By Michael Falcone
Daily Bruin Contributor
At the threshold of the final month of his unprecedented
three-year term as U.S. Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky stopped at
UCLA on Friday for a poetry reading and discussion.
Pinsky’s appearance at the UCLA Armand Hammer Museum was
marked by sadness at the loss of Doris Curran, the founding curator
of the Hammer Poetry Reading Series.
“Poetry in Los Angeles has lost a most wonderful, utterly
singular advocate,” said Stephen Yenser, professor of English
and current curator of the Hammer Poetry series.
Curran, who died Thursday night at the UCLA Medical Center,
initiated the series in 1969 and served as its curator until Yenser
took over five years ago. Yenser said that the series enjoyed
tremendous growth and success under Curran’s
directorship.
“It became the best venue in the area ““Â maybe
even the West Coast ““ for poetry reading,” Yenser
said.
“Most of the best American poets of our time came through
here over the years,” he added.
Yenser announced that the remainder of this year’s series
and all of next year’s would be dedicated to Curran’s
memory.
Pinsky took the opportunity to honor Curran with a reading of
William Butler Yeat’s “Sailing to Byzantium,”
which he said was a fitting tribute because it represents
“the spiritual power of art.”
For Pinsky, Friday’s poetry reading gave him the chance to
present poetry in the way he likes best ““ out loud.
“Poetry is a vocal, but not necessarily a
performer’s art,” Pinsky said.
“The medium for a poem is the voice of an individual
reader, not necessarily an expert, the poet, an actor or
performer,” he added.
Pinsky, who said his boyhood dream was to become a musician
rather than a poet, incorporated sonorous changes of pitch and
tempo into his reading ““ a technique that some members of the
audience said gave new meaning to the poetry.
“Robert Pinsky has a very distinctive voice, and the way
he pronounces things lends a certain amount of weight to the words
that you couldn’t necessarily get just by reading,”
said Suzanne Karpilovsky, a fourth-year English and philosophy
student.
Though many of the poems Pinsky read on Friday were his own, he
also shared excerpts from “America’s Favorite
Poems,” a new poetry anthology featuring the stories and
favorite poems of Americans from across the country.
The book and its accompanying Web site, www.favoritepoem.org,
are the result of Pinsky’s Favorite Poem Project ““ what
he considers to be the defining achievement of laureateship.
The goal of the project was two-fold: first, to further his goal
of promoting poetry as an oral art form, and second to prove that
poetry is alive an well in the United States today. Even with a
limited marketing effort, Pinsky said the 18,000 responses he
received were overwhelming.
“It happened that I began the project, and the project
evoked the kind of participation and energy that the Web site and
anthology exemplify,” Pinsky said.
“I couldn’t know that tens of thousands of people
would respond as they have,” he added.
Though Pinsky, is near the end of his tenure as Poet Laureate,
he said he will continue to work toward expanding the Favorite Poem
Project and getting it distributed to a wider audience through
television and the Internet.
Though the job of Poet Laureate has few official duties, Pinsky
has been very active reading and lecturing throughout the country
““ a choice that he would not necessarily advocate for his
successor.
“I think it would be entirely appropriate for the next
person to stay home and quiet, to simply think about poetry and
write poems,” Pinsky said.