Pinsky on poetry

Found a copy of Robert Pinsky's "Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry" at a used bookstore in Lambertville on Friday and read it over the weekend. It is a slim volume, but one that forced me to consider the way in which poetry interacts with the world, even the quietest of poems, how public an art it ultimately is because it imagines an audience. The poem, he writes, is a mediating force between the internal and the external, between the solitarya nd the public.

The book also talks about the essential difference between poetry and the more boastful, more celebraty-driven/commerce-driven arts. I recommend it highly.

-- Hank Kalet