Reviews of the Times

In his review of a book called Take the Cannoli written by Sarah Vowell, Rick Marin says (in The New York Times Book Review for April 9, 2000), “Sarah Vowell ought to be my kind of lady. She’s into Bruce Springsteen, Frank Sinatra and The Godfather ⎯ a rare triple. What’s the problem? Public Radio. Vowell is public radio personified. The essays in Take the Cannoli ⎯ mostly pieces she did for “This American Life” on Public Radio International ⎯ contain everything I find irritating and boring about PRI and National Public Radio. Self-indulgent monologues. Received wisdom passing for irreverence. Cozy smugness.”

I know just exactly what Mr. Marin means. When the classical music goes off and one of those fuzzy country voices comes on to tell a smug little personal history tale (Vowell is “no stranger to the ‘I’ word. Let me put it another way: Spalding Gray talks about himself less.”), I turn off the radio.

In the same issue of the Book Review Adam Kirsch reviews Jersey Rain, a book of “poems” by Robert Pinsky, America’s former extended-term Poet Laureate who ⎯ if Vowell was “Ms. Public Radio” personified ⎯ was Mr. PBS. “The author of a poem called ‘An Explanation of America,’” Kirsch writes, “is now explaining poems to America: he is to be found reading poems on PBS, videotaping them for his Favorite Poem Project, writing a primer on ‘The Sounds of Poetry.’ He has become Yeats’s ‘60-year-old smiling public man,’ almost to the year.”

But is Pinsky the equivalent of Vowell? Well, this book “contains no irony about his official mask,” Kirsch says, “no impulse toward confession. But it is filled with ruminations on the competing virtues of private and public life.” Later on he writes, “Of course, there are risks waiting for a poet too at ease with such a public role, and at one moment Pinsky allows his own civic-mindedness to pass over into perhaps excessive endorsement of mass taste....” “But the tasks of the public poet usually suit him well, because his intelligence seems, at bottom, less lyrical than discursive, even didactic.”

The result of this method, unfortunately, is that the reader’s “pleasure” (if that is the word) in such productions “comes less from the poem’s perfection as an artifact than from our sense of the poet’s sensitive, inquisitive mind at work. In lyric poems, where immediacy and precision are essential, he is less at ease.”

Mr. Kirsch seems to have some difficulty in stating plainly his critical judgments. I once responded to another of Kirsch’s reviews with this letter to the New York Times Book Review:

"In his review of Charles Wright’s Appalachia … Adam Kirsch wrote that, unlike Matthew Arnold who “refused the completeness of spiritual conviction, but embraced the completeness of poetic form,” “Wright, like many serious poets today, refuses both kinds of completeness.” “These poems do not want to be made things, beautiful in their wholeness.”

Why not say outright what he means? That, like the productions of the many prose-chopping “free verse” writers who wouldn’t know iambic pentameter from a pair of suspenders, Wright’s “poetry” is flaccid and boring."

And so is Pinsky’s. Kirsch ends his review with a near approach to honesty in speaking of an attempt at lyric verse titled “To Television” in which “rich language seems thickly applied to the surface of things by the poet’s fancy, rather than emerging from the things themselves ⎯ Pinsky’s epithets are proposals, not evocations. Fittingly, it is with the public voice of the teacher, explainer, or rememberer that Pinsky speaks most naturally.”

Poetry, however, is not the genre for teaching, explaining or remembering; lectures, sermons and essays are, nonfiction genres. Poetry is the genre for song, for love of the language, for delight and sorrow. If Pinsky cannot provide these, perhaps he ought to go back to the pulpit or the classroom, and NPR and PBS would do well to avoid both the Vowell and the Laureate. To put it even more bluntly, I wrote to James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress who appointed Pinsky to three consecutive terms as Poet Laureate,

"Perhaps you saw the enclosed letter to the editor in The New York Times Book Review for March 28th. The other evening on PBS it was announced that Robert Pinsky had been reappointed for “an unprecedented third one-year term” as 'Poet Laureate.'

"Mr. Pinsky is exactly the type of poet that I was talking about in my letter to the editor. His “free verse” is merely chopped prose. He has no ear whatever for the rhythms of the English language. His work is as dull as a board; worse, it is filled with stale 'insights' and soppy sentimentality.

"It is appalling that the Librarian of Congress, of all people, has so little insight into what constitutes language art that he appoints a hack writer — the American equivalent of the 18th-century British Laureate Colley Cibber — to the post of “Poet Laureate” once, let alone three times, to the detriment of the profession of letters."

To return for a moment to Rick Marin, Pinsky’s “poems” “contain everything I find irritating and boring about PRI and National Public Radio (and PBS). Self-indulgent monologues. Received wisdom passing for irreverence. Cozy smugness.” Add fatuous inanities, banal discussions, hobbled meters if any.

In his review of Robert Pinsky’s new book of poems Gulf Music on Sunday, February 3rd, 2008, Joel Brouwer wrote, “With its clear language and sturdy blank verse the poem offers images of state violence past and present….” Pinsky’s “Poem of Disconnected Parts” may be “blank,” which means “without rhyme,” but it is not “verse,” which means “metered language,” but “prose,” which means “unmetered language.”

Actually, what Brouwer probably means is not “blank verse” — which is unrhymed metered verse, but “free verse” — which is a contradiction in terms: “verse” cannot be “free” because it is “metered.” So what does Pinsky write? He writes prose poems. There is nothing wrong with writing poems in prose, one of the two modes of writing, the other being verse. The question is, are they good prose poems or bad ones? Here is what Brouwer has to say on that subject:

“Given this range of seemingly unrelated subjects, it’s as if Pinsky wants his poem, too, to be consulted for possibilities rather than worshiped for convictions,” etc., etc. ad nauseam in the manner of Adam Kirsch.

It would be good if the TBR would now and then give a book of “poems” to an honest reviewer who knows something about poetry.