Jersey Rain: Poems

by Robert Pinsky

Overview

Impassioned, Personal Poems From America's Poet Laureate

"It spends itself regardless into the ocean.
It stains and scours and makes things dark or bright:
Sweat of the moon, a shroud of benediction,
The chilly liquefaction of day to night,

The Jersey rain, my rain, soaks all as one:
It smites Metuchen, Rahway, Saddle River,
Fair Haven, Newark, Little Silver, Bayonne.
I feel it churning even in fair weather

To craze distinction, dry the same as wet."
--from "Jersey Rain"

Jersey Rain--at once masterly and intimate--marks a fresh, lyrical stage of Robert Pinsky's work. Poems like "Samurai Song," "ABC," "Ode to Meaning," "To Television," and "The Green Piano" have already attracted a wide readership. Now, assembled in this book, they become part of a larger, fugue-like meditation on the themes of a life guided by Hermes: deity of music and deception, escort of the dead, inventor of instruments, the brilliant messenger and trickster of heaven.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466894310
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	08/04/2015
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	80
File size:	234 KB

About the Author

Robert Pinsky is Poet Laureate of the United States. His collected poems, The Figured Wheel, were published in 1996. He is the recipient of the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award of the Academy of American Poets for his translation The Inferno of Dante. His Sounds of Poetry (1998) was nominated for a National Book Award in Criticism. He teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston Uiversity and lives with his wife, Ellen, in Newton, Massachusetts.
Robert Pinsky is the author of several books of poetry, including Gulf Music, Jersey Rain, The Want Bone, The Figured Wheel, and, most recently, At the Foundling Hospital. His bestselling translation The Inferno of Dante sets a modern standard. He was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1997 to 2000. Among his awards and honors are the William Carlos Williams Award, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the PEN/Voelcker Award, the Korean Manhae Prize, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the PEN American Center. He teaches in the graduate creative writing program at Boston University.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

    Samurai Song

When I had no roof I made
Audacity my roof. When I had
No supper my eyes dined.

When I had no eyes I listened.
When I had no ears I thought.
When I had no thought I waited.

When I had no father I made
Care my father. When I had
No mother I embraced order.

When I had no friend I made
Quiet my friend. When I had no
Enemy I opposed my body.

When I had no temple I made
My voice my temple. I have
No priest, my tongue is my choir.

When I have no means fortune
Is my means. When I have
Nothing, death will be my fortune.

Need is my tactic, detachment
Is my strategy. When I had
No lover I courted my sleep.

    Vessel

What is this body as I fall asleep again?
What I pretended it was when I was small—

A crowded vessel, a starship or submarine
Dark in its dark element, a breathing hull,

Arms at the flanks, the engine heart and brain
Pulsing, feet pointed like a diver's, the whole

Resolutely diving through the oblivion
Of night with living cargo. O carrier shell

That keeps your trusting passengers from All:
Some twenty thousand times now you have gone

Out into blackness tireless as aseal,
Blind always as a log, but plunging on

Across the reefs of coral that scrape the keel—
O veteran immersed from toe to crown,

Buoy the population of the soul
Toward their destination before they drown.

    Ode to Meaning

Dire one and desired one,
Savior, sentencer—

In an old allegory you would carry
A chained alphabet of tokens:

Ankh Badge Cross.
Dragon,
Engraved figure guarding a hallowed intaglio,
Jasper kinema of legendary Mind,
Naked omphalos pierced
By quills of rhyme or sense, torah-like: unborn
Vein of will, xenophile
Yearning out of Zero.

Untrusting I court you. Wavering
I seek your face, I read
That Crusoe's knife
Reeked of you, that to defile you
The soldier makes the rabbi spit on the torah.
"I'll drown my book" says Shakespeare.

Drowned walker, revenant.
After my mother fell on her head, she became
More than ever your sworn enemy. She spoke
Sometimes like a poet or critic of forty years later.
Or she spoke of the world as Thersites spoke of the heroes,
"I think they have swallowed one another. I
Would laugh at that miracle."

