Robert Pinsky Quotes

19 Sourced Quotes

No aspect of poem is more singular, more unique, than its rhythm.

Robert Pinsky
Even in the scorched and frozen world of the dead after the
holocaust
The wheel as it turns goes on accreting ornaments.

Robert Pinsky
All the mysteries of consciousness flower in the body.

Robert Pinsky
I think what holds a poem like this together for me, if it's held together, is largely meter; this one is in iambic pentameter and iambic pentameter whatever else it is, can be a very good glue. It is a very good way to hold things together. It's like 4:4 you know.

Robert Pinsky
I am very interested in memorization which is the process of incorporating a poem, so, I would say the kind of poetry I write is the kind that emphasises the physical qualities of the words.

Robert Pinsky
The poetry I love is written with someone's voice and I believe its proper culmination is to be read with someone's voice. And the human voice in that sense is not electronically reproduced or amplified.

Robert Pinsky
A poem is free, and it shows its freedom by establishing its own principles.

Robert Pinsky
An underestimated element in poetry, that reading aloud makes clear, is the pause. I mean especially the force of a pause or a couple of pauses close together, contrasted with a longer unit of grammar.

Robert Pinsky
There are no rules but uniformity can make it seem as though there are rules.

Robert Pinsky
There are no rules. However, principles may be discerned in actual practice; for example, in the way people actually speak, or in the lines the poets have written.

Robert Pinsky
That physical tingle, that powerful audible experience (not with poets projecting their work to an audience) but more intimate, less planned than that.

Robert Pinsky
Part of making a poem is a process of day- dreaming.

Robert Pinsky
Poetry is a vocal art for me, not neccessarily performative, it might be reading to one self or recalling some lines by memory. The speaker bringing their own experience to it, changing it with their own sensibility.

Robert Pinsky
It is the nature of poetry to emphasize that the physical sounds of words come from a particular body, one at a time, in a particular order.

Robert Pinsky
The voice recognizes movements and pause, similarity and difference, recognizes and understands it in a mental and physical process.

Robert Pinsky
Poetry is the most bodliy of arts, the medium of poetry is the column of breath rising from the diaphragm in the individual's chest to be shaped into meaning sounds inside the mouth of whoever undertakes to say the poem.

Robert Pinsky
Every word is an abstraction or category, not a particular.

Robert Pinsky
Craft is something you learn by studying models. When a student asks, what is a good book about traditional iambic verse, The Collected Poems of Ben Jonson. What is an excellent book about free verse? The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams. What is a good book about short line in ballad metre? The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson.

Robert Pinsky
An artist needs not so much an audience, as to feel a need to answer, a promise to respond.... a good feeling about his art.

Robert Pinsky