Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry (The University Center for Human Values Series)

Rating:
Summary: A middle-ground defense of poetry
Review: As a poet, critic, and as Poet Laureate, a literary activist, Pinsky has been a significant force in recent efforts to comprehend relationships between American poetry and culture. This volume summarizes his efforts to "consider the voice of poetry [...] within the culture of American democracy, amid the tensions of pluralism." Although Marxists and Post-structuralists will likely find the unquestioned humanism implicit in Pinsky's argument suspect, he nevertheless offers pragmatic arguments for situating poetry's cultural and political role in American society and for understanding the social value of private art. He emphasizes how the diverse character of America has led to a "fantastic" experience of memory that "exaggerates the anxieties of uniformity and memory" in a nevertheless positive role of resistance to the "apparently total successes" of colonization. Poetry's function in the process of cultural memory lends a bodily quality to the "solitary voice" and defends human-scale perceptions and judgments from the leveling effects of mass-scale culture. For Pinsky, the "solitude of lyric [...] invokes a social presence." Integral, is poetry's intrinsic vocality, creating a force that "originates within the reader" but "gestures outward" to "alert us to the presence of another or others." Thus poetry, though inherently personal, is nevertheless "far from solipsistic" in its invocation of audience. Pinsky distinguishes this outward-reaching interiority from more performative arts such as drama, music, and slam, and stresses it as poetry's source of enduring strength. Efforts to transform poetry into performance, from this view, doom it to irrelevance because of its inability to compete with the influence of the entertainment industry. As an essentially socially-based convention, poetry's formal qualities also play an outward-reaching role in its social praxis, but unlike the more apocalyptic proclamations of formalists like Dana Gioia, Pinsky's calm advancement of a theory of form's function avoids reductively polarized (form versus free verse) polemics and thus supports a broader endorsement of the genre's social efficacy. Although far from comprehensive, Pinsky offers a teachable counterpoint to more dire political assessments from both the right and left wings of the poetry wars.

Rating:
Summary: A great short read
Review: Short, punchy, and nicely designed. Pinsky doesn't waste words. If you want to read a modern manifesto in defence of poetry, this is it. It's easy to dump on Pinsky because he's in the public eye so much, but this at least shows he's there because he has a brain. And who can complain about a poet being a star?

Rating:
Summary: The Heat of Middle Water
Review: Sober, judicious, temperate, suave, Pinsky considers poetry's place in our high-tech democracy with all the passion of a required civics course. Nary an insight will trouble anyone's sleep in NPR, MacNeill/Lehrer America, and that's a shame, because poetry at its best is a whole lot hotter than that. Pinsky's a deft explainer and he keeps his good-natured balance in the midst of a very acrimonious and fragmented field. But I think those qualities mitigate against the kind of fire we need to shake poetry loose from the warm academic middle, whose virtues and limitations Pinksy embodies in every line of his prose.