You also in the laughter, warrior angel:
Your helmet the zodiac, rocket-plumed
Your spear the beggar's finger pointing to the mouth
Your heel planted on the serpent Formulation
Your face a vapor, the wreath of cigarette smoke crowning
Bogart as he winces through it.

You not in the words, not even
Between the words, but a torsion,
A cleavage, a stirring.

You stirring even in the arctic ice,
Even at the dark ocean floor, even
In the cellular flesh of a stone.

Gas. Gossamer. My poker friends
Question your presence
In a poem by me, passing the magazine
One to another.

Not the stone and not the words, you
Like a veil over Arthur's headstone,
The passage from Proverbs he chose
While he was too ill to teach
And still well enough to read, I was
Beside the master craftsman
Delighting him day after day, ever
At play in his presence—you

A soothing veil of distraction playing over
Dying Arthur playing in the hospital,
Thumbing the Bible, fuzzy from medication,
Ever courting your presence.
And you the prognosis,
You in the cough.

Gesturer, when is your spur, your cloud?
You in the airport rituals of greeting and parting.
Indicter, who is your claimant?
Bell at the gate. Spiderweb iron bridge.
Cloak, video, aroma, rue, what is your
Elected silence, where was your seed?

What is Imagination
But your lost child born to give birth to you?

Dire one. Desired one.
Savior, sentencer—

Absence,
Or presence ever at play:
Let those scorn you who never
Starved in your dearth. If I
Dare to disparage
Your harp of shadows I taste
Wormwood and motor oil, I pour
Ashes on my head. You are the wound. You
Be the medicine.

Autumn Quartet
On my birthday

    I

Others are not the medicine for loneliness—
When I was a child, I wanted to be a knight:
Helmeted, living by a noble code
Above the crowd, to serve, to carry a sword
And a shield blazoned with symbolic meanings:
Arrogant and generous like Launcelot du Lac,
The abducted infant and uncompanioned hero.
Did part of me grow up to be a type?—
Those melancholy males who nearly twitch
With yearning for their silver armor, misplaced.
Humorless. Often the inviting lady,
Fatigued by all his brooding, slips away.

    II

But somehow it was also all mixed up
With Washington astride his horse, the ardor
Of Lafayette, the elegant sad jokes
Of Lincoln, who freed the slaves and demonstrated
That Nature's were the only real noblemen:
It was the assassin that craved the coat of arms.
In his mid-fifties, a chevalier of care,
It was heroic to scribble on the train
The speech that disappointed many people:
Too strange, too brief. And then they called it "great."
Solitary in a vivid dream he saw his mourners,
His coffin swagged in bunting, the marble hall.

    III

Older than Odysseus, older than Leopold Bloom.
Older than number forty-two was—Jack
Roosevelt Robinson—when I watched him crouch
Trembling on the basepath between first and second
With arms extended, taunting the opponent.
And now older than he was the day he died
Depleted by his solitary ordeal,
A public man. In momentary wonder,
I see him burning again, beyond me, playing
A boyish country game in the gaping cities:
Brooklyn, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Boston.
Nineteen-nineteen to nineteen-seventy-two.

    IV

The heroes of antiquity were taught
By centaurs, ancient creatures who were half
Rational intelligence, half intuition:
Bearded and hooved, all male, a dying race,
Each solitary as the lawless Cyclops,
But pedagogical and bound by nature
To pass their lonely double knowledge on
To such as Odysseus, who learned to tell the story
Of his life, couched in as many lies as needed.
Among the epic bravos, a civic man.
The centaurs showed him truth in fabulation,
In every living city the haunted ruin.

    ABC

Any body can die, evidently. Few
Go happily, irradiating joy,

Knowledge, love. Many
Need oblivion, painkillers,
Quickest respite.

Sweet time unafflicted,
Various world:

X = your zenith.

