Robert Pinsky reads "Impossible to Tell" скачать в хорошем качестве

Robert Pinsky reads "Impossible to Tell"

Image: Hokusai, Banana Garden at Chūtō This poetry presentation by Robert Pinsky was made possible by funding from the Institute for the Arts and Humanities. The event took place on 25 October 1997 at the Hanes Art Center Auditorium at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as part of the Autumn Saturday series. Mark McCarthy oversaw the digital recordings. More recordings can be found here: https://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/pinsky.php I like jokes very much, as does Alan Shapiro, in fact. When I say "jokes", I don't mean witty remarks. I mean the pope, a pig, and an optometrist go into a bar together, and then there's a punchline. My friend Elliot Gilbert knew more jokes than anybody I ever knew, and Elliot died in his early fifties through a series of mistakes the doctors made; they made a blunder, and then they made another blunder, and then they lied about the blunder, and that was the end of Elliot. And just about that time that Elliot died, our friend Bob Hass, the poet, had come out with his anthology of haiku. Wonderful book. I had always been haiku-deaf. I'd never quite gotten it... But then I read Bob's introduction, and the notes, which are wonderful, to that anthology, and he explains the haiku is really just part of a renga. A renga is a linking poem where a group of poets, led by a master over the course of a long evening, do a series of stanzas, and you pick up images through the different seasons according to certain rules, so that in your poem you say, "The birds chattering in the tree in October in North Carolina are as many as the pores on my body." And then somebody else later on says, "The tiny little grains of snow glinting on top of the car are like the pores in a piece of leather." And then the word "pores" gets picked up and somebody else says, "The little porous petals of the apple tree are shattered by my feet." And each person does... That wasn't a very good example, but you get the idea. That is exactly what people who really like jokes are like. You tell the joke with the optometrist in it, and then I think of one about a dentist, and my dentist was Italian so you think of another Italian joke, and that's how an evening of jokes can go. This is an elegy for Elliot. And this poem, I'll warn you, does contain two jokes. I call it my two-joke elegy. And if there's no laughs at all, I could break down, easily. "Impossible to Tell." "Impossible to Tell" by Robert Pinsky: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem... After I'd finished that poem, I was nervous about showing it to Sandra Gilbert – who incidentally has written a very moving, wonderful prose book about Elliot's death called Wrongful Death – and I asked my poet friend Peter Sacks, who's an expert – he wrote a prize-winning book called The English Elegy – I said to Peter, "I'm very nervous about sending it to Sandra." In fact, I did send it to their son first. And he said, "Why?" And I said, "Well, if you've lost a loved one, to have a joke, and to have somebody say, 'really dead'..." And Peter said a wonderful thing, he said, "'Really dead'?" he said – "that's the point of all elegy." And the Rabinowitz joke – I just thought that was good North Carolina material.