Robert Pinsky in Conversation with Tod Machover and David Thorburn - MIT Communications Forum

[MUSIC PLAYING]

THORBURN: --1006 communications forum series. I'm David Thorburn, director of the communications forum. I'm happy to see you all here. I would be happier if there were more of you. But I remind our guests that we are in touch with an international audience through our website and through the audio recordings and now video that are archived on our site. And we should reach a considerably larger audience than the folks who are here. And my hope is that, as is often the case with forums, some folks will be coming in as we speak.

I'm going to be very brief in my introductions, because we have a full venue. And I'm hoping for a very exciting conversation.

Robert Pinsky is the former Poet Laureate of the United States, the only poet in American history to serve three terms as Poet Laureate from 1997 to 2000. He is the poetry editor of the online journal Slate. He teaches in the writing program at Boston University and is the author of a series of remarkable books of poetry, of which the most recent is Jersey Rain, and then a forthcoming chapbook about to appear, I think later this month or next month, called First Things to Hand.

One of his most recent publications, which we will have a chance to talk about a bit later in our conversation, is a very interesting and, in some ways, surprising book for Robert Pinsky, a book called The Life of David. It's not about me, however. It's about the biblical King David, much to my dismay when he told me that.

Also sitting at our conversation table is my colleague from MIT Tod Machover. He's the head of the Media Lab's Hyperinstruments and Opera of the Future group. He's the creator of the Toy Symphony, an international music performance and education project and is kind of a legend at MIT for his imaginative way of bringing classical attitudes toward music together with new technologies and with experimental forms of various kinds.

We're going to begin today by showing a fragment of an opera that Pinsky and Machover have collaborated on. And then they will talk about it.

MACHOVER: And I thought I would just quickly just show you a little bit about the opera. And then we'll show you a couple of minutes of it. It's called Death and the Powers. And Robert and I-- I called Robert out of the blue to see if he might want to collaborate on a project several years ago. And thank god he said yes.

It's been a very, very interesting project. It's still in process. Robert finished the libretto about four or five months ago. And so I've started on the music. It's quite a wild project.

We'll tell you a little bit about the story later. It's about a man. Do you want to say two words about what the story is?

PINSKY: He's a billionaire, sort of a Rupert Murdoch hyphen Walt Disney character. He's a creative billionaire who is getting--

MACHOVER: Kind of like Robert.

PINSKY: Kind of immortality by having himself converted into software. He's leaving the meat machine, and he's basically abstracting himself. And this has implications for his family, who may or may not follow him into this state, and also, because he's so rich, for the world and the world economy.

And the subtitle is A Robot Pageant. The whole show is put on by robots. And our robots won't look like any robots you've ever seen.

MACHOVER: And in fact, the biggest robot of all is the set itself, because one of the ideas is that this character Simon Powers decides that he wants to leave everything about himself in the world, even though he himself wants to leave. So he turns himself into his environment.

And the stage itself is a big robot. It's made up of gigantic panels that move into different configurations, as you can see. The panels themselves look like a room at first. And then they start to vibrate and undulate. In fact, the floor does as well. All the surfaces that you wouldn't expect come alive.

And somehow or other, we're going to make this stage sing. I haven't quite figured that out yet.

But all kinds of unusual things happen with the characters as well. So objects that usually stay on the ground, like grand pianos, don't. They float as well. So this is a scene with the third wife Evvy who floats and dances with Simon in the walls. And the piano plays while it's in the air.

This is my favorite shot so far of the animation of the set, because also the whole thing explodes and goes onto the audience. Don't sit in the front row for that one. We'll see.

And we're also collaborating with a few other wonderful people on this project. Cynthia Breazeal, who works here in the Media Lab, is designing the robotics for the set and for a variety of objects. Randy Weiner, who is a writer and dramaturge, worked very closely with Robert to help craft the story. The story's Robert's. But to get it just right for an opera, Randy was extremely helpful.

Diane Paulus is the theatrical director, a wonderful young New York-based director who is exceptional, because she's very well known for her classical opera, Mozart and Monteverdi in particular. She also has a variety of kind of cult hit off-Broadway shows in New York that have been running for a long time. The Donkey Show is of them, if you've heard of it. And she also designs a lot of the theatricals for Disney these days.

