As US Poet Laureate, through his long-lived Favorite Poem Project, and as a writer, professor, translator, and anthologist, Robert Pinsky has advocated for poetry’s voice and vital place in our civic life. I recently turned to his volume Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry (Princeton UP, 2005), as I reckoned with my own questions about what poetry can do in this present moment.
In the opening section, Pinsky draws the etymology of the word “culture” to trace opposing tensions in a democratic society. First, he describes the word’s connection to “colon,” from which we drive “colonization,” representing a homogenizing force, whether directed imperially or internally, and next he turns to “cult,” another manifestation of culture’s root, representing “a vicious tribalized factionalism.” Pinsky warns, in this prescient (twenty-year-old) text: “The fanatical concentration on difference and its exploitation by tyranny have been multiplied, accelerated and terribly empowered by modern technology.”
Though the nuances of the book’s arguments can’t be included here, Pinsky ultimately argues that poetry’s work operates in a different time frame from mass culture; poetry is “an ancient, singular art” with which we can engage with historical memory:
It is memory that eventually undermines the apparently total successes of both the colonializing Conquistador and the leveling Visigoth.
It’s no surprise then that Robert Pinsky’s own poetry takes time and memory as crucial subjects, still always grounded in the individual voice. I’d further argue that literary engagement with the complexity of ideas is another antidote to “colon” and “cult,” and in “Forgiveness,” as in his work more broadly, Pinsky allows complexities to proliferate in the consideration of unforgivable acts and the question of forgiveness.
As the poem opens: “The mind skitters, its one rudder / Being its own voice.” We peer into the workings of a mind making connections, and associations, some with evident logic, some via oblique correspondences. In the second half of the opening tercet, “The great / Fascist poet taught me free verse,” we, as readers, begin to connect with the voice steering or steadying a restless mind, as the second weighty f-word of the poem, fascism, enters with the shadow of Ezra Pound.
At this point, a reader may expect a poem about the age-old question of what to do with the art of an accomplished (or better) but unethical (or worse) artist, and certainly that question is engaged here, but the concerns of the poem reach further, too.
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In an almost holographic sense, each poem in Robert Pinsky’s latest book, Proverbs of Limbo, which includes “Forgiveness,” seems to contain a whole poetics. Each poem, within a constellation of allusions and intertextual gestures, plumbs our cultural memory—through baseball, music, and comedy, to name a few recurring areas, and, of course, poetry—alongside nuanced questions of identity and history (often focusing on horrific abuses of power).
In “Forgiveness,” Pinsky’s fluid, associative moves form an electron cloud of image, shadow, and fact around a heavy nucleus of a solitary voice wrestling with its own thoughts, ambitions, and ethical questions. The poem steers from Emmanuel Levinas’s lecture “‘The forgiving / Of an unforgivable crime’” to Pound’s poetics (and Pinsky’s revelation about duration and stress) in a whorl of motion, a record of a dynamic thought process animated, in part, by music.
Proverbs of Limbo was released both as a poetry collection, in book form, and as a jazz album of the same name, in which Pinsky voices the lyrics to the music of his collaborator, Laurence Hobgood, and their jazz ensemble. In his improvisational manner, perhaps cultivated through his lifelong engagement with jazz, Pinsky draws jazz singer Keely Smith into his web of consideration, mentioning her Cherokee heritage but noting that, rather than thinking about the genocide of Native Americans, he’s “thinking”:
About how well she imitates
Louis Prima’s pelvis-forward walk, mocking
The magic of it while singing […]
while also longing to write something as “funny and impassioned” as Smith’s performance.
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“The world is allusive” Pinsky writes, in the beginning of “In Defense of Allusion,” a poem from his 2008 collection, Gulf Music, which reckons, as the title suggests, with the Gulf Wars and also with Hurricane Katrina in our own Gulf of Mexico (ahem). After establishing that: “The world is allusive. The mantis alludes to a twig / To deflect the starling […],” he reflects on the etymology and potentially dangerous rhetorical power of ‘allusion’: “even allusion sometimes is full of harm / though it means play—as when the President promised / to defeat terrorism with a great crusade.”
In “Forgiveness,” Pinsky returns to Pound, commenting on his “Exile’s Letter,” (itself an adaptation of, or complex allusion to, a Li Po poem) and finds its “cadences” compelling, but he ultimately calls the poem on its own pretensions. Early in the poem, he rejects the prose of Pound’s poetics. He cannot abide “Starvation as a figure of speech!” attentive as he is to the power of language and the vagaries of language, and especially figurative language, as used by those in power.
Poet Louise Glück writes, of Pinsky, “against the background of the eternal, the void, [his] stories are musical phrases.” And against that vast background, the allusions in Pinsky’s poems work as much to gather and compress worlds into the sphere of the poem as they do to point to outside referents.
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The emotional crescendo of “Forgiveness” is riddled by questions, beginning with “who has a right to forgive?” and opening into a litany of “unforgivable” violence: “White soldiers / Took away the Arapahos’ horses,” Nationalists humiliated and killed Jews in pogroms in Ukraine, and “the damned impregnate / The enslaved.” Because Levinas has been pulled into the poem early on, his nuanced ideas on forgiveness provide a lens through which to consider whether the point of these harms is, as Pinsky asks, to create irreparable damage, and then, perhaps, “to deny” the acts themselves?
In Levinas’s textual exploration of forgiveness in “Toward the Other,” Nine Talmudic Readings (Trans. by Annette Aronowicz), he poses the notion that to seek forgiveness, the transgressor must be aware of the harm they’ve caused, and forgiveness must be sought on an individual, (and, in keeping with his ideas of the “other,” ideally face-to-face) level. Thus, a reckoning that might, retroactively “cleanse” a past offense (as Levinas believes possible) of the kind described in the poem, is exceedingly difficult to achieve.
To return to the twin terms of “colon” and “cult”—the threats, in culture, from forced homogeneity and from the inextricably related danger of violent factionalism—we could despair, in this moment, of peace, as Levinas does here, “God is perhaps nothing but this permanent refusal of a history which would come to terms with our private tears.” In the poem, however, Pinsky upends the question of the transgressor’s agency, and instead places the agency of the “I” on the speaker, himself, and in this final stanza, the transgressed.
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The poems in Proverbs of Limbo are voiced by a searching, restless consciousness, by turns witty, absurdist, and vulnerable, always willing to overturn an opinion or belief to test whether it holds, or whether its opposite may be true.
Pinsky closes the poem, not with a reckoning with Ezra Pound, but with “poor John Keats,” whose casual antisemitism, in his (much vaunted) letters, has been evoked here (and elsewhere in Proverbs of Limbo):
Who do I think I am to forgive him?
After all, I am him. He too was the child
Of a New Jersey optician, and please do me
A favor, don’t tell me No, he wasn’t.
Perhaps, Pinsky agrees with Jorge Luis Borges: “I am all the writers I have read.” Or perhaps, in ascribing his own unique, American story to the English Romantic poet, he refuses the “other’s otherness,” moving, in his own comic and irrational way, to close the distance. In any case, I find his tongue-in-cheek reckoning with a seemingly irreconcilable problem, is both “funny and impassioned,” to be sure.
