SOURCE: "Robert Pinsky and the Language of Our Time," in Salmagundi, No. 103, Summer, 1994, pp. 157-77.

[In the essay below, Longenbach traces Pinsky's artistic development in terms of the poet's "deep awareness—sometimes wariness, sometimes worship"—of historical, linguistic, and literary forces at work in his art.]

Robert Pinsky has always stood apart from the various schisms used to map the world of American poetry. He not only admires both the formal terseness of Cunningham and the capacious waywardness of O'Hara; his poems also seem to partake of both these qualities. Formal and free, open and closed, Olson and Wilbur—however the twentieth-century American poetry is divided, Pinsky remains unplaceable in the best sense of the word. He has recently said that Seamus Heaney seems legitimately "post-modernist" because in his work, "formal freedom feels assumed, and matters of technique no longer fighting issues in the old modernist sense." This quality seems to me even stronger in Pinsky's own work. If he is a postmodern poet it is not because he opposes modernism in the way that some modern poets rejected their Romantic forebears; the label sticks because he has understood that opposition itself is what holds other poets down.

A poet's mark may be measured by his or her ability to expand the language (which is to say the culture) available to poetry. The effort is usually subtle (we don't need to think of Shakespeare as a formally innovative writer), and it always depends on an openness to a variety of poetries, both past and present. Unlike other writers who seem, mostly because of their formal choices, more programmatically postmodern, Pinsky has slowly become the more truly innovative poet—the poet who increases the possibilities open to poetry. By being both completely distinctive and completely undogmatic, Pinsky reminds me of the idiosyncratic pianist Glen Gould, who was known as a champion of twelve-tone music and who consequently affronted his admirers by publishing a gorgeously tonal string quartet. Gould replied that he was simply a "student"—as he called himself—whose "enthusiasms were seldom balanced by antagonisms." What's striking here is that Gould's performances are unmistakably unique: his originally came from an embrace of everything that music had to offer him.

I think it's important to make this point about Pinsky because his criticism has been used to widen the poetic canon's artificial oppositions. This is in part understandable, since Pinsky is a writer with clear opinions; but he is not a writer who would say that he is "denying the hegemony of such dominant twentieth-century conventions as the subjective modernist lyric." Pinsky is too sophisticated a critic to put together the words subjective, modernist, and lyric, secure that the phrase means something coherent enough to deny. It's true that Pinsky has criticized what I might call (though it makes me nervous to do so) a strain of attenuated modernism—much smaller than the practice of any modernist poet—that privileges the "image" to the exclusion of other kinds of poetic discourse. But to capitalize polemically on this aspect of Pinsky's work is to diminish the scope of what he's doing. Pinsky did not set out to replace one orthodoxy with another; his goal is to resist any vocabulary for poetry that becomes exclusionary and taken-for-granted. The point of The Situation of Poetry is that all poetic language is more or less arbitrary, none of it closer to the heart than any other. Pinsky has his preferences, but his argument is not with the "image" as such but with the unquestioned acceptance of its values.

Throughout The Situation of Poetry Pinsky discusses this issue in what seem like purely formal terms. But as the title of his most recent critical work—Poetry and the World—suggests, Pinsky understands that any formal issue in poetry is simultaneously a social issue: "The poet's first social responsibility, to continue the art, can be filled only through the second, opposed responsibility to change the terms of the art given—and it is given socially, which is to say politically." Except that it's not afraid of the word art, this statement is similar to many current "New Historicist" ideas about poetry. (In fact, the essay it's taken from, "Responsibilities of the Poet," was first published in a special issue of Critical Inquiry on politics and poetic value: unlike most poet-critics, Pinsky seems in touch with academic literary criticism in profitable ways.) But the wisdom of this statement also resonates beyond critical fashion. Over the course of his career, Pinsky has made his finest poems not by harnessing beautiful language but by forcing the language of his time (the language that didn't yet seem beautiful) into poetry. This skill, discovered in the poems of Sadness and Happiness and perfected in those of The Want Bone, is the product of Pinsky's strong sense of poetry's historicity. Like the poets of his past, Wordsworth or Elizabeth Bishop, Pinsky resists not subjectivity itself but the dramatization of subjectivity uncomplicated by an awareness of the subject's social nature: this is Pinsky's inheritance, romantic and modern.

