Review: Proverbs of Self-Importance (A Review of Robert Pinsky's Proverbs of Limbo)

By Hugh Blanton

 

Robert Pinsky's first collection of poetry in eight years has almost as much name-dropping as his memoir and just enough untranslated Latin to let us respectfully conclude he's over our heads. His poems bounce and wiggle on the page like a dancer with two left feet, often made even more comical by his efforts to paint himself as a sage. There are a few tepid efforts at being lyrical: "Writer blighter fighter what do you want?" but he still deserves credit for carrying on Wordsworth's torch of the real language of men. Pinsky has the annoying habit of capitalizing the first letter of each line even when the last word of the previous line does not have a period, and combined with his poor enjambment choices and you get a great big form headache.

Proverbs of Limbo delivers exactly what is expected of Pinsky; poems of his Jewishness, rage at fascism (of the thirty-three poems in this collection seven of them mention Nazis and or Hitler), celebrity names (Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Lee make an appearance in the third poem). In his poem "Forgiveness" he says "The great/ Fascist poet taught me free verse." (Actually, Pinsky means he learned free verse from Pound, they never met as teacher/student.)

"The desire for vers libre," says Pound

In his hectoring way, is "quantity

Reasserting itself after years

of starvation." Reading that, I

Got the idea—just like in music,

Longer is different from higher.

Now, if karaoke singers would just realize the same thing.

In his memoir Jersey Breaks, Pinsky spoke often of his father, stressing that his father was an optician, not an optometrist. Optometrists make more money than opticians, he reminds us, and he wants to create the impression of a hardscrabble and impoverished youth. He sort of shoehorns it in here again in a verse about John Keats, saying: "He too was the child/ Of a New Jersey optician and please do me/ a favor, don't tell me No he wasn't." There's a vague mention later in the book of a nightingale, but even it doesn't help to make these lines any more sensible. Pinsky seems to be claiming kinship with the very creation of the universe as well: "Galactic broth visible light-years away/ Brews the first suns. Familial, I feel/ I know these lights." It's getting past time to ban poets and philosophers from stargazing.

Pinsky enjoys a distracted kind of poetry writing, he notices something, then something else and then often remembers the first something again. Like many people who grew up before the internet age, he wonders what happened to all those telephone numbers we had to remember:

Infinite information here in my phone.

Hear in my head a congregation of dead

With numbers I had by heart, each with a tune

Back when a few years' friendship in New Brunswick

Or Palo Alto was a lifetime. The numbers

Now fast asleep among the neuron ruins.

 

Thwarted by the Elders he defied, Gene England

A hero now for those young Mormons I met.

Henry Dumas shot dead by a transit cop.

He told me once while we were reading "The Gyres"

That as an airman in Texas he could get in

To see movies with an accent and a turban.

The reader begins to feel like a pinball at the mercy of a player jacked up on meth. (Emily Dickinson would have smiled at the Here in my head a congregation of dead.)

Rubes love a little obvious recondity and Pinsky plays to them from time to time throughout the collection: "The spotted cockroach/ Like Hamlet talks viajar y casar but never/ Arrives or marries." His ill-tempered character is ill-suited to mild themes and subjects (he refuses to say the name Walter O'Malley, the team owner that moved the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles) and though he claims to be influenced by Ezra Pound, Pound's modernism is not felt here at all. Pinsky borrows the manners of prose in his poetry without letting prose laxness spoil the poetry (similar to Billy Collins who borrows much more heavily, but Collins has a better sense of humor). His pedantry, "Spica, one of the brightest stars in our sky,/ Is a rotating ellipsoid variable" is trivial and the poems that wallow in it also become trivial.

In 1999 Pinsky ran the Favorite Poem Project which included a series of readings by poets selected by Pinsky to be recorded in the White House. Yes, both Bill and Hillary got to read one poem each—Bill's was Emerson's "Concord Hymn" and Hillary's was Howard Nemerov's "The Makers." Pinsky never shies away from the mud pen of politics, he made mention of his family's connections to congressman Frank Pollone's family (three generations!) in Jersey Breaks and even took multiple pot shots at Donald Trump. He doesn't bring up Trump here, in fact his name-dropping in Proverbs of Limbo is a bit subdued compared to his memoir. Seeing a new collection of poetry these days without mention of climate change or Donald Trump is a rare treat indeed. Pinsky does, however, take on cancer causing and poisonous baby powder and plastic water bottles in Limbo.

Poet and critic James Logenbach once said of Pinsky, "Since the death of Robert Lowell in 1977, no single figure has dominated American poetry the way that Lowell...once did. But among the many writers who have come of age in our fin de siècle, none have succeeded more completely as poet, critic, and translator than Robert Pinsky." Poets are known (and too often forgiven) for their hyperbole, but comparing Lowell and Pinsky doesn't even rate the apples to oranges comparison, it's more like comparing granite to bunny rabbits. There just aren't any similarities (other than their pride in pedigree) and the discordance is enough to crash the operating system of the brain. The drudgery of some of these poems (Pinsky takes us through Branca's pitch that gave up the infamous home run, with diversions and digressions dragging it tediously out) shows that Pinsky perhaps wishes to be a Lowell-like modernist, but he's out at first.

Hugh Blanton's latest book is Kentucky Outlaw. He can be reached on X: @HughBlanton5