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The poems in Robert Pinsky's At the Foundling Hospital consider personality and culture as improvised from loss: a creative effort so pervasive it is invisible. An extreme example is the abandoned new-born. At the Foundling Hospital of eighteenth century London, in a benign and oddly bureaucratic process, each new infant was identified by a duly recorded token. A minimal, charged particle of meaning, the token might be a coin or brooch or thimble or sometimes a poem, such as the one quoted in full in Pinsky's poem "The Foundling Tokens." A foundling may inherit less of a past than an orphan, but with a wider set of meanings. The foundling soul needs to be adapted, and it needs to be adaptive. In one poem, French and German appear as originally Creole tongues, invented by the rough needs of conquered peoples and their Roman masters. In another, creators from scorned or excluded groups - among them Irving Berlin, Quintus Horatius Flaccus, and W.E.B. Du Bois - speak, as does the Greek tragic chorus, in the first person singular. In these poems, a sometimes desperate, perpetual reimagining of identity, on the scale of one life or of human history, is deeply related to music: The quest is lyrical, whether the subject is as specific as "the emanation of a dead star still alive" or as personal as the "pinhole iris of your mortal eye.".
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• Freedom
• Listening
• Form
• Dreaming things up.

Quick, joyful, and playfully astringent, with surprising comparisons and examples, this collection takes an unconventional approach to the art of poetry. Instead of rules, theories, or recipes, Singing School emphasizes ways to learn from great work: studying magnificent, monumentally enduring poems and how they are made- in terms borrowed from the "singing school" of William Butler Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium." Robert Pinsky's headnotes for each of the 80 poems and his brief introductions to each section take a writer's view of specific works: William Carlos Williams's "Fine Work with Pitch and Copper" for intense verbal music; Emily Dickinson's "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" for wild imagination in matter-of-fact language; Robert Southwell's "The Burning Babe" for surrealist aplomb; Wallace Stevens's "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm" for subtlety in meter. Included are poems by Aphra Behn, Allen Ginsberg, George Herbert, John Keats, Mina Loy, Thomas Nashe, and many other master poets. This anthology respects poetry's mysteries in two senses of the word: techniques of craft and strokes of the inexplicable.
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• from Gulf music (2007)
• from Jersey rain (2007)
• from new poems in The figured wheel (1996)
• from The want bone (1990)
• from History of my heart (1984)
• from An explanation of America (1979)
• from Sadness and happiness (1975).

Intense verbal music with a jazz feeling; invention against the grain of expectation; intelligence racing among materials with the variety of a busy street - these have been the qualities of Robert Pinsky's work since his first book, "Sadness and Happiness" (1975), celebrated for setting a new direction in American poetry. At that time, responding to a question about that book, Pinsky said: 'I would like to write a poetry which could contain every kind of thing, while keeping all the excitement of poetry'. That ambition was realized in a new way with each of his books, including the book-length personal monologue "An Explanation of America"; the transformed autobiography of "History of My Heart"; the bestselling translation "The Inferno of Dante"; and, most recently, the savage, inventive "Gulf Music". That variety and renewal are represented in this brilliantly chosen volume.
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Broadway, the main street that runs through Robert Pinsky's hometown of Long Branch, New Jersey, was once like thousands of other main streets in small towns across the country. But for Pinsky, one of America's most admired poets and its former Poet Laureate, this Broadway is the point of departure for a lively journey through the small towns of the American imagination. "Thousands of Broadways" explores the dreams and nightmares of such small towns - their welcoming yet suffocating, warm yet prejudicial character during their heyday, from the early nineteenth century through World War II. The citizens of quintessential small towns know one another extensively and even intimately, but fail to recognize the geniuses and criminal minds in their midst. Bringing the works of such figures as Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Alfred Hitchcock, Thornton Wilder, Willa Cather, and Preston Sturges to bear on this paradox, as well as reflections on his own time growing up in a small town, Pinsky explores how such imperfect knowledge shields communities from the anonymity and alienation of modern life. Along the way, he also considers how small towns can be small-minded - in some cases viciously judgmental and oppressively provincial. Ultimately, Pinsky examines the uneasy regard that creative talents like him often have toward the small towns that either nurtured or thwarted their artistic impulses. Of living in a small town, Sherwood Anderson once wrote that 'the sensation is one never to be forgotten. On all sides are ghosts, not of the dead, but of living people.' Passionate, lyrical, and intensely moving, "Thousands of Broadways" is a rich exploration of this crucial theme in American literature by one of its most distinguished figures.
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• I. Dawson's Landing; ii. Broadways; iii. Long Branch; iv. Simple, External Problems; v. Frenchman's Bend; vi. Shadows of Doubt; vii. Morgan's Creek; viii. Moonstone; ix. Long Branch; Acknowledgments.