And Alex McDowell is the designer. He's the one who's helping us figure out how to make these walls feel like they're alive. He's one of the very best Hollywood film designers right now. He designs all of Spielberg's movies, including Minority Report, The Terminal, and also does Tim Burton's movie. So he did Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Corpse Bride, if you've heard of those.

So we are starting to make this project now. It opens in two years in Monte Carlo. I'm starting to compose the music. We're designing the sets and building everything. And we put on a little sneak preview, which we're going to show you a teeny bit of right now, in Monte Carlo in the fall.

If you look at the top left, the characters, these are the four main characters. The person all the way on the left is Evvy, the third wife, in the black dress. She's sung by Elizabeth Koecsh, who's a Boston-based mezzo soprano.

The person next to her, to her left holding the wheelchair is Nicholas, who's a kind of grad student scientist assistant to Simon Powers. And he's the one who has the know-how to actually build this system. And his role is sung by the tenor Brian Grosman.

Next to him is Simon Powers, the main character, with the white shirt and the sleeves rolled up. He's sung by the baritone James Maddalena, great singer, who, if any of you've seen any of John Adams' operas, he originated the role of Richard Nixon in Nixon in China, for instance.

And on the end wearing, the black shirt and the skirt is Miranda, the daughter who's about 12 years old. And she's sung by a remarkable young singer, an 18-year-old New Yorker, freshman at the Manhattan School of Music named Elizabeth Reiter.

So now let's give you a tiny glimpse of what this is going to be like. This is the simplest possible set, no set at all, just the performers. And I put together a little three-minute excerpt. So you could hear it.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Can you make that louder, please?

JAMES MADDALENA: (SINGING) I will never take my fatherly [INAUDIBLE] from any natural thing. But such a world as we should both [INAUDIBLE]

Mechanical [INAUDIBLE]

REITER: (SINGING) [INAUDIBLE]

KOECSH: (SINGING) Will I know it is you without any breath? Will it be your voice?

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

JAMES MADDALENA: (SINGING) Maybe as [INAUDIBLE]. Maybe as a dog. [INAUDIBLE].

So silly mortal [INAUDIBLE] I'll be more immortal than her or that peculiar bird.

[INAUDIBLE]

KOECSH: What now?

THORBURN: Well, I guess I should say I don't get opera.

MACHOVER: Well--

THORBURN: Let's talk a little bit about it.

PINSKY: I don't see why you should say that.

MACHOVER: Yeah, really. Great way to start.

THORBURN: How do you feel--

PINSKY: It would have appealed to David more if Tod-- he edited out my favorite part right at the beginning there. The first words that this guy sings are the beginning Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium. He says, "Once out of nature, I will never take my bodily form from any natural thing." And he say, "Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. The immortal William Butler Yates with his bird."

And he says something like, "mechanical parakeet, mechanical parakeet."

THORBURN: He says gold enamel, I think.

PINSKY: Mechanical parakeet. And then he says, "Yeats, you can have your bird. Yeats--" and you edited out the part where then Jimmy Maddalena says, "Yeats, I give you the bird." And I don't know if that was your delicacy, Tod. But for the lumpen audience like David, that would have--

MACHOVER: Yeah, that's right. We took out the obscenities, phenomenal.

THORBURN: But it's an interesting-- and in some ways, one would think of it as partly a problematic collaboration between someone who spends his time worrying about the nuances of vowel sounds and consonant sounds at the end of words and then having it translated into this environment in which people sing it. It's surrounded by music.

PINSKY: For me, there's a kind of freedom in the composition. I knew that Tod was going to set these things to music. I don't have a wide knowledge of modern music. I actually did know Tod's music.

And as you can tell, it's quite melodic and emotional. And it really is very referential for me. It's referential to all kinds of familiar music so that it's an exciting feeling for me. Thank god we'll have super titles.

My main problem with it is that, as with heavy metal music, as with many kinds of music, it's hard to understand the words. And I have never liked the art song if I know the poem.

As you say, I'm thinking about the original music that's built into the vowels. And usually the less I know the poem, the better I like the art song.

And in this case, I had the freedom of, in effect, writing for this format. And I could throw in rhymes and false rhymes and alliterations until it was like playing. It was the freedom of a rather new medium.

So as a way of composing, but I had no confidence in my ability to make a good story for the stage. And that's where Randy Weiner was very useful, almost as my psychiatrist, saying, we can make this work.