Table of Contents

Contents

Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Samurai Song,
Vessel,
Ode to Meaning,
Autumn Quartet,
ABC,
An Alphabet of My Dead,
The Haunted Ruin,
To the Phoenix,
A Phonebook Cover Hermes of the Nineteen-forties,
The Cycles,
Porch Steps,
The Superb Lily,
Summer in Saratoga Springs,
To Television,
The Green Piano,
Machines,
Victrola,
Song,
Steel Drum Variations,
The Hall,
The Tragic Chorus,
In Memory of Congresswoman Barbara Jordan,
Biography,
At the Worcester Museum,
The Knight's Prayer,
Jersey Rain,
About the Author,
By Robert Pinsky,
Copyright,

Editorial Reviews

Robert Pinsky is perhaps the most popular poet in America today. It is not simply that he is our poet laureate, or that his Favorite Poem Project has toured the country with its readings and recordings, or that he is the editor of the beloved anthology The Handbook of Heartbreak (1998), the translator of a highly successful version of The Inferno of Dante (1994), or the author of a treatise on the technical aspects of the art, The Sounds of Poetry (1999).

Pinsky's popularity is firmly based on the strength of his poems. His creative work embodies a concern elaborated in his criticism, the dynamic between individual and community, and his poetry occurs at the permeable border where the two meet. In considering the puzzle of his own tropes and tendencies, Pinsky himself has written, "I am from a lower middle-class family in a small town in New Jersey. My grandpa had a bar there. My family was nominally Orthodox Jewish. In my work I try to pull together as many of the different kinds and levels of American experience as I can." Perhaps it is these roots that have given Pinsky his unique twist. Pinsky was, famously, a prestigious Stegner Fellow at Stanford, where he fell into the orbit of the powerful critic Yvor Winters, whose strict insistence on technical formalism deeply influenced the young poet. But if Pinsky left Stanford with a talent for meticulously crafted sound and a classicizing disposition, he nevertheless retained a crucial ingredient specific to him: his origins in the garrulous multicultural boarding houses of his childhood in Long Branch, New Jersey.

Pinsky has an ear for the colloquial, for conversational rhythms of speech that insure his poems against sterility, irrelevance, and rarefaction. His idiosyncratic diction, a hybrid of the elevated and the everyday, can express serious philosophical truths without lofty airs, and his careful but understated manner of patterning sound gives the poems aural cohesion while avoiding the appearance of excessive artifice. This is a crucial achievement because, in a sense, speech is precisely what poetry is for Pinsky: an argument articulated by one speaker to a larger audience, in which clarity, inventiveness, and beauty are valued not so much in and of themselves but in relation to their abilities of public persuasion.

This approach is seen at its most successful in Pinsky's new collection, Jersey Rain, in the many poems that trace circles of thought or investigate cycles of being and time. Indeed, his soul "cleaves to circles," as Pinsky explains in the exquisite "Biography":

      Stone wheel that sharpens the blade that mows the grain,
      Wheel of the sunflower turning, wheel that turns
      The spiral press that squeezes the oil expressed
      From shale or olives. Particles that turn to mud
      On the potter's wheel that spins to form the vessel
      That holds the oil that drips to cool the blade.

      My mother's dreadful fall. Her mother's dread
      Of all things: death, life, birth. My brother's birth
      Just before the fall, his birth again in Jesus.
      Wobble and blur of my soul, born only once,
      That cleaves to circles. The moon, the eye, the year,
      Circle of causes or chaos or turns of chance.

      The line of a tune as it cycles back to the root,
      Arc of the changes. The line from there to here
      Of Ellen speaking, thread of my circle of friends,
      The art of lines, chord of the circle of work.
      Radius. Lives of children growing away,
      The plant radiant in air, its root in dark.

