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Robert Pinsky Quotes
born 1940 United States
Robert Pinsky (born October 20, 1940) is an American poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator. From 1997 to 2000, he served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.
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No aspect of a poem is more singular, more unique, than its rhythm.
Every word is an abstraction or category, not a particular.
Part of making a poem is a process of day- dreaming.
A poem is free, and it shows its freedom by establishing its own principles.
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.
There are no rules but uniformity can make it seem as though there are rules.
There are no rules. However, principles may be discerned in actual practice; for example, in the way people actually speak, or in the lines the poets have written.
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.
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.
It is the nature of poetry to emphasize that the physical sounds of words come from a particular body , one at a time, in a particular order.
The poet is a particular kind of expert.
The voice recognizes movements and pause, similarity and difference, recognizes and understands it in a mental and physical process.
All the mysteries of consciousness flower in the body.
That physical tingle, that powerful audible experience(not with poets projecting their work to an audience) but more intimate, less planned than that.
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