Robert Pinsky's Grand Slam

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Then my mother fell on her head in 1951. . . . Family life was severely crippled and fractured by that event. She had a very severe concussion. Whether for physiological or psychological reasons, for many years she suffered from vertigo and hypersensitivity to sounds and light, and she was very deeply unhappy and erratic for a long time.

There was a certain tension between my parents, a dissatisfaction. We didn't have much money--in a two-bedroom apartment, with eventually two children and a baby. It was not what my parents would have considered at all a desirable part of town. So, the scarcity of money was a part of it.

Has the fact that you grew up working class been important to your writing?
It has given me an appreciation of my good fortune. I have an acute sense of amazement that I can earn my bread by teaching poetry and by writing these things that occur to me and that I put in a certain shape or form to sound a certain way, and people pay attention to it.

Do you like being a poet, or would you rather be something else?
I like being a poet very, very much. If I could play the saxophone the way Dexter Gordon or Sonny Rollins does, I would probably rather do that. But I can't. I think the rhythms in a lot of my writing are an attempt to create that feeling of a gorgeous jazz solo that gives you more emotion and some more and coming around with some more, and it's the same but it's changed and the rhythm is very powerful, but it is also lyricism. I think I've been trying to create something like that in my writing for a long time.

Anne-Marie Cusac is managing editor of The Progressive. Excerpted from The Progressive (May 1999). Subscriptions: $32/yr. (12 issues) from Box 421, Mt. Morris, IL 61054-0421.

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