Robert Pinsky, America’s Ambassador for Poetry, Retiring from Teaching after 36 Years at BU, More Than 1,000 Students
On a recent Friday morning, a group of eight Boston University graduate students gathered in a circle inside a second floor room at 236 Bay State Road for Poetry Workshop II, a seminar taught by one of BU’s most decorated professors—and a former US poet laureate—Robert Pinsky.
Over the next few hours, they read aloud poems written by fellow classmates. Next, the poems’ authors read their work in their own voice, and the class then discusses the poem. And in keeping with tradition, one of the students reads aloud a selection from Singing School: Learning to Write (and Read) Poetry by Studying with the Masters, an anthology edited by Pinsky. On this day, Heather Wright (GRS’26) reads Louise Bogan’s “Women.”
It’s a scene that has been replayed every week since Pinsky arrived at BU in 1989 as a visiting lecturer, a return to the East Coast for the New Jersey native. He had come to BU from the University of California, Berkeley, for what he expected would be a yearlong appointment, but once settled in Boston, he found that he loved teaching in an MFA program (Berkeley had no creative writing program).
“The students [at BU] wanted to know exactly the kind of thing I’m interested in,” Pinsky says. “There was a door and on the door it said the words, “Creative Writing.”
More than three and a half decades later, Pinsky, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of English, is preparing to retire from teaching. By his own count he has taught roughly 1,000 students at BU, most of them in the graduate MFA program. And on Thursday, the University celebrated his legacy with a reading, where he read some of his own works at the Duan Family Center for Computing & Data Sciences.
To read more from John O’Rourke’s article click here