8 5 R R O B E R T P I N S K Y A N D M O D E R N M E M O R Y D A V I D K A U F M A N N Is it possible that the antonym of ‘‘forgetting’’ is not ‘‘remembering’’ but justice? – Yusef Hayim Yerushalmi John Ashbery once wrote of Frank O’Hara that he was too hip for the square and too square for the hip. The same might go for Robert Pinsky, who, in spite of his achievements and reputation, has not received the kind of scholarly attention one might expect. Of course, I would not want to claim that Pinsky is particularly hip. In spite of the fact that his fierceness increases with age, he is still the master of the Horatian middle style, and his work is still marked by the rigors of his early formalism. But for all that, Pinsky has indeed become somewhat unruly, and his poems range onto unexpected terrain. Though he does not belong to any avantgarde , living or dead, his work does not belong to any traditional school, either. While he is a deeply intellectual writer, his career displays an endearing and committed old-style populism. He just does not fit. I want to argue that Pinsky has set himself the task of remembering the present. In a famous letter to Walter Benjamin, The- 8 6 K A U F M A N N Y odor Adorno reminds his friend that reification – the reduction of collective labor and shared history to atomized, isolated, and seemingly ‘‘natural’’ facts – is a kind of forgetting. Objects, he claims, become dead things to our perception and memory once we forget the nexus from which they come, the web of human relations and endeavors that inhere in them. One of the jobs of thinking, then, would be to reconstitute that nexus, to make it visible again. That, I will maintain, is the point of Pinsky’s signature poem, ‘‘Shirt.’’ Further, although Pinsky never resorts to Adorno’s language, the drive to overcome reified forgetting has become the project of Pinsky’s work in poetry and prose. I’ll begin in mid-course, with Pinsky’s discussion of William Carlos Williams’s iconic ‘‘The pure products of America / go crazy’’ in his 1999 essay ‘‘Poetry and American Memory.’’ The stakes of Pinsky’s overall argument in the article are clear and high. We Americans might make up a great nation but we have not yet decided to be a great people, in part because we have not agreed on what it is we will remember. As he puts it, ‘‘A people is defined and unified not by blood but by shared memory.’’ A lot, then, is riding on memory and on Williams’s poem. Elsie, the young woman who worked for the Williams family, serves as the exemplary pure American product gone crazy: some Elsie – voluptuous water expressing with broken brain the truth about us – her great ungainly hips and flopping breasts addressed to cheap jewelry and rich young men with fine eyes as if the earth under our feet were an excrement of some sky and we degraded prisoners destined to hunger until we eat filth R O B E R T P I N S K Y A N D M O D E R N M E M O R Y 8 7 R while the imagination strains after deer going by fields of goldenrod in the stifling heat of September. Williams pits Elsie’s ‘‘broken brain,’’ her lack of taste, and adamantly unrefined body against her sexualized desire for social mobility, and he takes the pathos of the impossibility of her situation as an expression of the ‘‘truth about us.’’ We are misguided materialists who live as if appetite were all, even though our stunted imaginations yearn for beauty. Williams, whose social criticism here is aesthetic, tropes transcendence as a form of everyday pastoralism, as nature softened by distance. I am not making any new claims about this well-known passage here. Rather, I want to underscore how idiosyncratic Pinsky’s own reading...