own way, becoming more and more a term for all kinds of things, including an academic job category. ("We need to hire a poet.") Following Frost's principle started to feel like an affectation. His cunning declaration that poet is something for other people [End Page 25] to say was like him: under what may look like a modest surface, a covert, underlying superiority. There's also a bit of superstition involved—bad luck to claim the word for yourself. That kind of backspin has its appeal. But a couple of books into my career I let myself say out loud, at times, that I was a poet. It wasn't modesty that made me shy to use the word about myself, but a matter of where I came from—a covert, stubborn, and provincial pride in what you are and shame at the very idea of pretending to be anything you might not be. In the watchful smalltown neighborhood of lower-middle-class Jews, Italians, and Black people where I grew up, the phrase "trying to be something you're not" was a heavy accusation. It might be fine to be a poet, though possibly less valuable than to be an optometrist. In certain limited ways, it might even be acceptable to be a criminal. What was not acceptable was vaunting bullshit about yourself. Poet was a great thing to me—none greater, really, so not to be desecrated. Given my background, a dear friend recently asked me, How is it that I became a poet rather than a criminal or an optometrist? I could quibble. My father, Milford Pinsky, was an optician, not an optometrist. (A common mistake.) And it's true that his father, Dave Pinsky, was a criminal. But as my aunt Thelma used to say, her pop was in the liquor business, and it happened to be during Prohibition. That was the era when Dave, my Zaydee Pop, as I called him, pursued the liquor business in our hometown, Long Branch, New Jersey. Trivial and significant, stupid and profound, like a family oppressive and nurturing, like the larger world seductive and treacherous: my feelings about the town are as confused as can be. My bedeviled patriotism, my need for the lofty outcast art of poetry, my C− student's distrust of worldly rewards and punishments, the inward voice that spurs me to bring together disparate times, places, and things, that attraction to a mishmosh. All began in Long Branch. If I have a story to tell, it's about how the failures and aspirations of a certain time and place led to poetry. [End Page 26] Click for larger view View full resolution Dave Pinsky, the author's grandfather. [End Page 27] ________ even saying "i write poems" is inaccurate. Write is not precise. I work to produce not marks on paper but something more like a song or a monologue, or both. I was never that precocious child or teenager who would sit down to produce work on a page with a pen or a typewriter. I know that there are people who think by writing. But I tend to think by speaking, often to myself. Even now, as throughout my life, my poems don't usually begin on paper or on a screen. It's a matter of humming and muttering, grunts and echoes in the vowels and consonants of speech, the melody of every sentence. I get a tune in my head. Like noodling at a piano, I like toying with bits of remembered conversation, maybe half-remembered lines by Keats or Dickinson mixed in with a joke or a bit of gossip. Sometimes you discover something new. Early on, this obsession with how words sound seemed like a bad habit...