Robert Pinsky famous quotes

04-23-2025

Poetry's medium is not merely light as air, it is air: vital and deep as ordinary breath.
-- Robert Pinsky

#Air #Light #Ordinary
When I had no roof I made audacity my roof.
-- Robert Pinsky

#Audacity #Made #Roof
A sentence is like a tune. A memorable sentence gives its emotion a melodic shape. You want to hear it again, say itâ€”in a way, to hum it to yourself. You desire, if only in the sound studio of your imagination, to repeat the physical experience of that sentence. That craving, emotional and intellectual but beginning in the body with a certain gesture of sound, is near the heart of poetry.
-- Robert Pinsky

#Memorable #Heart #Emotional
Whatever makes a child want to glue macaroni on a paper plate and paint the assemblage and see it on the refrigerator - that has always been strong in me.
-- Robert Pinsky

#Strong #Children #Paper
For Aliki Barnstone, poetry seems a natural medium. The vision and cadences of these poems suggest a sensibility for which poetry is as inevitable as breathing or eating.
-- Robert Pinsky

#Breathing #Vision #Cadence
Even in the scorched and frozen world of the dead after the holocaust The wheel as it turns goes on accreting ornaments.
-- Robert Pinsky

#Death #Holocaust #Frozen
Sometimes the ideas that mean the most to you will feel true long before you can quite formulate them or justify them.
-- Robert Pinsky

#Mean #Ideas #Long
If what you want to do is make good art, decide whats good and try to imitate it.
-- Robert Pinsky

#Art #Trying #Want
Art will not solve your problems. It will not enable you to live merrily.
-- Robert Pinsky

#Art #Problem #Solve
The last thing a young artist should do in poetry or any other field is think about whats in style, whats current, what are the trends. Think instead of what you like to read, what do you admire, what you like to listen to in music. What do you like to look at in architecture? Try to make a poem that has some of those qualities.
-- Robert Pinsky

#Thinking #Artist #Style
An underestimated element in poetry, that reading aloud makes clear, is the pause. I mean especially the force of a pause or a couple of pauses close together, contrasted with a longer unit of grammar.
-- Robert Pinsky

#Couple #Reading #Mean
The poetry I love is written with someone's voice and I believe its proper culmination is to be read with someone's voice. And the human voice in that sense is not electronically reproduced or amplified.
-- Robert Pinsky

#Believe #Love Is #Voice
Autobiography is a genre notorious for falsehood.
-- Robert Pinsky

#Notorious #Genre #Autobiography
There is something cathartic about having absolute loss articulated.
-- Robert Pinsky

#Health #Loss #Cathartic
Poetic language is singularly appropriate for recounting the life of the king who is traditionally accepted as the author of the poetic psalms, some of which are included in the narrative.
-- Robert Pinsky

#Kings #Narrative #Language
To talk about the reality of life here and the work that you do here at the university.
-- Robert Pinsky

#Reality #University #Reality Of Life
Poetry is the most bodily of the arts.
-- Robert Pinsky

#Art #Poetry Is
An artist needs not so much an audience, as to feel a need to answer, a promise to respond....a good feeling about his art.
-- Robert Pinsky

#Art #Feelings #Promise
Poetryâ€™s medium is the individual chest and throat and mouth of whoever undertakes to say the poem.
-- Robert Pinsky

#Mouths #Individual #Throat
In jazz, as in poetry, there is always that play between whatâ€™s regular and whatâ€™s wild. That has always appealed to me.
-- Robert Pinsky

#Play #Jazz
In the particular presence of memorable language we can find a reminder of our ability to know and retain knowledge itself: the brightness wherein all things come to see.
-- Robert Pinsky

#Memorable #Brightness #Language
The medium of poetry is a human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the mouth. In this sense, poetry is just as physical or bodily an art as dancing.
-- Robert Pinsky

#Art #Air #Dancing
The heart grows brutal feeding on fantasies.
-- Robert Pinsky

#Heart #Fantasy #Feeding
Deciding to remember, and what to remember, is how we decide who we are.
-- Robert Pinsky

#Identity #Who We Are #Remember

You may also like: