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Readings to Go: Robert Pinsky

Three-time U.S. poet laureate reads from his new book

In the video above, Robert Pinsky, a College of Arts and Sciences professor of poetry and three-time U.S. poet laureate, reads from his new book of poetry, Gulf Music.

Pinsky is the author of six books of poetry: Jersey Rain; The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966–1996, winner of the 1997 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and a Pulitzer Prize nominee; The Want Bone; History of My Heart; An Explanation of America; and Sadness and Happiness. He has published four books of criticism, The Sounds of Poetry, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Poetry and the World; The Situation of Poetry; and Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry; two books of translation, The Inferno of Dante, which received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, and The Separate Notebooks by Czeslaw Milosz (with Renata Gorczynski and Robert Hass); a prose book, The Life of David; and a computerized novel, Mindwheel. During his unprecedented three terms as poet laureate, from 1997 to 2000, Pinsky created the Favorite Poem Project to document, promote, and celebrate poetry’s place in American culture. In 1999 he coedited Americans’ Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology with Maggie Dietz (GRS’97), now the project’s director. They published An Invitation to Poetry: A New Favorite Poem Project Anthology in 2004. Pinsky is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Pinsky was one of seven faculty members to read from their works at the annual Faculty Reading on January 30, 2007. Sponsored by BU’s Creative Writing Program, the event included readings by Leslie Epstein, a CAS professor and director of the Creative Writing Program; Jennifer Haigh, a CAS lecturer in creative writing and a PEN/Hemingway and PEN/Winship award winner; Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Louise Glück, a CAS lecturer in creative writing and another former U.S. poet laureate; David Ferry, a CAS lecturer in creative writing and winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Bingham Poetry Prize, and the Teasdale Prize; Ha Jin (GRS’94), a CAS professor of creative writing and winner of a National Book Award, two PEN/Faulkner Awards, and a PEN/Hemingway Award; and poet, scholar, and translator Rosanna Warren, a University Professor and BU’s Emma Ann MacLachlan Metcalf Professor of the Humanities.

See tomorrow’s BU Today for a video of Jennifer Haigh reading from her work. Click here to watch Leslie Epstein read from his book King of the Jews. Click here to watch Ha Jin read from his short story “A Composer and His Parakeet.”

 

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