Robert Pinsky's Grand Slam

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

But Pol Pot was a visionary. And Hitler was a visionary. Stalin, perhaps, wasn't a visionary, but he cleaved to a vision. So as I reflect on the history of my century, I feel hesitant about the notion of a sweeping vision. It's a powerful electoral and philosophical issue right now to think about how much we owe to a kind of gradualistic, ameliorist sense of politics.

You focus on the city in your poetry. Why are so many people attracted to the city right now?
Just as Americans are feeling tender and protective about the natural environment, I think we're feeling tender and protective about the neighborhood life and the downtown life that once were taken for granted. And the great romance of the city, from Baudelaire through Carol Reed, is not a romance that we can repose in. It has some of the feeling of a wounded thing as well as a very powerful thing.

What was your childhood like?
I grew up in a town--Long Branch, New Jersey--that had a very strong historical fabric going back to the 19th century. My family had been in the town for generations. My grandfather had been a well-known bootlegger and now he had a bar across the street from the police station and town hall. My other grandfather washed the windows in many of the stores. So, though you'd have to call them working-class figures in many ways, they were important figures in the town, as was my father.

My father and mother graduated from Long Branch High, as I did, my brother and sister did, and our cousins did. So I was aware of the historical context--both in the macro and in the micro sense. And I've often thought that my response to books like Faulkner's The Hamlet, Joyce's Ulysses, and One Hundred Years of Solitude [by Gabriel GarcÌa M·rquez] partly is determined by that sense of a town and community that self-consciously sees itself as solemn and grand.

Long Branch was a largely Italian town, and there was a beautiful, expansive Italian culture of food, music, and communal life. There was a new boardwalk and a racetrack--so that flash and glamour and money came down from New York. And I'm grateful for all those things.

Did anything happen to you early on that changed or deeply molded your life?
My parents were witty people. They had good taste in clothes. They were good dancers. They were prized, and sort of like impoverished royalty. My mother listened to the opera on Saturday mornings. They were very funny as well as very terrifying in their fights or crazy spells. For five or six years, I was an adored only child of parents who felt themselves to be visibly beautiful and exciting people. I was a part of that charm. I was encouraged to be right. And I'm grateful to them for that. I think it's good for people to be adored.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print