Pinsky does classic pieces

I think that this is a rather nice gesture on both Slate and Pinsky's part. Laureates and others of noted reputation should do things like this to promote the genre for news and casual readers.

I will not copy in Hardy's prettily wrought "The Darkling Thrush" (why steal Pinsky's thunder?) but it would be pleasant, even pleasing, if our beloved Administrator could manage something similar like this--have a scholar or a poet of note, or other figure come into the forums and do something like this with a classic text once a month or so. For some of us it is a rare drop of a continuing education.

I am not big on Hardy, but for what this is, it is nicely done. You think?:p

That's great Jozy. thanks for pointing this out to us. So Pinsky will be reading a classic poem there every week? I don't go to the Slate site, but i guess this may draw me in. Pinsky is such a wonderful reader that I will tune in for sure. Thanks again. :)

They publish poetry as well Virgil; Pinsky is in charge of all this, and no, I haven't sent him anything to consider, yet--but I still think his efforts, as noted above, constitute a valuable public service in appreciation of the arts. He could use some applause. I think so, in any case.

Yes... JoZ... thanks for pointing this out to us. I actually am quite enamored of Hardy... as a poet far more than as a novelist... especially the poems in meditation upon the death of his wife.

I am not an expert on Hardy, but I wonder. Pinsky points to the obvious in a possible tribute to Keats, but what of Dickinson? I have no idea how obscure she was or wasn't by the end of the 19th century, but Hardy's last stanza:

So little cause for carolings
…..Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
…..Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
…..His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
…..And I was unaware.

Seems to echo Emily's "Hope, that thing with feathers."

Am I off-base here?

Essay on Psychiatrists
I. Invocation
It‘s crazy to think one could describe them—
Calling on reason, fantasy, memory, eves and ears—
As though they were all alike any more
Than sweeps, opticians, poets or masseurs.
Moreover, they are for more than one reason
Difficult to speak of seriously and freely,
And I have never (even this is difficult to say
Plainly, without foolishness or irony)
Consulted one for professional help, though it happens
Many or most of my friends have—and that,
Perhaps, is why it seems urgent to try to speak
Sensibly about them, about the psychiatrists.

II. Some Terms
“Shrink” is a misnomer. The religious
Analogy is all wrong, too, and the old,
Half-forgotten jokes about Viennese accents
And beards hardly apply to the good-looking woman
In boots and a knit dress, or the man
Seen buying the Sunday Times in mutton-chop
Whiskers and expensive running shoes.
In a way I suspect that even the terms “doctor”
And “therapist” are misnomers; the patient
Is not necessarily “sick.” And one assumes
That no small part of the psychiatrist’s
Role is just that: to point out misnomers.

III. Proposition
These are the first citizens of contingency.
Far from the doctrinaire past of the old ones,
They think in their prudent meditations
Not about ecstasy (the soul leaving the body)
Nor enthusiasm (the god entering one’s person)
Nor even about sanity (which means
Health, an impossible perfection)
But ponder instead relative truth and the warm
Dusk of amelioration. The cautious
Young augurs with their family-life, good books
And records and foreign cars believe
In amelioration—in that, and in suffering.

IV. A Lakeside Identification
Yes, crazy to suppose one could describe them—
And yet, there was this incident: at the local beach
Clouds of professors and the husbands of professors
Swam, dabbled, or stood to talk with arms folded
Gazing at the lake ... and one of the few townsfolk there,
With no faculty status—a matter-of-fact, competent,
Catholic woman of twenty-seven with five children
And a first-rate body—pointed her finger
At the back of one certain man and asked me,
“Is that guy a psychiatrist?” and by god he was! “Yes,”
She said, “He looks like a psychiatrist.”
Grown quiet, I looked at his pink back, and thought.

V. Physical Comparison With Professors And Others
Pink and a bit soft-bodied, with a somewhat jazzy
Middle-class bathing suit and sandy sideburns, to me
He looked from the back like one more professor.
And from the front, too—the boyish, unformed carriage
Which foreigners always note in American men, combined
As in a professor with that liberal, quizzical,
Articulate gaze so unlike the more focused, more
Tolerant expression worn by a man of action (surgeon,
Salesman, athlete). On closer inspection was there,
Perhaps, a self-satisfied benign air, a too studied
Gentleness toward the child whose hand he held loosely?
Absurd to speculate; but then—the woman saw something.

{ 5 of 21 stanzas }

I think I like Pinsky's editing and interpretive skills better than his ironic narrative attempts :), but thanks for the sample quasi. I guess no one would know if Hardy would have happened upon Dickinson's first collection from 1890, but I cannot help feeling something of a link between these now two famous pieces. Do any Hardy fans know his biography? I am curious if he might have happened upon her work by some accident.

V
But what was it I was too young for? On moonless
Nights, water and sand are one shade of black,
And the creamy foam rising with moaning noises
Charges like a spectral army in a poem toward the bluffs
Before it subsides dreamily to gather again.
I thought of going down there to watch it a while,
Feeling as though it could turn me into fog,
Or that the wind would start to speak a language
And change me–as if I knocked where I saw a light
Burning in some certain misted window I passed,
A house or store or tap-room where the strangers inside
Would recognize me, locus of a new life like a woods
Or orchard that waxed and vanished into cloud
Like the moon, under a spell. Shrill flutes,
Oboes and cymbals of doom. My poor mother fell,
And after the accident loud noises and bright lights
Hurt her. And heights. She went down stairs backwards,
Sometimes with one arm on my small brother’s shoulder.
Over the years, she got better. But I was lost in music;
The cold brazen bow of the saxophone, its weight
At thumb, neck and lip, came to a bloodwarm life
Like Italo’s flashlight in the hand. In a white
Jacket and pants with a satin stripe I aspired
To the roughneck elegance of my Grandfather Dave.
Sometimes, playing in a bar or at a high school dance, I felt
My heart following after a capacious form,
Sexual and abstract, in the thunk, thrum,
Thrum, come-wallow and then a little screen
Of quicker notes goosing to a fifth higher, winging
To clang-whomp of a major seventh: listen to me
Listen to me, the heart says in reprise until sometimes
In the course of giving itself it flows out of itself
All the way across the air, in a music piercing
As the kids at the beach calling from the water Look,
Look at me, to their mothers, but out of itself, into
The listener the way feeling pretty or full of erotic revery
Makes the one who feels seem beautiful to the beholder
Witnessing the idea of the giving of desire–nothing more wanted
Than the little singing notes of wanting–the heart
Yearning further into giving itself into the air, breath
Strained into song emptying the golden bell it comes from,
The pure source poured altogether out and away.

{fifth of five parts from Pinsky's HISTORY OF MY HEART}

She, At His Funeral by Thomas Hardy



THEY bear him to his resting-place—
In slow procession sweeping by;
I follow at a stranger’s space;
His kindred they, his sweetheart I.

Unchanged my gown of garish dye,
Though sable-sad is their attire;
But they stand round with griefless eye,
Whilst my regret consumes like fire!

Thomas Hardy, 1840–1928

{subject of this poem said to be Emily Dickinson...proof? ...there are 8 entries under Thomas Hardy in the DEA, i.e. Dickinson Electronic Archives}