What Tod has done with the words is very beautiful to me, very expressive. And I was not saying goodbye to poetry. I can write a poem whenever I like or whenever I can. It was adding this other kind of composition, which I found very liberating, very pleasurable.

THORBURN: Talk a little bit about the sequence of the work. Robert did all his work first. And then you worked from that text?

MACHOVER: Yeah. So I have always liked-- not just liked. I think I write best to text. And I probably write melody more naturally than other things as well. And so I'm also very inspired by text.

So for a piece like this, I thought a lot about it, had many, many ideas. But nothing was absolutely specific until I not just saw some words but saw the words.

But Robert and I spent a huge amount of time together over those few years actually, talking about the story and talking about specific text. And then sometimes we worked together. Sometimes Robert worked with Randy.

But I didn't write a note of music until, again, not until there were sections. But I usually like to imagine the whole shape of a thing and the personality of a piece and of these characters. So I got the whole libretto and then really dug in. That's when I started writing.

I think the sound system in here is awful. I think the text--

THORBURN: The lights ain't that great either.

PINSKY: There's a lot of ethnic humor, political allusions. Tod is leaving out a false start in which we wrote an aria.

MACHOVER: There's only one false start.

PINSKY: We went to Monaco. We had a soprano who sang the aria for the people in Monaco. And with that false start and with this project so far, Tod will email me and say something like, there are a lot of syllables right here. Can you find a way to use fewer syllables? And I pride myself on--

THORBURN: Because the music requires it?

PINSKY: Well, because the exigencies of needing to compose music for it. Is that a fair paraphrase? I'm sort of forgetting. Things like that.

MACHOVER: Yeah.

PINSKY: There's a simpler word here instead of a longer word.

MACHOVER: Simpler word, longer word. You never know what's going to come up.

PINSKY: A little tinkering. And I think in every case, I've responded by saying, no, but this. That is, in every case, I said, well, not that fix. But how about this fix? And I think the fixes have been appropriate.

MACHOVER: Yeah, I think it often goes back a few times.

PINSKY: So there has been a process of collaboration on that level, where this won't work here like this. Can we try that? I'd say, well, A wasn't any good, B wasn't any good, how about B prime or C?

MACHOVER: And I think probably that's the way you'd like to work. But especially with a project like this, where it's not a fixed poem, it's also incredibly liberating for me, because you can start writing the music and see.

I remember something that came up in this section was-- it's not always easy ahead of time. I think in the old days, you could plan out the structure of an opera and say, OK, I need a trio here, and I need a duet here. And here's where we bring everybody in.

This, I think, was more fluid. We knew we were setting up characters and situations. But as I'm writing it, you say, well, here's a place. We really do have to have these people be together.

PINSKY: We made a quartet out of what had been part of a monologue. I remember now, there was things that Simon said. And we just changed them a little. And you got a little glimpse of some of the-- we didn't quite get the quartet. But we got a trio.

MACHOVER: A trio.

PINSKY: But it does become a quartet before the closing scene.

MACHOVER: Yep.

PINSKY: And when you heard that trio, you were hearing words that I had originally written for one character, partly because I am a complete beginner at doing this. And it didn't take us long to turn it into a trio.

THORBURN: How long do you think the entire project will-- how long will the production be?

PINSKY: You'll wake up, and it'll be two minutes.

MACHOVER: Not him, no. He might have a hard time.

THORBURN: That only happens when I read your poems.

[LAUGHTER]

MACHOVER: The goal is to have no intermission so you can't have more than eight or nine hours. No, no, it's probably about an hour and a half without a break is the idea, maybe a little longer.

When you look at the text, it reads quickly. It's very elegant, beautiful. But when you spend time with it and make these characters real, there's a lot going on. And there are a lot of changes in character, a lot of beautiful words that you don't want to just run through.

THORBURN: There are links to this project on the communications forum website and I assume also from your own website.

MACHOVER: I think there probably are.

THORBURN: So those of you who want to pursue this, find out more about this project. Have you been able to put anything online yet of the fragments that you've completed?

MACHOVER: No, I haven't wanted to put those online yet. But there's some good text on the opera online and pictures. And there's an amazing amount of set design, wonderful graphics. I'm working on them again next week.

