‘The River’ is the opening poem of my new collection, "Beast." The river is the Río Tambopata in the Peruvian Amazon, the creatures are all ones I observed, including a jaguar who had just swum across and was drying his fur on the bank. I think of the Amazon rainforest as a mother, replacing my own mother whom I only lived with as a teenager. Like her, it’s abused, and although dangerous, is a place I love.
Pascale Petit on "The River" |
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"Why Catullus Continues to Seduce Us"
"'In Catullus we have, in a sense, not one poet but two,' the editors of 'Two Centuries' acknowledged. Most scholars would agree. On the one hand, there is the impetuous, often swaggering young writer whose sometimes brash, sometimes tender personality vividly emerges from the hundred-odd poems that have come down to us....On the other hand, there is the doctus poeta, the refined littérateur celebrated for his delicacy and wit, who peppered even his occasional verse with elaborate word games and abstruse allusions."
viaTHE NEW YORKER |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Heather Green on Life in Public
"In 'Forgiveness,' Pinsky’s fluid, associative form moves an electron cloud of image, shadow, and fact around a heavy nucleus of a solitary voice wrestling with its own thoughts, ambitions, and ethical questions. The poem steers from Emmanuel Levinas’s lecture 'The forgiving / Of an unforgivable crime' to Pound’s poetics (and Pinsky’s revelation about duration and stress) in a whorl of motion, a record of a dynamic thought process animated, in part, by music." |
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