Robert Pinsky's Grand Slam

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And I said, "Well, it's easy for him. He doesn't have to do all his own material."

Then Frank said, "Well, we ought to give poetry readings and do lots of material."

And he and I have. We read nothing of our own. We read poems by Shakespeare and Elizabeth Bishop and Frank O'Hara and whoever we feel like--though we tend not to read anyone living. We enjoy it immensely.

The Favorite Poem Project is partly meant to demonstrate that there is more circulation of poetry and more life of poetry than there might seem. . . . If you take any office building in any city in America, I can promise you there will be people in the secretarial pool who have poems they love. I assure you there will be managerial people who will have poems they love. There will be people on the custodial staff--folks who empty the wastebaskets and clean the floors--who have poems they love. And there will be people on the board of directors who have poems they love. The poems would not all be in English. They would vary widely in kind and in literary quality. But as those people described why those poems were personally important to them, you would see a very basic human phenomenon of communal support and appreciation and respect.

Do you have a favorite poem?
There is a list of probably 50. It rotates. "Sailing to Byzantium" [by William Butler Yeats], "Ode to a Nightingale" [John Keats], "Eros Turannos" [Edwin Arlington Robinson], "To Earthward" [Robert Frost].

You've written about "the saving vulgarity of poetry." What do you mean by "vulgarity"?
The word has to do with the fact that there's kind of a built-in universality to the art, which needs so little equipment. It's basically somebody's breath and mouth. Though it's an intellectual art, it's also a bodily art. There is a cerebral, intellectual part of it and there is also an animal part of it, and that gives it a peculiar intimacy.

Do you have a vision of a just and liberated society?
I'm not sure how to answer because the history of my century is a history in which the visionary has repeatedly collapsed into nightmare. I am almost genetically incapable of becoming a true conservative or a reactionary. I was raised in an immigrant town in this country. I certainly aspire to a better society than what we have--more just economic arrangements, more equitable distribution of material and agricultural goods.

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