Pinsky was born and raised in Long Branch, New Jersey, a town that by 1940 was already a dilapidated resort. Graduating from Rutgers University in 1962, he wrote his senior thesis on T. S. Eliot. Then he enrolled as a graduate student at Stanford, and, quite by accident, became aware of Yvor Winters. During his first semester, after he read Robert Lowell's review of Winter's Selected Poems, Pinsky was impressed enough to show Winters his poems. On more than one occasion Pinsky has described this meeting with a delicately self-depreciating irony.

He asked me to sit down, and he thumbed through the manuscript while I was there. It took him perhaps four minutes, stopping once or twice at certain ones. Then he looked up at me, and said, "You simply don't know how to write."

He added that there was some gift there, but because I was ignorant of what to do with it, he could not estimate how much of a gift it was. If it was blind luck or happy fate or smiling Fortune that must be thanked for leading me to Stanford, let me congratulate myself for having the sense not to leave the room when he said that.

Pinsky stayed in the room for several years, taking directed reading courses with Winters and writing poems. He has subsequently expressed his debt to Winters many times (most wonderfully in the penultimate section of his "Essay on Psychiatrists"), but unlike other writers who identify with Winters, Pinsky has never seemed like a Wintersian, repeating the old man's idiosyncratic take on literary history. While Pinsky inherited Winter's preference for a Jonsonian clarity of statement in poetry, I think Winters was important to him as a poet-critic who stressed the necessity of coming to terms with the entire history of poetry: it was Winter's generosity rather than his crankiness that made an impression on the young Pinsky. In addition, I think Winters stressed in usable terms what Pinsky probably knew intuitively: that the reading and writing of poetry was a moral act.

Three years after he showed Winters his work, Pinsky published his first poems in the October 1965 issue of the Southern Review, then a journal where many of Winter's students and friends appeared. These poems sound almost nothing like the work Pinsky would produce three or four years later, but they are distinguished by a formal clarity and ease. Of the four poems, Pinsky preserved only "Old Woman" in his first collection, Sadness and Happiness.

   Not even in darkest August,
   When the mysterious insects
   Marry loudly in the black weeds
   And the woodbine, limp after rain,
   In the cooled night is more fragrant,
   Do you gather in any slight
   Harvest to yourself. Deep whispers
   Of slight thunder, horizons off,
   May break your thin sleep, but awake,
   You cannot hear them. Harsh gleaner
   Of children, grandchildren—remnants
   Of nights now forever future—
   Your dry, invisible shudder
   Dies on this porch, where, uninflamed,
   You dread the oncoming seasons,
   Repose in electric light.

Like one of the poems that accompanied it in the Southern Review (another was set in rhymed couplets and the fourth in terza rima), "Old Woman" is organized syllabically, the eight syllables of each line variously accented. The subtlety of their rhythm does stand apart from the lines of the other poems ("The marriage bed awakes to hear / A voice reciting, without fear"), but "Old Woman" showed only half of what Pinsky would become: the expert craftsman.

Pinsky published no more poems until 1969–70, when he appeared again in the Southern Review and also in Poetry: all but one of these poems remain uncollected, as do three of the four additional poems that later appeared in the September 1971 issue of Poetry. The fourth poem, "The Destruction of Long Branch," seems in retrospect like a breakthrough.

     When they came out with artificial turf
     I went back home with a thousand miles.
 
     I dug a trench by moonlight from the ocean
     And let it wash in quietly
 
     And make a brackish quicksand which the tide
     Sluiced upward from the streets and ditches.
     The downtown that the shopping centers killed,
     The garden apartments, the garages,
 
     The station, the Little Africa on (so help me)
     Liberty Street, the nicer sections
 
     All settled gently in a drench of sand
     And sunk with a minimum of noise.

