Robert Pinsky

An Invitation to Poetry: a New Favorite Poem Project Anthology Robert Pinsky

Brief Description: A multimedia collection of poems introduced by American readers, featuring a DVD, including a video introduction by Robert Pinsky. Brief Description: "Includes a DVD featuring project participants reading their favorite poems from Shakespeare to Szymborska"--Jacket. Marc Notes: Includes a DVD featuring project participants reading their favorite poems from Shakespeare to Szymborska--Jacket.; Includes index.; A multimedia collection of poems introduced by American readers, featuring a DVD, including a video introduction by Robert Pinsky.;012-up. Publisher Marketing: For a reader unaccustomed to reading poetry, or who has fallen away from the custom, this collection offers an inviting way into the art, or back into it. For readers devoted to poetry, it offers illuminating examples of the infinitely various ways a poem reaches a reader. In both the book and the videos on the accompanying DVD, poems by Sappho, Shakespeare, Keats, Whitman, and Dickinson as well as contemporary poets are introduced by people from across the United States a construction worker, a Supreme Court justice, a glassblower, a marine each of whom speaks about his or her connection to the poem. Their comments are variously poignant, funny, heartening, tart, penetrating, and eccentric, showing some of the ways poetry is alive for American readers. An "Invitation to Poetry" will inspire a fresh experience of poetry's pleasure and insight. Review Citations:

Library Journal Prepub Alert 04/01/2004 pg. 74 (EAN 9780393058765, Hardcover)

Library Journal 08/01/2004 pg. 86 (EAN 9780393058765, Hardcover)

Library Journal 04/01/2004 (EAN 9780393058765, Hardcover)

Contributor Bio:  Pinsky, Robert Robert Pinsky was born on October 20, 1940 in Long Branch, New Jersey. He received a B. A. from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and earned both an M. A. and Ph. D. in Philosophy from Stanford University, where he was a Stegner Fellow in creative writing, and studied under the poet and critic Yvor Winters . He is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Gulf Music: Poems; Jersey Rain (2000); The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 (1996), which received the 1997 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and was a Pulitzer Prize nominee; The Want Bone (1990); History of My Heart (1984); An Explanation of America (1980); and Sadness and Happiness (1975). He is also the author of several prose titles, including The Life of David; Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry (2002); The Sounds of Poetry (1998), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Poetry and the World (1988); and The Situation of Poetry (1977). In 1985 he also released a computerized novel, Mindwheel. Pinsky has published two acclaimed works of traslation: The Inferno of Dante (1994), which was a Book-of-the-Month-Club Editor's Choice, and received both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award ; and The Separate Notebooks by Czeslaw Milosz (with Renata Gorczynski and Robert Hass ). About his work, the poet Louise Gluck has said, "Robert Pinsky has what I think Shakespeare must have had: dexterity combined with worldliness, the magician's dazzling quickness fused with subtle intelligence, a taste for tasks and assignments to which he devises ingenious solutions."From 1997 to 2000, he served as the United States Poet Laureate and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. During that time, he founded the Favorite Poem Project, a program dedicated to celebrating, documenting and encouraging poetry's role in Americans' lives. In 1999, he co-edited Americans' Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology with Maggie Dietz. Other anthologies he has edited include An Invitation to Poetry (W. W. Norton & Company, 2004); Poems to Read (2002); and Handbook of Heartbreak (1998). His honors include an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, both the William Carlos Williams Award and the Shelley Memorial prize from the Poetry Society of America, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. He is currently poetry editor of the weekly Internet magazine Slate . Pinsky has taught at both Wellesley College and the University of California, Berkeley, and currently teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Contributor Bio:  Dietz, Maggie Maggie Dietz is the Favorite Poem Project's director. She lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.