An Explanation of America (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets)

Rating:
Summary: A search for identity that contains all seeds of generality
Review: Pinsky sifts through images and myths from both outside and inside America, alternating between the conventional and the idiosyncratic, reaching into the past towards the future, testing the limits of each framework. He always seems centered in the experiential but, almost always, works at arm's length. He really wants to encompass it all, and the scale of his ambition adds dignity to his results. I love this poem, no less for its ambitiousness than its scrupulous balance.

Robert Pinsky taught my undergraduate course in Seventeenth Century English poetry. Even now, his writing speaks to me in the same even, deliberate tone that, in the classroom, could be depended upon to launch into an explanation-reasoned, swift, feeling, comprehensive.

The last time we talked about poetry was shortly after An Explanation of America was published, when coincidentally he was on sabbatical at UC-Berkeley and I was in graduate school there. One afternoon our paths crossed, as I was rushing east across the Berkeley campus to my son's daycare. He said some readers found the poem too gloomy. I disagreed -but was too much in a hurry to set the record straight!

The end of 1999 finds me with more time to write and think, but also less optimistic about America. As much as I admire the brilliance with which the last line of the poem leaves America standing there as an undefended open question-"so large, and strangely broken, and unforeseen," it is in chapter two, Its Great Emptiness, where I find the vulnerability of American identity most deeply challenged. Pinsky, citing Horace, revives a vision of human freedom that I can no longer identify as belonging particularly to America-any more than I might have considered it as Roman.

"When a man stoops to pluck at the coin some boys of Rome have soldered to the street, I think that just then he is no more free than any prisoner, or slave; it seems that someone who wants too much to get things is also someone who fears, and living in that fear cannot be free."

Ann Rutledge/Wellesley 1976 [e-mail]