It's tempting to say that the new power of these lines comes from Pinsky's focus on the peculiarity of his home town. In some sense, the poem does represent the finding of a "subject matter," and Pinsky has subsequently written in sophisticated ways about the importance of subject matter and of poems that are organized by the earnest presentation of their meaning. But this advance happened when it did because Pinsky broke through an earlier idea about poetic language. He has recently said that "Old Woman" represents a kind of poetry that no longer interests him because of its "overt lyricism of vocabulary and syntax." In contrast, the force of the language of "The Destruction of Long Branch" depends not on an extravagance of image or wit or metaphor—not even on the sonorous quality of lines like "Deep whispers / Of slight thunder, horizons off, / May break your thin sleep"—but on the unfolding of an argument that includes words like shopping center. Pinsky has joked that he tends to suspect a poet who hasn't gotten a shopping center into his poems: his point is to stress not only the place of the everyday world but the place of everyday language—language not yet poetic—in poetry. The phrase shopping center could never appear in "Old Woman," just as Yeats could never have gotten the words greasy till into "To the Rose upon the Rood of Time"—even if he'd wanted to.

"The Destruction of Long Branch" sounds even more like the mature Pinsky because the introduction of phrases like shopping center, artificial turf, and so help me does not disrupt the formal clarity evident even in his earliest work. In "American Poetry and American Life" (collected along with "Responsibilities of the Poet" in Poetry and the World) Pinsky has described the social qualities of Anne Winter's poetry, and, like all influential poet-critics, he seems to account for aspects of his own poetry when he praises certain qualities in others'.

I don't intend anything as quixotic or odious as prescribing a subject matter, or proscribing one. Rather, the point is that a certain kind of fluidity, a formal and moral quality, seems to have been demanded of American poets by their circumstance…. Winter's laundromat with its "I mean to live" seems simultaneously to challenge and embarrass poetic language, and to incorporate it: to defy poetic form, and to demand it.

These sentences describe perfectly later poems like "Pleasure Bay" or "The Hearts" (the long, fluid poems that "The Destruction of Long Branch" looks forward to). They also describe the values that give those poems their idiosyncratic movement (Williams's diction plugged into Stevens's pentameters). Pinsky has no interest in the mysterious "freedom" often associated with the breaking of poetic forms, since he understands that forms are, as part of the historicity of his writing, unbreakable; but he is interested in bending them, testing them against the warp and woof of his experience.

Perhaps it isn't coincidental that "The Destruction of Long Branch" embodies thematically this double attitude toward history and culture—defying it and demanding it. The poem isn't about the slow decay of Long Branch; rather, it's about Pinsky's desire to flood the place and pave it over—an act which he accomplishes, like any romantic poet, "by moonlight." But the loving specificity of the poem's catalogue of everything that disappears belies his desire to destroy, and the poem ends not with destruction but with Pinsky's recreation—"cautiously elegiac"—of his home town. In the process, the words that threatened to make him what he is (artificial turf, shopping mall) become the words with which he names the world and makes it his own.

Comparing Elizabeth Bishop to Wordsworth, Pinsky has said that "her great subject is the contest—or truce, or trade-agreement—between the single human soul on the one side, and on the other side, the contingent world of artifacts and other people." This is Pinsky's great subject too, and it accounts for Pinsky's emphasis on the historicity of his language; it is only through the social structure of language that the single soul is constituted, and it is only through language that the soul asserts its power over the social structure. "Naming and placing things," says Pinsky apropos of Bishop (though he could have been talking about "The Destruction of Long Branch"), "is an approach to genuine liberty. This is true even though the very means of naming things … are also part of the terrain."

This concern unites the poems of Sadness and Happiness. If Bishop's "In the Waiting Room" is a poem that dramatizes the difficulty of realizing that the self is a social construction (the individual merely "one of them"), then the first poem in Sadness and Happiness is about the opposite difficulty of seeing the individual as anything but a product of the categories that constitute it—"an I." The opening stanzas of "Poem About People" offer a comfortable account of other people seen less as individuals than as exemplars of a kind of Johnsonsian "general nature." The difficulties begin here:

     But how love falters and flags
     When anyone's difficult eyes come
     Into focus, terrible gaze of a unique
     Soul, its need unlovable.