The poem chains together so many different classes of phenomena -- descriptive observations, universal themes, personal experiences -- and does it so gracefully that Pinsky appears not to have created a connectedness, merely to have exposed one. Likewise, the equally remarkable "Samurai Song," "Porch Steps," and "Song" also link diverse material into a complicated circuit; they remind the reader of those traditional dances in which one hand is exchanged for another and the other for another until the dancer has worked his or her way around the complete circle: "Air an instrument of the tongue,/The tongue an instrument/Of the body. The body/An instrument of spirit,/The spirit a being of the air." Pinsky's technique is perfectly suited to this operation. His tercets and quatrains have a dancelike forward momentum, the outline of metric order sketches its steps, and the poet's wit provides the playfulness propelling the whole. On a more profound level, this type of circle dance may be viewed as a metaphor for Pinsky's overall project. For Pinsky, poetry is neither solipsism nor mysticism; he neither inhabits the narcissistic plane of pure self-expression, nor does he deal in the shell game of symbols and endlessly hidden meanings. Rather, poetry is an active means of appreciating the lived world that draws all its parts into one, a community.

—Monica Ferrell

bn.com

Despite the Springsteen-esque title, the same phrasal gifts that drive 1996's new and collected volume, The Figured Wheel, and Pinsky's acclaimed translation of the Inferno, are well-displayed in this slim, sixth collection. Unfortunately, most of the poems' occasions and insights don't quite measure up to the rhetorical firepower turned upon them. The hortatory mode dominates the collection: "To the Phoenix" begins, "Dark herald, self-conceived in the desert waste,/ What yang or yin enfolds your enigma best?" Invoking Prufrock, the body as "Vessel" is implored "O veteran immersed from toe to crown,// Buoy the population of the soul/ Toward their destination before they drown." "A Phonebook Cover Hermes of the Nineteen-forties" features "Fire zigzag in his grasp, labeled `Spirit/ Of Communication'--unhistorical,/ Pure, the merciless messenger." There is pleasure in the sheer muscle of these constructions, and it's clear that the poet's archaisms are within his control. Yet the name-checks--of Oprah, Ecco press editor Daniel Halpern and others--grow tiresome, and the stabs at intimacy are tinged with a neo-Lowellian obsession with guilt and grandeur. One can't help reading pretentious references to Pinsky's duties as U.S. poet laurate into an "Autumn Quartet" (written "On my birthday"), which calls on "the heros of antiquity /To pass their lonely double knowledge on/ To such as Odysseus, who learned to tell the story/ Of his life, couched in as many lies as needed./ Among the epic bravos, a civic man." The prose centerpiece, "An Alphabet of My Dead," brings in family, a student suicide, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's Oxford Book of English Verse and "Plural dead in categories like counting sheep, the exterminated Jews of Europe, the obliviated Kallikaks of New Jersey " among others. "To Television," "The Green Piano" and other lighter pieces will delight fans, but the poems with more profound aspirations lack a penetrating introspection. (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Pinsky has several careers within the realm of literature: poet, translator, and public advocate of poetry. All of these influences can be felt in his new collection, which is the first assembly of his own lyric verse to appear since The Want Bone (The Figured Wheel served as a Collected Earlier Poems). At times, his poems reach for the extra-personal, the mythic or abstract, as in "The Knight's Prayer" or "To the Phoenix"; at others, they move through personal or confessional modes, as in "An Alphabet of My Dead" or "To Television." Pinsky seems most comfortable with the gnomic or elevated phrase: "The shifting hero wanders alien places,/ Through customs of cities and histories of races,/ Recollects, travels and summons together all--/ All manners of the dead and living, in the great Hall." Occasionally, his differing manners collide strangely, but Pinsky delivers, as ever, intelligent, pensive poetry of great beauty. For most collections.--Graham Christian, formerly with Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, MA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Library Journal

Poise and intellect do not preclude passion . . . in this ravishing and unusually revealing collection. . . . Life changes shape and intent in Pinsky's poems, like the gods and goddesses of old, and his chronicling of its metamorphoses is grace incarnate.” —Booklist

“With lavish technical gifts, a discriminating civic intelligence, and an impish relish for what goes against the solemnities of a lot of contemporary verse, Pinsky has given us one of the outstanding bodies of work in English-language poetry.” —Justin Quinn, The Boston Book Review

“The poetic mode of Jersey Rain is reflective, full of pathos for the human condition, and rich in its emotional scope. . . . Pinsky's poems remind us that . . . poetry is a tool for living.” —David Clippinger, Harvard Review

From the Publisher