Robert Pinsky: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Robert Pinsky, 2019. Photo ©Eric Antoniou.

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Poem with Lines in Any Order

 

Sonny said Then he shouldn’t have given Molly the two more babies.

Dave’s sister and her husband adopted the baby, and that was Babe.

You can’t live in the past.

Sure he was a tough guy but he was no hero.

Sonny and Toots went to live for a while with the Braegers.

It was a time when it seemed like everybody had a nickname.

Nobody can live in the future.

When Rose died having Babe, Dave came after the doctor with a gun.

Toots said What would you expect, he was a young man and there she was.

Sonny still a kid himself when Dave moved out on Molly.

The family gave him Rose’s cousin Molly to marry so she could raise the children.

There’s no way to just live in the present.

In their eighties Toots and Sonny still arguing about their father.

Dave living above the bar with Della and half the family.

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Robert Pinsky’s books include The Figured Wheel (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize); his translation The Inferno of Dante; and his Princeton Tanner Lectures, Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry. He founded the Favorite Poem Project, with the videos here. His honors include the Korean Manhae Award and the Italian Premio Capri. He has appeared on The Simpsons and The Colbert Report. [For more information on, and poems by, Robert Pinsky, click here.]

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Robert Pinsky: “The gangster sexual style of my grandfather, Dave Pinsky, underlies this poem. I am the boy he is holding in the first photo. In the photo on the right, he is with his beautiful first wife Rose—as the poem tells, when she died after childbirth, he came after the doctor with a gun.”

 

 

Comments

[David Lehman]

This poem will continue to live in the future.

[Jack Skelley]

I read it backwards !!

[lally]

good choice terence, compelling poem

[Terence Winch]

Michael:  Glad you liked it.

[Stephen Altman]

Thanks. I've been reading Pinsky for what?...30 years? A great soul.

[Dr. Earle Hitchner]

A reader’s first instinct may be to re-arrange the lines of the poem so that it makes “better” sense. But that would be violating what Pinsky and his poem intend to do: upend us. The narrative configuration or, if you will, convolution of the poem activates our instinct to recombine and thereby revise it into something neat, trim, linear, and readily comprehensible. But by doing so, we erect, elide, and “emend” memory and thus history to taste, preference, desire, and other purpose. The poem contains first-blush “disordered” fragments of family conversation, gossip, lore, and incidents resisting smooth manipulation. Even the last two of the three linchpin statements—“You can’t live in the past,” “Nobody can live in the future,” and “There’s no way to just live in the present”—are out of temporal order. A question posed by Pinsky’s poem is: Must we impose order on memory to live? This “Rashomon”-like take on recall and its codification into personal story suggest the things we remember often hinge on the way we want to remember. With consummate skill, Pinsky takes the tesserae of recall and makes a mosaic muddled enough to remind us that cultural and historical memory is similar to our own personal memory: imperfect, including by design. The Bard of Long Branch strikes true!

[Terence Winch]

Thanks, Earle, for another thoughtful & insightful comment.

[clarinda harriss]

This is a side of Pinsky (of whom I was and am a great fan!) I never knew. Thank you! And OMG, the photos, the photos. Wow.

[Peter Kearney]

The poet seems to say that the past, future and present can't be separated from one another, that they have to blend. Then he writes this remarkable poem to show how that is true.

[Stanley Sagov]

the marriage of poetry and vernacular , gangster and folk/family wisdom and more traditionally academic sophisticated philosophical and epistemology conundrums is constructively disturbing and a great read to boot with the pix.