So I would say pretty soon, there'll be-- actually, I'll probably put up a website on this. Excerpts of things that aren't finished, I usually don't like to make public.

PINSKY: There's something about collaboration and it sounds like the website does dramatize these different elements that are coming together. I'm thrilled when I first hear the music. And I was thrilled when I saw Alex's set designs. And Alex really is very, very good.

And when I first saw those walls breathe and when we started talking about things floating and that there are ways to do it, and that then this whole-- it's an organism that is an expression of this man's consciousness. And then when it goes, poof, and all goes out over the audience, and it can be done.

And the robots can be done. The robots, they're not going to look like stainless steel department store dummies. They're not going to look like Robert the robot or some post-war Japanese thing. They're largely made out of light. And they come on as one thing. And they have lights on them. And then they devolve into the separate robots who will become the characters.

MACHOVER: Actually, you didn't say anything about the robot prologue. That's a pretty unusual--

PINSKY: In the robot prologue, they say, they come out with the head robot-- after they come apart, the head robot says or sings, well, the human creators did instruct us-- the human creators back in the organic age instructed us to perform this at certain times. And so we're going to do it.

And one of the other robots says, but I don't get it. This thing death must have been so important. Is it like lost data? But data can always be recovered. I don't get it.

He says, it doesn't matter. We're going to do it.

And then they discuss it. And then they gradually become the singers we're going to see. And the light makes it possible to do that. Then at the end after our big finish, they re-coalesce. But before, one of the robots says, was that it. I still don't really understand why we did this. What is that about?

And the head robot says, I know what you mean. But everybody who participates gets 10,000 human rights credits. And they turn back into this thing. So there's a back story that is partly filled in, which is where did we go. Where did the human creators go? And what form of quote, life, end quote, is persisting in the form of these robots who are performing basically a kind of ritual with the origins of drama.

And a thing we've arrived at for that is that when the robots say this to one another, there'll be super titles where you get it in English. But they're speaking robot to one another. So they say [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

THORBURN: Maybe we should continue like this. It's actually very interesting.

PINSKY: Some of you who know robot were laughing.

THORBURN: Right, right. Right, the native robot speakers won't find this that interesting. Tod, thank you very much. It looks like a wonderful project. And we thank you for taking part today.

MACHOVER: Thank you. We premiere this in about two years. So we'll let you know. Come to Monte Carlo.

PINSKY: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

MACHOVER: See you there.

PINSKY: Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

THORBURN: We're going to try to have a conversation for about another half hour. And then we'll open the floor to general discussion. I thought the conversation would be helpful, because we could cover a number of aspects of Pinsky's immensely diverse, intimidatingly diverse portfolio.

And one of the most important aspects of his recent work has been another form of outreach that I'm sure many of you know about. And Robert and I have talked about it many times. I guess it's a project that he started when he was the poet laureate. I'll let him describe it.

It's the Favorite Poem Project. And we're going to have a clip or two to show you. Talk a little about it, Robert?

PINSKY: I invited Americans to write me a letter or an email saying the title and author of a poem that the person writing loved and would be willing to read for the National Archive. My advertising budget was about $7.

I received tens of thousands of responses. There is a book for sale outside called An Invitation to Poetry. It has a DVD in the back that has about 25 of the video segments, of which I'm about to show you a couple.

And if anybody here teaches or knows a teacher, I really urge you to buy the book if only for the DVD. I think you'll see what I mean. We'll look at a couple of the segments on a DVD that is in the back of the book. And yeah, why not start with sort of a flagship one, track six? These are baby four-minute, three-minute video segments.

DOHERTY: My name's John Doherty. I'm from Renton, Massachusetts, 34 years old. And I'm a construction worker for the Boston Gas Company. We do outside construction work, providing natural gas for residents or businesses. So a lot of digging, laying pipelines--

THORBURN: Is it loud enough?

DOHERTY: --all outdoor work. The satisfying thing about the job is you're working with a dangerous element, really. So it's important to be exact in everything you do. You certainly don't want to leave any kind of a gas leak behind. So you have to be careful. You have to pay attention.

Poetry was definitely intimidating initially. It just looked like a lot of words that were out of order and out of place and did not belong together. And that's the challenge of it. It just takes a lot of reading and rereading to grasp it.

But once you do, once you come to understand it, you've achieved something. So now you feel good.

