is like a musical score: it's meant to be heard. And so the College of Arts & Sciences professor of English, former three-time U.S. poet laureate, and author of several acclaimed books of poetry, prose, and translation is bringing his verse to life in a series of soulful readings to musical accompaniment. In these spirited performances Pinsky, whose first ambition was to be a jazz saxophonist, combines his passion for jazz and his conviction that poetry is "very physical." The result--call it jazz rap--is a merging of music and poetry into "a single manifestation of art," he says.
from Robert Pinsky: BU Today: Speaking Jazz
~~~~~~~~~~~
Another poem in A Boy's Will, "Pan With Us," acknowledges a changed, modern world with a little more nostalgia for the old mythological creatures of poetry. The pathos of grayness in the second line--almost a cinematic dissolve of the old pipe-playing, sexual, half-animal creature--justifies and animates the grammatical inversion of the following line: "The gray of the moss of walls were they," which, like the poem, is partly a lament for old ways and partly a parody of them:
"Pan With Us"
Pan came out of the woods one day,--
from Robert Pinsky: Slate: Old Made New
~~~~~~~~~~~
No comments :
Post a Comment