Pinsky offers several examples of this problem, the last of which explores the sentimentality of his earlier remark that it is "possible / To feel briefly like Jesus," crossing the "dark spaces" between individuals.

     In the movies, when the sensitive
     Young Jewish soldier nearly drowns
 
     Trying to rescue the thrashing
     Anti-semitic bully, swimming across
     The river raked by nazi fire,
     The awful part is the part truth:
 
     Hate my whole kind, but me,
     Love me for myself.

The truth is partial because single selves have meaning only as the parts of whole kinds; the difference is frightening, and difficult to calibrate. But it is not impossible, as the poem's final lines suggest, restating the opening stanzas' hope in darker, more tentative terms: "we / All dream it, the dark wind crossing / The wide spaces between us."

Two years after Sadness and Happiness appeared, Pinsky published The Situation of Poetry. But as his fugitive essays and reviews from the early seventies reveal, the book's argument had been in his mind for some time. Its thesis appeared in concentrated form in the June 1973 issue of Poetry.

Some contemporary poems tend, pretty distinctly as such matters go, toward coolness: the aspect of modernism which effaces or holds back the warmth of authorial commitment to feeling or idea, in favor of a surface cool under the reader's touch.

A previous generation sought coolness through concentration on objective images. But the techniques implied by the term "imagism" have come to look rhetorical and warmly committed…. When it fails, it resembles other forms of "poetic diction."

This was the problem. In the January 1974 issue of Poetry Pinsky offered a solution.

Most people who read poetry have some loose idea of what the prose virtues are—a demanding, unglamourous group, including perhaps Clarity, Flexibility, Efficiency …? This is a drab, a grotesquely puritanical bunch of shrews. They never appear in blurbs. And yet when they are courted by those who understand them—Williams, Bishop—the Prose Virtues, which sound like a supporting chorus, perform virtuoso marvels. They become not merely the poem's minimum requirement, but the poetic essence.

The only word missing here is discursive: the word is Pinsky's, but it has become the word most often used to describe his poems, especially those from Sadness and Happiness like "Essay on Psychiatrists" and "Tennis." Throughout these poems, Pinsky tries to recapture the pre-Romantic sensibility of Dryden or Virgil (the sensibility that was supposedly available, as Winters is made to say in "Essay on Psychiatrists," before "the middle / Of the Eighteenth Century" when "the logical / Foundations of Western thought decayed and fell apart"). If Virgil could write poems about the skills of farming, why not poems about the skills of tennis?

     Hit to the weakness. All things being equal
     Hit crosscourt rather than down the line, because
     If you hit crosscourt back to him, then he
     Can only hit back either towards you (crosscourt)
     Or parallel to you (down the line), but never
     Away from you, the way that you can hit
 
     Away from him if he hits down the line.

When these lines were first published, they seemed like an incredible breath of fresh air: nothing could have stood more at odds with the fashion for confessional poetry. But after almost twenty years, the more egregiously discursive poems don't seem to me to be the finest achievement in Sadness and Happiness—necessary though they were for Pinsky's development. While the textures of "Essay on Psychiatrists" or "Tennis" do encourage the expansion of poetic language, they do so programmatically, making the inclusion in poetry of phrases like crosscourt and down the line sound like a feat rather than an achievement that later poems will build on. Consequently, the poems seem more like attempts to write like Virgil (no more possible than it is to write like Keats) than efforts to adapt his pre-Romantic sensibility to the poetry of today. In contrast, that is exactly what poems like "Poem About People," "Discretions of Alcibiades," or "The Beach Women" do.

In retrospect, then, how dangerous it was for Pinsky to embark on the long poem Explanation of America, published in 1979. This poem is as plainly discursive as "Tennis," but unlike "Tennis" or even "Essay on Psychiatrists," Explanation is a poem in which Pinsky has something urgent to say. Halfway through, Pinsky offers this hope to his daughter, to whom the poem is addressed.

