He’s the only person in history to serve three terms as U.S. poet laureate.
Bruce Springsteen called him the “voice of the Jersey Shore.”
But ask Robert Pinsky about his prolific career, and he’ll say he’s just a guy who happens to be good with words.
In fact, words have always been his thing.
“It’s like the kid who just picks up a ball and is good at playing with the ball, or the kid who sits at a piano and it works out,” said Pinsky, who was born and raised in Long Branch and now resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
From an early age, Pinsky’s mind could — and often, would — turn words inside out, something he likened to a “slightly annoying bad habit, like biting your fingernails or jiggling your foot.” He enjoyed the sounds and infinite potentials, and the melodies of sentences. Nothing was ever just a word to Pinsky, it was a plaything.
Those playthings led him to poetry, which in turn led him to a fruitful career, and national and worldwide acclaim.
And yet, for many years, Pinsky refused to call himself a poet. It’s an unusual admission, but one that made sense to Pinsky.
“I was very impressed by something Robert Frost said, along the lines of ‘poet’ is something someone else should say about you,” said Pinsky, who is also a literary critic, essayist, author, and Boston University professor. “It’s too great an honor, it’s too great a thing, for you to say yourself that you are a poet.”
As it turns out, Pinsky is not easily dazzled by titles, prizes or accolades. What means the most to him is sharing his love of words with the masses.
“The title ‘poet laureate,’ I respect it, I honor it, I don't want to be silly about it, but it is not as important as the Favorite Poem Project, which it enabled,” said Pinsky, referring to the effort he launched in 1997 during his first term as poet laureate, to encourage public appreciation of poetry.
The project — a collection of short video documentaries showcasing everyday Americans reading and speaking personally about poems they love — is now a permanent part of the Library of Congress archive of recorded poetry and literature, and remains active to this day.
“You can see a construction worker reading Walt Whitman, and talking about Whitman,” said Pinsky. “A glassblower reading a poem by Frank O’Hara. A Cambodian American high school student doing a Langston Hughes poem. A Jamaican immigrant doing a Sylvia Plath poem.”
It’s a project that remains close to his heart, just like his former hometown, which inspired his autobiography “Jersey Breaks.”
Putting the book together “wasn’t easy,” said Pinsky, but he “decided at some point it was going to be very much about my home, and the Shore.”
He harkened back to an interview he did a few years ago, with State of the Arts, a cornerstone program of NJ PBS.
“Somebody asked me if I have any poems about Long Branch. I said, ‘all of my poems are about Long Branch’,” Pinsky recalled.
“And in a sense, I mean that I’ve been writing that autobiography through my whole writing life, because if I write about culture, history, food, patriotism, or despair, it’s always related to my early life experiences as a small child, as a high school kid…so to do the prose, it was an extension of something I had been doing all my life as a poet.”
But what about that Springsteen endorsement, which is emblazoned on the front cover of “Jersey Breaks”?
It’s a story Pinsky tells nonchalantly. The pair were connected while attending the 2010 WAMFest, a festival for words, art and music, held annually at Fairleigh Dickinson.
“They put us together, and we got along very well. Our work has a lot in common … and he was kind enough to write that blurb.”
Boiled down, Pinsky’s passion for poetry can be summed up succinctly.
“Poetry is a body art,” he said. “It feels good to just say certain words.”
We’ll take his word for it.
Robert Pinsky served as the U.S. poet laureate under President Bill Clinton from 1997-2000. He received his B.A. from Rutgers before earning both his M.A. and PhD from Stanford University. Pinsky taught at Wellesley College and at the University of California at Berkeley before joining Boston University, where he is a distinguished professor in the creative writing program. In addition to 'Jersey Breaks,' Pinsky has published several books of poetry, including 'Jersey Rain,' 'Gulf Music,' 'At the Founding Hospital,' and 'The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems,' which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.