"Song of Myself" is a poem that I probably had a lot of difficulty understanding the first time. And there were certain lines that caught me and that I liked and when I got to the very end of this very long poem, the last half-dozen lines are so encouraging.

In those last few lines, Whitman tells you what you're thinking. He says that you probably didn't understand what you just read. But stay with it, and you will. And you'll love it. And so it felt like it was speaking directly to me when I first read it. And I keep those lines in mind no matter what I read now.

The connection I feel with Walt Whitman's poem "Song of Myself" is not due to the fact that he talks about labor as physical labor, working outside like the common working American. That's a nice touch in it, of course. But I enjoyed it for its upliftingness, its ability to inspire me and see things in life and in everyday existence that I hadn't noticed before that I might have taken for granted before.

"Song of Myself" by Walt Whitman.

"There is that in me. I do not know what it is, but I know it is in me. Wrenched and sweaty, calm and cool then my body becomes. I sleep. I sleep long.

"I do not know it. It is without name. It is a word unsaid. It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol. Something it swings on more than the Earth I swing on. To it, the creation is the friend whose embracing awakes me.

"Perhaps I might tell more, outlines. I plea for my brothers and sisters. Do you see, all my brothers and sisters, it is not chaos or death? It is form, union, plan. It is eternal life. It is happiness.

"The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me. He complains at my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed. I too am untranslatable. I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

"The last scut of day holds back for me. It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadowed wilds. It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

"I depart as air. I shake my white locks at the runaway sun. I effuse my flesh in eddies and drift in lacy jags. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love.

"If you want me again, look for me under your boot sores. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean. But I shall be good health nevertheless and filter and fiber your blood. Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged. Missing me one place, search another. I stopped somewhere, waiting for you."

THORBURN: Thank you. Can we have the lights come up?

[APPLAUSE]

Could we see the audience?

PINSKY: The filmmakers were independent producer-directors around the country. So we didn't have to pay transportation costs. We brought them here for a film school. And my executive producer, Juanita Anderson, told them about library of shots, what kind of video, they're going to use, lenses.

And I talked to them about the project. And we had a favorite poem reading at BU, in which we had a college president and a grade school kid and a high school kid and an art director and an elderly person. We had a reading with a kind of range, which we can't demonstrate with one video. But the point is partly a very great range of people, not particularly poets or professors of poetry.

THORBURN: Robert, let's talk a little bit about the democratic implications of this. Clearly, one of the implications of the whole project is to say poetry should be-- we shouldn't think of poetry as a kind of elite activity which only professors and poetasters like, but that it's something that ordinary people can enjoy and experience, that poetry belongs to everyone.

But of course, there are plenty of poets who think that this is sort of selling out.

PINSKY: We could put it differently. We could say we're establishing a true elite of people who understand a poem, have incorporated it, can read it aloud in a way that other people can perceive it against the false elite of people who get tenure at Yale or Harvard or BU or somewhere and often don't know anything about what a poem actually is.

So the elitism is the elitism of people who are actually responding to a poem in a way that can be communicated to another person, which is very fundamental to the art of poetry. And its substitutes for a couple of elites. There's the academic elite, which sometimes is really not very close to the nature of the art of poetry.

And in our country, where the most true elite in American culture is an elite based on performers, so that instead of kings and queens and dukes and earls and duchesses, we have singers and actors and athletes. This is a great improvement. Far better to idealize somebody because they can throw a ball like hell or they're beautiful or they can sing and dance very well than because of who their great, great grandparents were.

But this is different from either, the academic world or the media world of celebrity. This is an art in which each individual's, the reader's body, the reader's breath is the medium.

Walt Whitman is dead. John Doherty is alive. John Doherty's breath saying those words by Whitman become Whitman's medium. It's not Whitman being read by an actor. It's not Whitman himself giving a terrific poetry reading on the poetry reading circuit. It is the reader's realization, literal realization of the poem.

And yes, I think that in a democracy, the idea of an art in which not the performer but an art that is inherently on a human scale, on the scale of one person-- I love digital media. This is a digital medium itself.

But the medium that is also human and bodily, as in the subject of the opera, there's a certain respect for that. And I think there are ways you could argue that in a democracy, this ancient art, which in some ways has non-democratic origins, courtly origins, has an important function, because it inherently respects what used to be called the dignity of the individual.