     The words—"Vietnam"—that I can't use in poems
     Without the one word threatening to gape
     And swallow and enclose the poem, for you
     May grow more finite; able to be touched.

This is what Pinsky had learned, writing his first book of poems. But the word that he chooses here, so much more charged than shopping center, reveals how much he feels is at stake in the expansion of the language of poetry. Pinsky begins Explanation by stressing the vast multiplicity of images in American culture ("Colonial Diners, Disney, films / Of concentration camps, the napalmed child / Trotting through famous newsfilm"), and he wants his daughter to see all these images—just as he wants to build a poem ample enough to contain them. Such a poem might satisfy Pinsky's smaller hope:

     The Shopping Center itself will be as precious
     And quaint as is the threadmill now converted
     Into a quaint and high-class shopping center.

But the larger hope—the larger word—is not dispatched with so easily:

     Someday, the War in Southeast Asia, somewhere—
     Perhaps for you and people younger than you—
     Will be the kind of history and pain
     Saguntum is for me; but never tamed
     Or "history" for me, I think.

J. D. McClatchy has called An Explanation of America Pinsky's "most capacious and aspiring work," but I agree with him when he says that History of My Heart, published in 1984, represents a turning point in Pinsky's career. Pinsky's great subject—the dialectical relationship of the self and the social structure—was necessarily at the center of his meditation on what the word "America" might mean. But while the poems of History of My Heart and The Want Bone continue this meditation, they do so dramatically, enacting the dialectic as well as explaining it. These poems retain the discursive clarity of the long poem, but their narratives seem (even within their smaller compass) more comprehensive and complex, more a dramatization of a mind thinking than the product of thought (to borrow a distinction Elizabeth Bishop favored).

The opening poem in History of my Heart, "The Figured Wheel," describes the rotation of a great wheel throughout history. A catalogue of culture, high and low, familiar and foreign, it begins with a shopping mall rather than a center and ends with the creation of Robert Pinsky's single self.

    It is hung with devices
    By dead masters who have survived by reducing themselves magically
 
    To tiny organisms, to wisps of matter, crumbs of soil,
    Bits of dry skin, microscopic flakes, which is why they are called "great."
    In their humility that goes on celebrating the turning
    Of the wheel as it rolls unrelentingly over
 
    A cow plodding through car traffic on a street in Iasi,
    And over the haunts of Robert Pinsky's mother and father
    And wife and children and his sweet self
    Which he hereby unwillingly and inexpertly gives up, because it is
    There, figured and pre-figured in the nothing-transfiguring wheel.

These lines establish the terms in which the title History of My Heart must be understood. Virtually all of Pinsky's poems are autobiographical, but they recognize that an autobiography, like the self it narrates, is constituted by a wide array of cultural and historical forces. To get to the "heart" of these poems is not to find some essential core but to recognize that the heart is on the surface of everything the poet sees or speaks. Any distinctions between private and public "history" become difficult to sustain.

The second poem in History of My Heart adds a more plainly political charge to this history. "The Unseen" begins with a group of tourists in Krakow, touring the death camp. The scene is "unswallowable," both unbearably familiar and unbearably horrific: "We felt bored / And at the same time like screaming Biblical phrases." Stalled between these extremes, Pinsky remembers a "sleep-time game"—an insomniac's dream of heroic destruction: granted the power of invisibility, Pinsky roams the camp, saves the victims from the gas chamber, and, as a finale, flushes "everything with a vague flood / Of fire and blood." As in "The Destruction of Long Branch," Pinsky dreams of having power over his history, remaking what made him.

It's not possible to take that dream too seriously in "The Destruction of Long Branch," of course: its act of destruction serves as a kind of metaphor for the self's struggle with language and history. But in "The Unseen" the act is too literal, too historically charged, and Pinsky must back away from it more clearly.

     I don't feel changed, or even informed—in that,
     It's like any other historical monument; although
     It is true that I don't ever at night any more
 
     Prowl rows of red buildings unseen, doing
     Justice like an angry god to escape insomnia.

