One of the great difficulties of writing about a poet who has worked as long, and as publicly, as Robert Pinsky is deciding what warrants mentioning. A reviewer can only offer their own experience. When I was 12 years old, I discovered him: the cameo on The Simpsons in which he read the opening lines of “Impossible to Tell.” I would go on to look it up in its entirety but would quickly dismiss it: too long, no end rhyme; it couldn’t really be a poem. Later, came his appearance on The Colbert Report where he publicized (if one can do such a thing for a poem) “Samurai Song,” which I did love, immediately. As a young man who wanted, it turned out, to write poetry but didn’t know such a life might be pursued, Pinsky and all his facility with mass media provided — what? A glimmer, an image, some example of what I myself might attempt? I’m not so sure. One’s beginnings in an art aren’t so simple to trace. Still, he gave me a place to start looking. In 2006, I found a nine-year old copy of The Figured Wheel in a used bookstore in Pittsburgh. It was the first book of poems I bought by a living poet.
Eighteen years later, Robert Pinsky is still writing poetry. The occasions of the poems in Proverbs of Limbo are various — baseball lore or obituaries, comedy shows or an eye exam — though they often rove away from their beginnings as they seek out their true subjects. Their manner is elliptical, allusive, digressive. “The mind skitters,” begins one poem, “its one rudder / Being its own voice.” An apt summary of the experience reading this book. Like jazz, one of Pinsky’s many avocations, the poems allure the reader first with their subdued harmonies which extend an invitation to the ear, if not the mind, like that internal half-rhyme of “skitters” and “rudder”: in one word, quickness and motion; in the other, a means to steer it. One intuits these connections first through the senses, comprehension coming only later. Sound for Pinsky seems its own justification, which he follows with an apparent pleasure — pleasure placing one at the threshold of mystery:
I pardon Keats for being a schmuck — the word
A homey metaphor meaning a bangle, a gem,
Diminutive for a child is schmeckel, a spoken
Precious ornament weighed and appreciated
In the jazzy sacred scales of appropriation.
This is pure play, the way Pinsky scrambles textures and registers, fields of reference (Romantic poetry, comedy, profanity), as well as languages until ending on the heavy Latinate abstraction. These lines, which make up the conclusion to the poem “Lenny Bruce,” also read as a sort of inside joke, riffing off of that word “schmuck.” The scandal of Bruce’s use of the word in his performances is the subtext and set up; Pinsky’s wry omission of its more crude definition is like a knowing smirk shared with those who understand what he’s left out. But this is much more than mere impishness. The poem is rooted in a particular pain, namely antisemitism (including Keats’s own). Pinsky’s method of engaging this pain, though, is unusual, complicated. Alienation is sublimated through humor; invective is half-hidden, framed as forgiveness rather than overt condemnation. Admiration is tinted by disappointment. Pinsky is our great poet of ambivalence, who asks: how can an artist participate in a culture so hostile to that artist’s existence? And yet, to be dispossessed is to lay claim to all. Pinsky’s formidable erudition, the swervings through so many modes of experience, is in this light not merely the flexing of a capacious mind. It’s the resourcefulness of the exile making for himself a home with what is near, available — much as English and Yiddish themselves have done, both built from those “jazzy sacred scales of appropriation.”
Throughout his career, Pinsky’s central interests have been history and identity; or, more precisely, the processes by which human beings create and are in turn created. In his earlier books, this project took the form of extended poems, didactic in their mode — consider for instance the title of his second book, An Explanation of America. Much like Robert Lowell, who blurbed Pinsky’s first book Sadness and Happiness, Pinsky has consistently explored how world history is linked to and constituted by individual history. Like Lowell, Pinsky’s poems, as time has passed, have grown more plainspoken in their diction, more associative than deductive in their thought. Unlike Lowell, though, whose writing is at times overburdened with his pretensions of canonicity, Pinsky’s imaginative resources are far wackier:
Walking among the graves for exercise
Where do you get your ideas how do I stop them
Looking for Mike Mazur’s marker I looked
Down at the grass and saw Stanislaw Baranczak
Our Solidarity poetry reading in Poznan
Years later in Newton now he said I’m a U.S.
