Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky (2005)

Robert Neal Pinsky (born October 20, 1940 in Long Branch , New Jersey ) is an American writer , poet , literary scholar and literary critic who was US Poet Laureate and thus poetic advisor to the Library of Congress between 1997 and 2000 .

Life

After attending high school in his hometown of Long Branch, he first studied at Rutgers University , where he earned a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in 1962 . He then completed a postgraduate degree at Stanford University with a Master of Arts degree , where he also received a Philosophiae Doctor (Ph.D.) in 1966 , with Yvor Winters in particular being one of his formative professors during his studies .

After the literary critical book Landor's Poetry wrote Pinsky (1968), who is also editor of poems of the magazine The New Republic was even three volumes of poetry , under the title Sadness and Happiness (1975), The Situation of Poetry (1976) and An Explanation of America (1979) appeared.

In 1980 he received a Guggenheim scholarship and then continued his literary activity with the history of my heart (1984). After the literary criticism Poetry and the World (1988), he published two further volumes of poetry : The Want Bone (1990) and The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 (1996). In addition, he received the 1995 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for poetry for the volume of poetry The Inferno of Dante .

In 1997 Pinsky, who is also a member of the Poetry Society of America , became a US Poet Laureate and was thus an advisor to the Library of Congress on poetic issues until 2000. After finishing this activity he published another volume of poetry with Jersey Rain (2000). In 2001 he contributed as an author to the collective publication A Convergence Of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell, edited by Jonathan Safran Foer , in honor of the New York artist Joseph Cornell, who died in 1972 .

In his literary critical essays he dealt with the book The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion .

Pinsky wrote the text adventure Mindwheel for the computer game company Synapse Software in 1984 . He reported on this experience with the interactive fiction genre in the 2010 documentary Get Lamp .

Awards

• 1993 election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 1996 Pulitzer Prize nominee in the seal category
• 1997 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996
• 1999 elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters

Web links and sources

• Literature by and about Robert Pinsky in the catalog of the German National Library
• Robert Pinsky in nndb (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW: 'The Year of Magical Thinking': Goodbye to All That (October 9, 2005)
2. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from June 22, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.