Though he feels unchanged, Pinsky describes an important transformation here. Having imagined himself as the "unseen," Pinsky now recognizes a more potent invisible presence.

     And so,
     O discredited Lord of Hosts, your servant gapes
 
     Obediently to swallow various doings of us, the most
     Capable of all your former creatures …

I think this force could be called "history" as easily as "Lord of Hosts." Having earlier found the scene "unswallowable," Pinsky realizes that he has no choice but to take in the past. And as "The Figured Wheel" suggests, the past—however sordid—is already inside him: in this sense, the force could also be called "my heart."

This historical wheel rolls through all of Pinsky's work, but these lines from The Want Bone (his best and most recent book) point to a slight change in his attitude: "How can I turn this wheel / that turns my life?" Throughout History of My Heart Pinsky is amazed by the vast array of images that make up the self; throughout The Want Bone he is equally amazed by the images that the self can make. The desire—the want—to turn the wheel of history has certainly been present in Pinsky's work since "The Destruction of Long Branch"; but in The Want Bone Pinsky sometimes stands aghast at the potential hubris of the human imagination—or what in "What Why When How Who" he calls

     The old conspiracy of gain and pleasure
 
     Flowering in the mind greedily to build the world
     And break it.

Behind these lines stand Old Testament injunctions against idolatry—"they worship the work of their own hands, that which their own fingers have made"—but in an essay on the prophet Isaiah Pinsky concludes that "all worship, even the most meticulous or elaborate, may be flawed by the spirit of idolatry." Since idolatry is in some way essential to human action, good or bad, Pinsky's fascination is less with greed as such than with the point where pleasure begins to conspire unhappily with gain.

The astonishing first poem in The Want Bone, "From the Childhood of Jesus," is impatient with both Old and New Testament wisdom, both the laws of Judaism and Jesus' revision of them. Pinsky tells the apocryphal tale of a young Jesus who makes a little pond of mud and twigs and models twelve sparrows from clay. The scene seems innocent enough until "a certain Jew" (Pinsky incorporates the language of the anti-Semitic joke or story here) scolds the child for "making images." In response, Jesus makes the sparrows come to life, and, when the son of Annas accidentally ruins the little pond, Jesus makes the boy wither away. The petulant tone of Jesus' anger is familiar from the gospels ("what did the water / Do to harm you?"), but his actions are merciless, filled with the childish greed and self-importance that the tone suggests. (As Pinsky says in "Lament for the Makers," worship is "tautological, with its Blessed / Art thou O Lord who consecrates the Sabbath … And then the sudden curt command or truth: / God told him, Thou shalt cut thy foreskin off.") "From the Childhood of Jesus" ends like a parable gone wrong.

    Alone in his cot in Joseph's house, the Son
    Of man was crying himself to sleep. The moon
 
    Rose higher, the Jews put out their lights and slept,
    And all was calm and as it had been, except
 
    In the agitated household of the scribe Annas,
    And high in the dark, where unknown even to Jesus
 
    The twelve new sparrows flew aimlessly through the night,
    Not blinking or resting, as if never to alight.

Jesus is resolutely human in this story, granted the powers of a god but the emotions of a child, and, like any man, he cannot control the things he has made: the poem's final image is more frightening than the child's petulance. "From the Childhood of Jesus" is astonishing because, while it is ultimately about the consequences of the simple human desire for power, it tells that profane story in the vocabulary of the sacred. Consequently, this poem about hubris is itself startlingly hubristic—a paradox that embodies Pinsky's uneasy double attitude toward the human imagination.

"From the Childhood of Jesus" exemplifies one of the two kinds of poems that make up The Want Bone. The other kind, rather than adapting Biblical rhetoric, combines a multiplicity of vocabularies and narratives into a shape that seems both wild and controlled, random and planned. Most of these poems are organized something like a Baroque concerto with a ritornello or repeating theme that returns (though in a different key) after each episode of new material. In "The Uncreation" various ideas of singing hold the poem's disparate materials together. In "At Pleasure Bay" some version of the phrase "never the same" recurs. And in "The Shirt" the repeated motif is neither a theme nor a phrase but simply a rhythm: "The back, the yoke, the yardage" or "The planter, the picker, the sorter." Similar to those of History of My Heart but even more accomplished, these poems are what "The Destruction of Long Branch" ultimately made possible.

