Реферат: Online Interviews With Robert Pinsky Essay Research
Or to put it yet another way, I write for
Ben Jonson or Emily Dickinson if they were me.
from FEED Magazine. ? FEED Inc. Online Source
Interview with Ted Genoways for Meridian
How did you find out you had been named Poet Laureate?
I came home from giving a poetry reading, and there were three messages on my answering
machine from the Library of Congress. I thought it probably wasn’t an overdue book.
[laughs]
One of the things the Library of Congress mentioned that appealed to them was your
effort to make poetry accessible to a broader audience by putting it on-line and seeing
the web as an asset rather than a liability.
Like print and writing, the computer is just a kind of representation of what is the
actual medium of poetry, which is the human voice. I’m the poetry editor of a weekly
magazine published on the web by Microsoft; the magazine is called Slate. We have a poem in Slate every week
and readers can click on the poem and hear it read aloud. There’s a lot of poetry on the
web.
What would you say to the people who complain that there’s no system on the web for
people to divide what’s good from bad beyond their own critical faculties?
I think that’s true, but it’s also true when you walk into Grolier Poetry Bookshop [in
Boston]. It’s also true when you pick up a literary magazine. I don’t think there’s any
guarantee of quality.
Another thing the Library of Congress cited was your other work in poetry. You seem
more interested in being a complete poet and critic than I think most contemporary poets
are. I think it was The Nation that drew the comparison to Robert Lowell. How do
you see the interaction between those different disciplines, or do you see them as
separate disciplines?
I grew up with the idea that to practice an art was to be involved in every part of it and
to try to involve art in every part of life. I never took a creative writing course, so I
don’t have a creative writing degree. I never specialized in an academic way. There are a