65 Quotes by Robert Pinsky

The medium of poetry is a human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the mouth. In this sense, poetry is just as physical or bodily an art as dancing.

In jazz, as in poetry, there is always that play between what’s regular and what’s wild. That has always appealed to me.

There is something cathartic about having absolute loss articulated.

Art will not solve your problems. It will not enable you to live merrily.

An underestimated element in poetry, that reading aloud makes clear, is the pause. I mean especially the force of a pause or a couple of pauses close together, contrasted with a longer unit of grammar.

If what you want to do is make good art, decide whats good and try to imitate it.

Sometimes the ideas that mean the most to you will feel true long before you can quite formulate them or justify them.

The heart grows brutal feeding on fantasies.

Deciding to remember, and what to remember, is how we decide who we are.