Liberal with a car like everybody else
When I held Bobo dying in my arms
His green eyes told me I am not done yet
Trains of thought intercept and interrupt one another, and without the guideposts of punctuation, the reader is led solely by the trajectory of the poet’s own consciousness. There is a thrill to the speed with which the lines move from the memory of old friends, who evoke a poetry reading in Poland. One might well expect all of this from a famous poet reflecting on an illustrious career. But then, the poet’s mind summons the death of Bobo the cat and the specificity of its green eyes. All of a sudden, such a different valence. And so like a cat, to emerge out of the most unexpected of places. “Where do you get your ideas how do I stop them,” Pinsky asks himself, with no answer other than the poem itself as it unspools. Poetry thus provides a means to shape chaos.
And to stave off oblivion. Death is Proverbs of Limbo’s most recurrent obsession, which Pinsky treats in distinctly personal terms. It is a book written from the vantage of old age. From the first poem in the collection, Pinsky reckons with his eventual death.
Thank you, Elliot, Simon & Hazel, for wanting
To talk with me about my dying some day —
Bucky had been so cold when you touched his body.
A compliment for me, that conversation.
It almost doesn’t matter what we said.
I thought of Milford your great-grandpa, that time
I asked him, did he believe in life after death?
“I guess that you are my life after death,” he said.
In the hospice where I make my living as a chaplain, this conversation and, by extension, the act of recording it in a poem would be referred to as legacy work. How does one hope to be remembered? Family, as in the lines above, is perhaps the most common refuge from despair. Careers, too; an inheritance to be passed down; faith. Or for writers, their writing. “Let my Treasure be commended to you, in which I live still,” asks the shade of Brunetto Latini in Canto 15 of The Inferno. (His Treasure is, of course, the book he wrote before he died.) To craft some essential part of himself into the world that will endure — this is the dream of the artist, no? But time has sharpened Dante’s already cutting irony: Latini now lives most vividly in his appearance in Dante’s Hell, rather than in his own book, on which he staked his life after death. Fortune’s wheel is capricious, especially regarding our posterity. Better then to consider not if but how we will disappear. In Proverbs of Limbo, oblivion’s most startling form is being made obsolete. “Soon the computer itself will tell these stories,” Pinsky says in a poem remembering a family friend, before wondering if “Maybe today a smart kid might quit school / To teach my computer how to write my poem.” Even as our technologies grow more sophisticated, they create new modes of forgetting. Yet this unsettling possibility is treated with equanimity, even curiosity. Judgment tends to be suspended, restrained, or quickly reconsidered within the collection, as if the poet looked into the abyss — and waited.
But why does the waiting prove such a challenge to me? As I say, Proverbs of Limbo is written from the perspective of an older man. I began this review recalling when I first started reading Robert Pinsky, already half a lifetime ago; now, I approach middle age. There’s something interesting but terrifying in confronting the contingency of my own perspective, how subject it is to time. Yet even in that flux, consistency. In reading these poems, one is reminded that Pinsky’s decades-long work to highlight poetry’s vital function as a civic art is but an extension of the knowledge that poetry is a technology of shared memory, perhaps our most enduring tool. And like any powerful tool, we at some point must ask ourselves how we wish to relate to it:
I asked the ancestors
About my suffering. You
Cannot understand it
You were born to
Too much of the possible.
If I was born free then what
Are you to me?
You were not born free,
To be born free! They said,
Would be not to be born.
I asked the ancestors
About their suffering.
Because it was ours, now
It is yours as the shape
Of your head is yours.
So I asked the ancestors
About the children. Is it
Their suffering too? That
Is your problem they said.
Honor it or not.
“Despair is a development of pride so great that it chooses someone’s certitude rather than admit God is more creative than we are.” So writes the character of Reverend Toller in Paul Schrader’s austere film First Reformed. Indeed. It is easy to aim all my resentment at the ancestors, who passed on all this suffering, which we might call History. It is easy to live in the myopia of the moment. But that’s the impatience of a younger man, and a younger man’s despair. However, in Pinsky’s disciplined imaginative patience, the poems in Proverbs of Limbo offer an injunction against despair. We’re left, instead, with a conversation, and a choice. Shall our history, like our ancestors, become our master, our enemy, or our collaborator? Shall we honor it, or not?
[Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux on June 11, 2024, 67 pages, $26.00 hardcover]
To read Ron Slate’s review of Robert Pinsky’s memoir Jersey Breaks (2022), click here.