Early life and education Pinsky was born in
Long Branch, New Jersey, to Jewish parents, Sylvia (née Eisenberg) and Milford Simon Pinsky, an optician. He attended
Long Branch High School. He received a B.A. from
Rutgers University in
New Brunswick, New Jersey, and earned both an M.A. and PhD from
Stanford University, where he was a
Stegner Fellow in creative writing. He was a student of
Francis Fergusson and
Paul Fussell at Rutgers and
Yvor Winters at Stanford.
Personal life Pinsky married Ellen Jane Bailey, a clinical psychologist, in 1961. They have three children. Pinsky taught at Wellesley College and at the University of California at Berkeley, and since 1989 has lived in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University.
Career Early on, Pinsky was inspired by the flow and tension of jazz and the excitement that it made him feel. As a former saxophonist, he has said that being a musician was a profoundly influential experience that he has tried to reproduce in his poetry. The musicality of poetry was and is extremely important to his work. Additionally, Pinsky revealed in a 1999 interview with
Bomb Magazine that he enjoys jazz for its "physical immediacy, improvisation and also the sense that a lifetime of suffering and study and thought and emotion is behind some single phrase." Pinsky has acknowledged that his poetry would change somewhat depending on the particular subjectivity of each reader. Embracing the idea that people's individuality would fill out the poem, he has said, "The poetry I love is vocal, composed with the poet's voice and I believe its proper culmination is to be read with a reader's imagined or actual voice. The human voice in that sense is not electronically reproduced or amplified; it's the actual living breath inside a body—not necessarily an expert's body or the artist's body. Whoever reads the poem aloud becomes the proper medium for the poem." for poetry to Pinsky, is a vocal art, not necessarily performative, but reading to one self or recalling some lines by memory. Pinsky comments 'all language is necessarily abstract' . No aspect of a poem, he observes, is more singular, more unique, than its rhythm, for there are no rules. at the
Miami Book Fair International 2011 He received a
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 1974, and in 1997 he was named the United States Poet Laureate and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress; he was the first poet to be named to three terms. As Poet Laureate, Pinsky founded the
Favorite Poem Project, in which thousands of Americans of varying backgrounds, all ages, and from every state share their favorite poems. Pinsky believed that, contrary to stereotype, poetry has a strong presence in the American culture. The project sought to document that presence, giving voice to the American audience for poetry. The Shakespeare Theatre of Washington, D.C. commissioned Pinsky to write a free adaptation of Friedrich Schiller's drama
Wallenstein. The Shakespeare Theatre presented the play, starring Stephen Pickering in the title role, directed by Michael Kahn, in 2013. Premiering on April 17 of that year, the play had a sold-out run, in repertory with
Coriolanus. Pinsky also wrote the libretto for
Death and the Powers, an opera by composer
Tod Machover. The opera received its world premiere in Monte Carlo in September 2010 and its U.S. premiere at Boston's Cutler Majestic Theater in March 2011. Pinsky is also the author of the
interactive fiction game
Mindwheel (1984) developed by
Synapse Software and released by
Broderbund. Pinsky guest-starred in an episode of the
animated sitcom The Simpsons TV show, "
Little Girl in the Big Ten" (2002), and appeared on
The Colbert Report in April, 2007, as the judge of a "Meta-Free-Phor-All" between
Stephen Colbert and
Sean Penn. Since 2000,
Farrar, Straus and Giroux have published five books of his poetry
Jersey Rain (2000),
Gulf Music (2007)
Selected Poems (2011)
At the Foundling Hospital (2016) and
Proverbs of Limbo (2024). In 2012, Circumstantial Productions released the CD,
PoemJazz by Robert Pinsky and
Laurence Hobgood. In 2015,
House Hour: PoemJazz II was released. Pinsky served as editor of the 25th anniversary volume of
The Best of American Poetry anthologies called
The Best of the Best of American Poetry (2013), and is the former poetry editor of
Slate. He edited
Singing School (2014),
The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall: Poems at the Extremes of Feeling (2019) and
The Book of Poetry for Hard Times (2021). In 2023,
W.W. Norton published Pinsky's memoir
Jersey Breaks: Becoming an American Poet. == Bibliography ==