THORBURN: Do you remember the JD Cunningham poem that talks about breathes on the words he made, sort of an embodiment of your--

PINSKY: I couldn't quote it, but yes.

THORBURN: It was a test. You were supposed to be able to quote.

PINSKY: The artist is dead. But the reader's breath, literal or imaginary-- it might not be reading aloud. It might be just hearing it in your mind's ear. That is your particular-- this is a form of possession by the dead.

If John Doherty reads that or David reads the Cunningham or I read a Ben Johnson, that sliver of that original consciousness is being realized in the new person's breath.

THORBURN: But can't it also be realized, Robert, just reading? Why do I have to read it aloud to reanimate it?

PINSKY: Poetry is an art that takes for its material the sounds of a language. And Ezra Pound said poetry is a centaur, by which he means, in prose, you fire an arrow at a target. In poetry, you do the same thing, but you're riding a horse at the same time.

And the horse I take to be the human body, the bodily part of poetry. So if you're reading a poem and not hearing it at all, as far as I'm concerned, you're missing an important part of it.

Also true if you're stupid, you won't get it all. It is an art of the mind and of the body. And every art that I can think of, in some way, uses something physical. Music uses physical sounds. Film is a physical phenomenon you take it in visually and auditorially. All plastic art, visual arts--

And poetry also has a physical, bodily component. And that is the sounds of the words.

THORBURN: Let's show you one more fragment from this. And then we'll go on to some other discussion. We can come back to these? Could I nominate one? Because I think she actually starts reading right away. And I'd rather just--

Could we do number four? And I think she actually reads the poem in the book or recites the poem at the start. So let's just look at the recitation in the beginning and not watch the whole, unless you think it's valuable.

PINSKY: I don't want to watch only part of one.

THORBURN: You want to watch the whole thing? All right, all right. It's your project. I'll go through with this tedious idea. Go ahead. Actually, this is my favorite of all of the--

MECHLING: In moving slow, he has no peer. You ask him something--

PINSKY: Go back to the beginning of the track.

MECHLING: Think about it for a year.

THORBURN: I interrupted her.

MECHLING: "The Sloth" by Theodore Roethke.

"In moving slow, he has no peer. You ask him something in his ear. He thinks about it for a year. And then before he says a word, there, upside down, unlike a bird, he will assume that you have heard. A most exasperating lug.

"But should you call his manner smug, he'll sigh and give his branch a hug. Then off again to sleep he goes, still swaying gently by his toes. And you just know he knows, he knows."

I'm Katherine Mechling. I'm 11 years old. I live in Lexington, Massachusetts. And--

THORBURN: She's actually very charming. And at the end of this fragment, she reads it again. She recites it again even more remarkably.

PINSKY: She analyzes it.

THORBURN: I'd rather hear Robert than his--

PINSKY: She says that she likes the line "Still swaying gently by his toes." She says quite correctly that it's onomatopoetic. She doesn't use that word. But she says it's like you can see him swinging there.

I don't mean to deprecate the entire academic profession of the study of literature. But it's true that often you will hear an extremely celebrated grand professor or profesora give a lecture. And when the person reads parts of the poems, you'll realize the person is not hearing the poems.

This is not incidental or ornamental. And it's not histrionic skill. It's not being an actor. These are not trained actors. But it's a little bit like music or dancing. You're either doing it or not. You can tell when somebody just is not hearing it.

And so I say that partly mischievously but partly to say that it's not all about democracy or the people. There also is something exacting about art. And every art has its techniques and its demands. And it can be quite stringent.

And it's not just that, isn't it cute that a child or a construction worker is reading a poem. The things they say about the poems, in every case, I think, are cogent. The book prints 200 poems. And there's a quotation from a letter that I got next to each poem. We tried to choose things that were quite illuminating.

So there is an aspect of the project that I'm happy to say is elitist as well as clearly an aspect that is democratic too. I was the editor. I chose which letters I thought were very good.

And though the poems included don't represent my taste exactly or aren't the poems I would have chosen, they do represent my standards. If a poem was not up to my standards, we didn't put it in the anthology, we didn't make a video of it.

THORBURN: "Casey at the Bat?"

PINSKY: "Casey at the Bat," perhaps an exception. But it's a very good piece of pop art. And the kid does do it very well.

