Readings to Go: Robert Pinsky
CAS prof reads three selections from acclaimed Gulf Music
In the video above, three-time U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky reads from Gulf Music, his most recent poetry collection.
Gulf Music, the most recent book of poetry by three-time U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky, a College of Arts and Sciences professor of English, was reviewed in the New York Times “Sunday Book Review” on February 3.
“Pinsky is our finest living example of [the American civic poet],” writes reviewer Joel Brouwer, an associate professor of English at the University of Alabama and author of two books of poems. “The poems of Gulf Music are among the best examples we have of poetry’s ability to illuminate not only who we are as humans, but who we are — and can be — as a nation.”
Pinsky’s previous works of poetry are Jersey Rain; The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966–1996, winner of the 1997 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and a Pulitzer Prize nominee; The Want Bone; History of My Heart; An Explanation of America; and Sadness and Happiness. He has also published four books of criticism, The Sounds of Poetry, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Poetry and the World; The Situation of Poetry; and Democracy, Culture, and the Voice 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 (with Renata Gorczynski and Robert Hass); a prose book, The Life of David; and a computerized novel, Mindwheel.
Pinsky was one of eight faculty members to read from their works at the annual Faculty Reading, on December 3, 2007. Sponsored by the Creative Writing Program, the event included readings by Leslie Epstein, a CAS professor and director of the Creative Writing Program; David Ferry, a CAS lecturer in creative writing and winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Bingham Poetry Prize, and the Teasdale Prize; Allegra Goodman, a CAS lecturer in creative writing and winner of a Whiting Writer’s Award; Ha Jin (GRS’94), a CAS professor of creative writing and winner of a National Book Award, two PEN/Faulkner Awards, and a PEN/Hemingway Award; poet, scholar, and translator Rosanna Warren, a University Professor and BU’s Emma Ann MacLachlan Metcalf Professor of the Humanities; Derek Walcott, a Nobel laureate and a CAS professor of creative writing; and poet Tom Yuill (GRS’98), a Metropolitan College lecturer in liberal studies.
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