65 Quotes by Robert Pinsky

Vivid and reflective, documentary and visionary, re-imagining the city of New York with the same urgency that ponders the opening words of Genesis, this is a passionate, artful and re-readable book.

The wonderful 17th Century poet, Robert Herrick, wrote a poem entitled, 'To Live Merrily and to Trust to Good Verses.' Easy to say, Robert Herrick; not always easy to do. But it's a good slogan, I think.

The test of whether it's poetry is: does it sound beautiful when you say the words over, in your mind or your voice, with no skilled performer, no music, just the sounds and meanings in the words themselves,

All questions of process require an answer that begins with a very important sentence, and the sentence is: 'Everybody is different.' Whatever way of working you name - methodical, haphazard, gets up early in the morning, sleeps all day, works at night, revises immensely, never revises at all - someone has made great work with that way.

It's true that school can poison things - some people hate W.C. Williams' little poem about the wheelbarrow because somebody bullied them with it in school,

For an American, there's no automatic place where people love the art of poetry. There's not a social class that considers poetry its property the way in some countries there's a snob value to the art.

For a lot of people, well-meaning teaching has made poetry seem arcane, difficult, a kind of brown-knotting medicine that might be good for you but doesn't taste so good. So I tried to make a collection of poetry that would be fun. And that would bring out poetry as an art, rather than the challenge to say smart things.

The best argument for teaching poetry is to put a three-year-old or a four-year-old and read Dr. Seuss, or Robert Louis Stevenson, and to feel how the child and you are engaging in something that's really basic to the animal, which is passing on in these rhythmic ways, something that came from somewhere.

I'm far from immune to the American, perhaps historically male, prejudice toward practical and physical competence; I hope I've also considered that prejudice enough to have some distance from it.