THORBURN: Well, I'm glad you're in favor of some aspects of pop art. I'd like a quick transition. We don't have a lot of time. And I want to give the audience a chance at you. But there are at least two topics that I want us to talk a little bit about, Robert. And one of them is what has always struck me as one of the most remarkable and interesting things about your career.

Brief background, when Robert first began to publish, he was immensely influential, even as a young poet, because he seemed to be doing something, at the time, that was new, in quotes, in the sense that the established line in poetry was elsewhere. And what was new, essentially, was how deeply conversational his early poetry was.

And his first few books of poetry not only had a kind of conversational feel and a kind of syntactic coherence that was, in some respects, closer to prose than it was poetry. Although they were very thought through and careful poems, they were true poems, there was this not exactly prosaic but conversational dimension to Robert's early poetry, and especially in the book entitled An Explanation of America.

As you've gone on though, your poetry has changed in somewhat radical ways and in somewhat surprising ways. And there have been some essays written about this, which I've learned from, studying Robert's work at different stages of his career.

But to oversimplify, his work becomes less and less conversational. It becomes harder, I think, more difficult, sometimes harder to follow. You have to work harder to get the meaning, although I think he's always an accessible poet. And moves toward a condition in which he seems to be writing something closer to incantation than conversation.

And there is a deeply incantatory and visionary dimension to his most recent poetry. Many people have commented on this.

But my first question is, do you remember a moment in your own work when you felt a turning like that? I know of some poems I might nominate. But I was wondering if you felt a moment where you were changing?

PINSKY: It's so hard to write a good poem. And you die not knowing if you ever have. If you want to know that you've done something right, you must become something like a surgeon or an airline pilot, really, seriously. Then you know you flew, you performed the mission, to do the surgery. You have a much more objective measure than if you're an artist.

To the students earlier, I quoted Keats' epitaph that he wrote for himself. "Here lies one whose name was written in water." Part of him knew or suspected that he was John Keats, that people like us would be reading his words hundreds of years later.

But since he wasn't a madman, he also admitted the possibility, perhaps his life had been in vain, he had not written masterpieces. And when he thought he did or had, it was a delusion.

And being a genius, he wrote a brilliant epitaph that covers both cases. It's ironic if he is John Keats. And it is a very moving evocation of what it is to have your name be written water if not.

It's so hard to write a good poem that when you are trying to do it, what you are thinking about is how you can possibly approach that goal. So you're not thinking about, well, I've done the conversational thing. I think I'll try and be a little bit more incantation-oriented.

You're much more like somebody--

THORBURN: But that's exactly how I thought it would be.

PINSKY: --trying to keep an airplane in the air or trying to save the patient. You're just desperately, very intensely trying to make something that works.

It's also true that Explanation of America is spoken. And it's spoken, fictionally, to a child between the ages of eight and 11. And almost because of that, it's a book-length poem with a little prefatory poem that is rather interesting and more incantational and a poem at the end that is also much less conversational and more like a litany or prayer.

I wasn't consciously saying, look, I can do that too. But it seemed an appropriate way to say, this is a little bit like, I'm writing a concerto. Minor keys are involved. Another time I might be writing a song cycle. Or this is in a major key. That there is not only development, there's also different tasks.

At some point, it is true, I fell in love with the substantive. And I mean grammatically. And this is like talking about nuts and bolts. I had been very much in love with very complicated sentences, like the first sentence of George Herbert's poem "Church Monuments."

The man is about to go to pray. And he stops in the graveyard outside the church. And he addresses his body. And he says the soul's going to go and pray now. Body, little child, you be good, stay out here, and look at this. You'll learn something from it.

"While my soul repairs to her devotion, here I entomb my flesh, that it betimes may take acquaintance of these heaps of dust to which the blast of death's incessant motion fed by the exhalation of our crimes drives all at last."

You diagram it on the blackboard. It's like a spidery thing. How beautiful the energy is directed. "While that my soul repairs her devotion, here I entomb my flesh that it betimes may take acquaintance of these heaps of dust to which the blast of death's incessant motion filled by the exhalation of our crimes drives all at last."

I once asked a lot of doctoral students at Berkeley, what's the main verb in that sense.

[LAUGHTER]

Some of them said, drives. No, F. It is entomb. Isn't it great, everything grows off entomb? Poem is called "Church Monuments."

