☀ What Sparks Poetry: Robert Pinsky on the Favorite Poem Project

I saw him in San Francisco at the Purple Onion
When I was still at Stanford, a Teaching Assistant
Getting the “Ode to a Nightingale” by heart.

Out of prison on bail, soon he would die.
One of the charges against him was saying “shmuck.”
He reminded me of my teacher Irving Howe:

The impatience of an improvising spirit
Hurtling beyond a footnote or a punch line
Like a light-wingëd dryad in the trees.

The comic with months to live was only 40.
I thought he talked too much about his trials—
Forgive me please, I was barely 24.

The cover charge, on my tiny fellowship,
A tender gesture menaced by hornets and grackles.
“Is money all you people think about?”

Being a lizard I’m not sure what to say.
John Keats in a letter says that now he’s ready
“To cheat as well as any literary Jew”—

One more example, ho hum, how could it matter
To me as a secret reptile from outer space
Charmed by your human poetry and music?

Howe happened to be at Stanford that one year.
My poetry teacher Yvor Winters deplored
The “awful mess” of Keats’s mind. I did

Get him to concede the “Ode” was beautiful.
He seemed surprised and happy when I told him
Howe had assigned his essay on Henry James.

“Alright, it’s true! We killed him. What a bad scene,
It was us, my family did it, we found a note I
Killed Jesus in the basement, signed Cousin Morty.”

I’m grateful to Lenny Bruce for saying that.
I pardon Keats for being a shmuck— the word
A homey metaphor meaning a bangle, a gem,

Diminutive for a child is schmeckel, a spoken
Precious ornament weighed and appreciated
In the jazzy sacred scales of appropriation.