Broadway, the main street that runs through Robert PinskyOCOs home town of Long Branch, New Jersey, was once like thousands of other main streets in small towns across the country. But for Pinsky, one of AmericaOCOs most admired poets and its former Poet Laureate, this Broadway is the point of departure for a lively journey through the small towns of the American imagination. "Thousands of Broadways" explores the dreams and nightmares of such small townsOCotheir welcoming yet suffocating, warm yet prejudicial character during their heyday, from the early nineteenth century through World War II. The citizens of quintessential small towns know one another extensively and even intimately, but fail to recognize the geniuses and criminal minds in their midst. Bringing the works of such figures as Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Alfred Hitchcock, Thornton Wilder, Willa Cather, and Preston Sturges to bear on this paradox, as well as reflections on his own time growing up in a small town, Pinsky explores how such imperfect knowledge shields communities from the anonymity and alienation of modern life. Along the way, he also considers how small towns can be small mindedOCoin some cases viciously judgmental and oppressively provincial. Ultimately, Pinsky examines the uneasy regard that creative talents like him often have toward the small towns that either nurtured or thwarted their artistic impulses. Of living in a small town, Sherwood Anderson once wrote that the sensation is one never to be forgotten. On all sides are ghosts, not of the dead, but of living people. Passionate, lyrical, and intensely moving, Thousands of Broadways is a rich exploration of this crucial theme in American literature by one of its most distinguished figures.".
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The gulf in the title of Pinsky's seventh collection is both the large southern body of water that has been the site of so much weather-related misery, and the unavoidable distances between an author's thoughts and feelings and his expression. Poems from the first section frequently butt up against subjects too large for speech, and break down into music and mystery. An improvised, even desperate music, yearning toward knowledge across a gulf, informs Pinsky's first book of poetry since Jersey Rain. On the large scale of war or the personal scale of family history, in the movements of people and cultures across oceans or between eras, these poems discover connections. This is perhaps the most ambitious, politically impassioned, and inventive book by this major American poet.
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• Acknowledgments ix I: Culture 1 II: Vocality 19 III: Self-Consciousness 30 IV: Performance 43 V: Social Presence 46 VI: Readers 55 VII: The Narcissistic and the Personal 64 VIII: Models of Culture 73 IX: Conclusion 79 Index of Names 95.
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The place of poetry in modern democracy is no place, according to conventional wisdom. The poet, we hear, is a casualty of mass entertainment and prosaic public culture, banished to the artistic sidelines to compose variations on insipid themes for a dwindling audience. Robert Pinsky, however, argues that this gloomy diagnosis is as wrongheaded as it is familiar. Pinsky, whose remarkable career as a poet itself undermines the view, writes that to portray poetry and democracy as enemies is to radically misconstrue both. The voice of poetry, he shows, resonates with profound significance at the very heart of democratic culture.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Acknowledgments ix I: Culture 1 II: Vocality 19 III: Self-Consciousness 30 IV: Performance 43 V: Social Presence 46 VI: Readers 55 VII: The Narcissistic and the Personal 64 VIII: Models of Culture 73 IX: Conclusion 79 Index of Names 95.
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The place of poetry in modern democracy is no place, according to conventional wisdom. The poet, we hear, is a casualty of mass entertainment and prosaic public culture, banished to the artistic sidelines to compose variations on insipid themes for a dwindling audience. Robert Pinsky, however, argues that this gloomy diagnosis is as wrongheaded as it is familiar. Pinsky, whose remarkable career as a poet itself undermines the view, writes that to portray poetry and democracy as enemies is to radically misconstrue both. The voice of poetry, he shows, resonates with profound significance at the very heart of democratic culture.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Jersey Rain takes up a central American subject: the emotional power of inventions, devices, and homemade imaginings -- from the alphabet and the lyre through the steel drum and piano to the record player, digital computer, and television. Formally innovative and highly readable poems like "ABC", "Ode to Meaning", "To Television", and "The Green Piano" meditate a life guided by the quick, artful tinkerer-god Hermes: deity of music and deception, escort of the dead, inventor of instruments, brilliant messenger, and trickster of heaven.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)