So part of oneself, technically, is in love with the idea of how much energy syntax generates. And it's taking the rhymes as it goes. And it's taking the lines as it goes.

And then at some point, you've been doing that a lot, those long sentences. And at some point, you're probably thinking about "Shirt," where the substance is coming with the articles, the yoke, the back, the needle, the treadle.

THORBURN: This one of Robert's most famous poems. It's a prize-winning poem called "Shirt." Maybe you should read it, Robert.

PINSKY: Maybe.

THORBURN: Why don't you? It's a short poem. But describe it and then read it.

PINSKY: Substance. That poem, in fact, goes all over the lot intellectually with things like red. That I plagiarized a little bit of a thing here. And I have another idea I got from there.

But the poem is sort of dominated by the sense of substantives, in that case with the articles, this, this, and that. And there's a power to that.

THORBURN: It's a kind of inventory. Since he doesn't want to read it, it's a kind of inventory.

PINSKY: I'll read it.

THORBURN: Thank you. See, he would be much more cooperative if I wasn't his friend.

PINSKY: It's what friends are for. It's so nice. Oh, no, I must have. No, no.

THORBURN: He's not behaving well. If he doesn't behave better, I'm going to recite some of his suppressed poetry that he wrote as teenage.

PINSKY: I said to David, keep enticing me, telling me to read "Shirt." I'll pretend I don't want to. Beg me to do it.

"Shirt, the back, the yoke, the yardage, left seams, the nearly invisible stitches along the collar turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians gossiping over tea and noodles on their break or talking money or politics, while one fitted this arm piece with its overseam to the bend of cuff eye button it at my wrist.

"The presser, the cutter, the ringer, the mangle, the needle, the union, the treadle, the bobbin, the code, the infamous blaze at the Triangle Factory in 1911. 146 died in the flames on the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes.

"The witness in the building across the street who watched how a young man helped a girl to step up to the window sill then held her out away from the masonry wall and let her drop, and then another, as if he were helping them up to enter a streetcar and not eternity.

"A third, before he dropped her, put her arms around his neck and kissed him. Then he held her into space and dropped her. Almost at once, he stepped to the sill himself. His jacket flared and fluttered up from his shirt as he came down, air filling up the legs of his gray trousers like Hart Crane's Bedlamite, shrill shirt ballooning.

"Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly across the placket and over the twin bar tacked corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme or a major chord. Prints, plaids, checks, houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras.

"The clan Parkins invented by mill owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian to control their savage Scottish workers tamed by a fabricated heraldry, McGregor, Bailey, McMartin.

"The kilt devised for workers to wear among the dusty clattering looms, weavers, carders, spinners, the loader, the docker, the navvy, the planter, the picker, the sorter sweating it her machine in a litter of cotton as slaves in calico head rags sweated in fields.

"George Herbert, your descendant is a black lady in South Carolina. Her name is Irma. And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit and few and it's clean smell have satisfied both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality down to the buttons of simulated bone, the button holes, the sizing, the facing, the characters printed in black on neckband and tail, the shape, the label, the labor, the color, the shade, the shirt."

THORBURN: Thank you, Robert.

[APPLAUSE]

PINSKY: Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

THORBURN: The later poems become even more visionary. And we may have a chance to look at those a little bit later. But I want to make a transition to the final topic we'll discuss before we open to general discussion. And that is this recent prose book that Robert has written called The Life of David.

I've read it closely and been deeply moved by it. And it strikes me that one of the interesting things about the book, it is like a vast Pinsky poem. That is to say it's full of disparate energies that seem to sort of create at least the illusion of an absence of coherence. But when you finally finish the whole, you realize how richly coherent it is.

And it is in some degree a kind of departure for a poet like Robert Pinsky to turn to this sort of a book. I thought with that first, Robert, I might ask you to just, in a general way, describe why you felt David was such a fascinating figure, why he mattered to you, in a way?

PINSKY: I'll try to unite the two subjects, the previous subject and this one. Syntax in poetry is the equivalent of melody in music. It connects things over time. It's the equivalent, perhaps, of harmonic structure but even more of melody, so that any good syntax is in some sense conversational, that it converts and it's between, so that sometimes when people are talking, they talk rather like, while that my soul repairs devotion here, my flesh--