A Quote by Robert Pinsky

Poetry is a vocal art for me - but not necessarily a performative one. It might be reading to oneself or recalling some lines by memory. — © Robert Pinsky
Poetry is a vocal art for me - but not necessarily a performative one. It might be reading to oneself or recalling some lines by memory.
I didn't ever consider poetry the province exclusively of English and American literature and I discovered a great amount in reading Polish poetry and other Eastern European poetry and reading Russian poetry and reading Latin American and Spanish poetry and I've always found models in those other poetries of poets who could help me on my path.
Your lines, I maintain it, are poetry, and good poetry.... Friendship... had I been so blest as to have met with you in time, might have led me - God of love only knows where.
Certainly for me prose has a dilatory capacity, insofar as I don't trust my abilities in prose. I imagine I could have done the same thing in poetry, but sometimes I feel more fluent in poetry than in prose, and as a consequence perhaps I might pass too quickly by a thing that I might, in prose, have struggled merely to articulate. That struggle creates space, and it seems to me a particular kind of space into which memory flows easily. I suspect I think better in poetry, however.
For the last episode [of Downton Abbey], you'll need some handkerchiefs. I needed handkerchiefs reading it. It wasn't because it necessarily moved me while reading it, but it was the experience of reading it when I realized it was the last time I was ever going to be reading one of those scripts. That was quite terminal.
Poetry is difficult, I mean interesting poetry, not confessional babble or emotive propaganda. Reading a new poet is discovering an entire world, what Stevens called a 'mundo' and it takes a lot of time to orientate oneself in such a world. What we have to learn to do then, as teachers and militants of a poetic insurgency, is to encourage people to learn to love the difficulty of poetry. I simply do not understand much of the poetry that I love.
To the question, ‘Is the cinema an art?’ my answer is, ‘what does it matter?’... You can make films or you can cultivate a garden. Both have as much claim to being called an art as a poem by Verlaine or a painting by Delacroix… Art is ‘making.’ The art of poetry is the art of making poetry. The art of love is the art of making love... My father never talked to me about art. He could not bear the word.
To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed through words, so to convey this so that others may experience the same feeling - this is the activity of art.
To me, photography is not just a visual art, but something closer to poetry - or at least to some poetry, such as the haiku.
I read a lot of poetry. All types of poetry, but mostly Catalan poetry, because I believe poetry is the essence of language. Reading the classics, be they medieval or contemporary, gives me a stylistic energy that I'm very interested in.
Harmonies come really naturally to me. I don't have to labor too hard over them. I'll sing a lead vocal, and then I will immediately have all of these other ideas for vocal harmonies. I think that some of the most fun parts of recording, for me, are the vocal harmonies.
Some people become so expert at reading between the lines they don't read the lines.
For an American, there's no automatic place where people love the art of poetry. There's not a social class that considers poetry its property the way in some countries there's a snob value to the art.
As you may know, my motto is: "All memory is fiction." It could just as easily be: "All fiction is memory." Unpacked, these two statements defy the ease of logic, but offer some really important truths about narrative art, at the very least, and about memory. So I would say that all art is personal.
Singing is all about certain inflection on certain lines. I used to listen to tapes of everybody from Michael Jackson and Prince to Earth, Wind and Fire. They would have different vocal inflections. If the line insinuated pain, they would cringe on some lines.
Traditionally poetry is written in lines. But the prose poem is the kind of poem that isn't written in lines. It is lyrical prose that uses the tricks of poetry, such as dense imagery. This is a big topic of debate in poetry land. There's no perfect definition.
Poetry doesn't necessarily need to be some erudite thing. Your mom telling you a story is just as much poetry as some old 17th century thing that no one really understands. I think that those boundaries should be broken down!
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