Donald Brown in The Quarterly Conversation:
In 1996 Robert Pinsky published The Figured Wheel, a collected poems comprising his first four books of poems that also included some new work; the next year he would become the Poet Laureate of the United States. Perhaps not coincidentally, his next volume did not appear until 2001, the year after his tenure as Laureate ended. Pinsky achieved more visibility in the latter role than many another poet who has held the post, all in an effort to increase the viability of poetry in America. His serious attention to the task has earned Pinksy the epithet “civic poet” as an acknowledgement of the degree to which, as poet, critic, and proselytizer for poetry, he is able to express a convincing sense of poetry as a taught and learned cultural asset. Reading Pinsky, one tends to reflect on early, schoolroom encounters with poetry in poems offered not as hermetic repositories of private arcana but as encounters with language that create a vital sense of cultural heritage in “the best that has been thought and said.”
More here. [Photo shows Pinsky.]
