Pinsky's Free Verse History

Reading “Gulf Music” is an active exercise of introspection and observation of the modern world. In his first book of poetry since 2000, Robert Pinsky confronts global chaos and uncertainty while examining longstanding philosophical questions involving everything from memory to the mundane. His skeletal poems skillfully tie together the past and the present, exploring the capacity of collective memory and selective forgetting while leaving ample room for readers to reach their own conclusions about human suffering and contemporary existence.

Pinsky divides “Gulf Music” into three sections. The first poems, which explore the human capacity to both cause and endure suffering, tackle current events such as Hurricane Katrina and the horrors of Guantánamo. Pinksy adopts a personal tone, asking, “What could your children boast about you?” He then turns to the tendency of history to repeat itself despite man’s pledges to learn from past mistakes. The poems in the second section become extended definitions of everyday objects. Pinsky argues that every word “is an assembly of countless voices,” and here, each poem expands the significance of otherwise mundane things. In the final third of the book, Pinksy moves further into the abstract, addressing a myriad of ideas as unconnected as Inman Square and allusion.

Dominated by simple sentences and minimal form, Pinsky’s poems are austere; their free verse structure mirrors that lack of order and refinement in the world to which Pinsky is reacting. His diction is carefully designed to extract maximum emotion with minimal effort, and allusions to current events permeate the pages. Most poems are composed of short stanzas that propel the poetry at a fast clip and reflect the spontaneous nature of Pinsky’s thoughts. Pinsky’s confusion emanates from each page as he jumps from idea to idea with each successive couplet. Each poem, he writes, “is acting dumb...in a smart-ass way involving the contradiction of naming.”

Unfortunately, some poems are too successful in embodying Pinsky’s confusion and fail to move the reader. These vignettes, overwhelmed by jumbled thought, sacrifice meaning for style. Ironically, the character of “Gulf Music” is such that this confusion can serve to remind the reader that there are no solutions to many of the problems that Pinsky addresses. Without attempting to, Pinsky’s least technically impressive poems adopt an alternative role as embodiment of man’s most basic inability to comprehend human action. As Pinsky asserts, “Sometimes from the babble a kind of clarity emerges.”

Largely compelling, Pinsky successfully calls the reader’s attention to our turbulent world and the pain and suffering felt by so many today. His greatest strength lies in his ability to tie current events to historical themes of curiosity, oppression, and philosophy. Reading “Gulf Music” conjures the image of a society tired of dealing with pain and desperate for an explanation and an escape. The poems are never trite, owing to Pinsky’s cultivated and subtle use of historical and literary references.

“Gulf Music” is a provocative work that draws new attention to topical themes that have dominated man’s discussion for millennia. The book does not conclude with an optimistic outlook for our future. As the chaos and abstraction of Pinsky’s work crescendos in the final third of “Gulf Music,” it becomes clear that Pinsky has not found the answers to the uncertainties that plague him. It is in the final throes of “Gulf Music” that Pinsky includes excerpts from “Georgics” and “The Divine Comedy.” These poems are not a condemnation of man’s propensity to repeat history, but an indication that we suffer from the same ills as our ancestors. “Gulf Music” leaves it to the reader to continue to examine the world and its suffering.

—Staff writer Eric M. Sefton can be reached at esefton@fas.harvard.edu.