In "The Hearts" the ritornello is an unsentimental image of the heart, itself the sentimental image of desire, as "pulpy shore-life battened on a jetty."

     Slashed by the little deaths of sleep and pleasure,
     They swell in the nurturing spasms of the waves,
 
     Sucking to cling; and even in death itself—
     Baked, frozen—they shrink to grip the granite harder.

Between the recurrences of this image comes a catalogue of harsh desires. The victim of a suffocating lover is equated with a heroin addict who knows, the first time he shoots up, that he will suffer, go to prison, and probably die. But this knowledge doesn't stop the addict, whose consolation is that proposed by Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra when Antony laments "Would I had never seen her": "Then you would have missed / A wonderful piece of work." This passage, in turn, invokes a sentence from Stephen Booth's commentary on Shakespeare's sonnets: "Shakespeare was almost certainly homosexual, / Bisexual, or heterosexual, the sonnets / Provide no evidence on the matter." This link in the chain of associations provokes the poem's central question: why does human desire fuel, over and over again, the making of images—the singing of songs, the throwing of pots, the writing of poems?

All of these creative acts are invoked as the chain continues, one image leading metonymically to the next. The question of Shakespeare's sexuality invokes the rhetoric of courtly love (tears, crystals, hearts) which still infects the songs (Lee Andrews and The Hearts—"My tear drops are / Like crystals") we sing in the shower (falling like tears or crystals).

     To Buddha every distinct thing is illusion
     And becoming is destruction, but still we sing
     In the shower. I do. In the beginning God drenched
 
     The Emptiness with images: the potter
     Crosslegged at his wheel in Benares market
     Making mud cups, another cup each second
 
     Tapering up between his fingers, one more
     To sell the tea-seller at a penny a dozen,
     And tea a penny a cup. The customers smash
 
     The empties, and waves of traffic grind the shards
     To mud for new cups, in turn; and I keep one here
     Next to me: holding it awhile from out of the cloud
 
     Of dust that rises from the shattered pieces,
     The risen dust alive with fire, then settled
     And soaked and whirling again on the wheel that turns
 
     And looks on the world as on another cloud,
     On everything the heart can grasp and throw away
     As a passing cloud …

The image of the wheel returns here, but unlike "The Figured Wheel" the potter's wheel is turned by a man: the result of all human making, Pinsky suggests, is this absurd, this transient—not the potent images with which the Old Testament god drenches the emptiness but the mere images that the Buddha denounces as empty. And yet, as the poem continues to unfold, the wheel continues to turn—perhaps productively. The visions of the Old Testament are dismissed as "too barbarous for heaven / And too preposterous for belief on earth" (Pinsky rehearses the horrible vision in Isaiah 6, after which the prophet's unclean lips are purified by a live coal), and "The Hearts" ends by returning to Lee Andrews and The Hearts, their record spinning like the potter's wheel.

      As the record ends, a coda in retard:
      The Hearts in a shifting velvety ah, and ah
      Prolonged again, and again as Lee Andrews
 
      Reaches ah high for I have to gain Faith, Hope
      And Charity, God only knows the girl
      Who will love me—Oh! if we only could
      Start over again! Then The Hearts chant the chords
      Again a final time, ah and the record turns
      Through all the music, and on into silence again.

These lines of the poem answer the song: you can start again, though you'll end up in pretty much the same place. Finally, Pinsky's suggestion is that the turning itself—the longing, the singing, the making—must constitute our human value. If this seems like a paltry consolation, the empty images condemned by the Buddha, we should remember in contrast the uncontrollable, unsatisfying images conjured by the Son of Man.

