Robert Pinsky Quotations

Poetry is the most bodily of the arts.

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.

For Aliki Barnstone, poetry seems a natural medium. The vision and cadences of these poems suggest a sensibility for which poetry is as inevitable as breathing or eating.

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

To talk about the reality of life here and the work that you do here at the university.

Autobiography is a genre notorious for falsehood.

The last thing a young artist should do in poetry or any other field is think about whats in style, whats current, what are the trends. Think instead of what you like to read, what do you admire, what you like to listen to in music. What do you like to look at in architecture? Try to make a poem that has some of those qualities.

Poetry’s medium is the individual chest and throat and mouth of whoever undertakes to say the poem.

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.

Poetic language is singularly appropriate for recounting the life of the king who is traditionally accepted as the author of the poetic psalms, some of which are included in the narrative.