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TITLE: Poetry and American Memory
SPEAKER: Robert Pinsky
EVENT DATE: 10/08/1998
RUNNING TIME: 87 minutes
DESCRIPTION:
With this lecture on "Poetry and American Memory," Mr. Pinsky officially opened the Library's 1998-1999 poetry and literature series.
Speaker Biography: Robert Pinsky was born in Long Branch, N.J., in 1940. He is the author of six books of poetry includng "Jersey Rain"; "The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996," which won the 1997 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and was a Pulitzer Prize nominee; "The Want Bone"; "History of My Heart"; "An Explanation of America"; and "Sadness and Happiness." In 1999 he co-edited "Americans' Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology" with Maggie Dietz. He has also published four books of criticism, including "The Sounds of Poetry," which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; "Poetry and the World" and "The Situation of Poetry"; two books of translation: "The Inferno of Dante," which received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, and "The Separate Notebooks by Czeslaw Milosz"; and a computerized novel," Mindwheel." His honors include an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, Poetry Magazine's Oscar Blumenthal prize, the William Carlos Williams Award and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. He is currently poetry editor of the weekly Internet magazine Slate. Pinsky teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University, and in 1997 was named the United States Poet Laureate and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. He lives in Newton Corner, Mass.