The final lines of "The Hearts" cannot sound like too definitive a conclusion since, like so many of Pinsky's later poems, "The Hearts" eschews the normal kinds of progression or closure we associate with lyric poetry. Less than the final lines it is the turning of the poem itself that is most memorable. In his essay "Poetry and Pleasure" Pinsky praises the apparently random succession of thoughts and observations that a letter can accommodate, and in his quest to keep poetry open to all kinds of language and experience, Pinsky has tried to establish that kind of movement in poems like "The Hearts," "Shirt," or "Pleasure Bay." He asks in "Poetry and Pleasure" the question implicit in his work since "The Destruction of Long Branch": "if gorgeous, impressive language and profound, crucial ideas were all that poetry offered to engage us, would it seem—as it does to many of us—as necessary as food?" What engages us is not the product—the achieved word or thought—but the process of a mind moving through those thoughts and words: "This movement—physical in the sounds of a poem, moral in its relation to the society implied by language, the person who utters the poem—is near the heart of poetry's mysterious appeal, for me." In its sinuous investigation of desire, "The Hearts" tries to describe this appeal: more profoundly, the poem enacts it.

I've quoted "Poetry and Pleasure" to elucidate Pinsky's poems, but of course Pinsky is trying to say something about the pleasures of poetry at large; the phrase "Death is the mother of beauty" is not particularly interesting except because it occurs within the idiosyncratic movement of thought and sound in Stevens's "Sunday Morning." In "American Poetry and American Life" Pinsky returns to this quality of movement, emphasizing that it is visible in a wide range of American poetries.

One could exemplify this fluidity of tone, including the inseparable blend of comic and ecstatic, formal and vulgar, in an enormous range of American poets, John Ashbery and Elizabeth Bishop, George Oppen and James Merrill, Allen Ginsberg and Marianne Moore. (I think that the stylistic trait I mean also characterizes poems that do not explicitly take up American cultural material such as bus rides or movies.)

Pinsky is interested in developing categories for the discussion of American poetry that do not encourage the polemical oppositions of Oppen and Merrill, Ginsberg and Moore, or—even more culturally overdetermined—the high and the low. His strategy not only clarifies the position of his own work but helps to insure the future health and diversity of American literature: the segregation of poetic schools only limits the possibilities available to poetry.

Even the most deeply entrenched battle positions of American poetry don't interest Pinsky. In an essay occasioned by the centennial of T. S. Eliot's birth, he has admitted that the subject of his undergraduate thesis first alerted him to the quality of movement he so values, the "clangorous, barely-harmonized bringing together of the sacred and profane."

Eliot is above all the pre-eminent poet of this clash or yoking…. Because he identified and penetrated this dualism in the rhythms and noises and smells and surfaces of modern life, without simplifying what he saw into false ideas of squalor or perfection, Eliot remains entirely essential for us. He is not merely whatever we mean by "great poet," but precisely what Pound means by "an inventor." For this, Eliot's readers forgive him his mean side, his religio-authoritarian claptrap, the plushy grandiosity of "Ash Wednesday," the tetrameter anti-Semitism, the genteel trivialities of the late plays.

Today almost thirty years after Eliot's death, there still seems something daring about this expression of debt and affinity.

I began this essay by proposing that it is precisely through such acknowledgements of debt and affinity that Pinsky's originality is constituted. Tracing his artistic development, I think we can see that Pinsky's own work provides the terms in which my proposition must be understood. Since our selves are turned on the great wheel of history and language, we owe whatever combination of qualities that might distinguish us, formal and vulgar, comic and ecstatic, to mysterious forces we disregard at our own peril. Pinsky's is a poetry of acknowledgment, and its power grows from his deep awareness—sometimes wariness, sometimes worship—of the literary, linguistic, and historical precedents that continue to design his life even as he writes today. Acknowledging Eliot, Pinsky calls him an "inventor," which Pound defined as a writer who discovers "a particular process or more than one mode and process." Above inventors, said Pound, stands the small class of "masters," those "who, apart from their own inventions, are able to assimilate and co-ordinate a large number of preceding inventions." This, near the end of the twentieth century, in both his poetry and his prose, is what Robert Pinsky is doing.