Robert Pinsky Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Louise Glück

SOURCE: "Story Tellers," in The American Poetry Review, July-August, 1997, pp. 9-12.

Below, Glück explains the ways a narrative impulse informs Pinsky's poetics, comparing his poetry with that of Stephen Dobyns.

The poet Stephen Dobyns, who is also the novelist Stephen Dobyns, once remarked with just irritation that the narrative, as a poetic strategy, is usually misread, or not taken for what in his opinion it is: a metaphor. As though when the poet couldn't think of anything interesting, he told a story.

Like Homer. Like the Bible.

Contemporary critics prefer, it appears, the static/rhapsodic, in which the translation of event to art is more literal: what is event in the world becomes, in the poem, luminous image. In fact, narrative is also transformation and recreation, and the use of stories managed in more ways, to more ends, than one. In the old battle to determine the greater form (a...
(read more)