Robert Pinsky: Poetry and Psychoanalysis Share Common Ground: Poet to Speak at APsaA Plenary

In the following lines from a poem in his first book, Sadness and Happiness, Robert Pinsky uses humor to describe a particular likeness between psychiatrists and writers:

Pinsky's poem, called “Essay on Psychiatrists,” is 15 pages long and made up entirely of tercets. For these little three line stanzas Pinsky has a special fondness. During an interview at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he explained it to me: “Four is rather stable, like a table or a horse. But three tumbles forward… I like the way that three is both symmetrical and asymmetrical.” And though many of the “Essay's” tercets poke fun at psychiatrists (“As far as one can generalize, only a few/Are not Jewish…”), there is sentimentality and bewilderment in their descriptions of them too. Pinsky says that when he wrote the poem, “It was a period in my life when I was for the first time surrounded by people who were seeing psychiatrists, married to psychiatrists, were psychiatrists; I grew up in a lower-middle-class household where there was a certain amount of mental illness that went untreated.” Life has changed for the poet since then: Thirty years later, a former U.S. poet laureate and married to a psychoanalyst, he is quite accustomed to living and working among therapists. He has even accepted an invitation to give the plenary at APsaA's annual meetings in January.

But Pinsky admits his enthusiasm for psychoanalysis is not unmitigated, even now. “I am interested [in analysis]—somewhat skeptical, somewhat convinced, and, as in many things, I find myself partly on the outside and partly on the inside. Not a bad place for a poet to be.” For his plenary, he suspects he will stick mostly to topics involving poetry. “I am certainly not going to attempt to make myself an expert on Freud.” And yet he explains that poets in general do not eschew analytic principles; rather, Freud is “still revered among the poets…because he is such a good writer.” In spite of, or perhaps because of, these shared sympathies, Pinsky places great importance on distinguishing the poet's work from the analyst's. To draw a comparison between composing a poem and practicing analysis, he says, is to underestimate the work of art. “Poetry is an art,” he says vehemently—not a kind of therapy or an academic discipline.

And yet he goes on to enumerate several points of correspondence between the art of poetry and the practice of psychoanalysis. For instance, both pursuits are “absolutely dependent on the idea that the past remains alive.” And for both the poet writing and the analytic dialogue, there is an implicit rule that what is not said is at least as important as what is. Pinsky likens the silences that happen in an analyst's office to the white spaces between words, between stanzas on a page: Much poetry, he suggests, happens there.

Music and Meaning

However, in the case of Pinsky's own poems, sounds stand out more than silences. His poetry is characterized by its musicality; the meter of his lines is always central to the poem's overall effect, and Pinsky chooses words as much for their sonic qualities as for their meanings. The title poem of his newest book, Gulf Music, relies particularly on this interconnectedness between subject matter and sound:

These couplets, the first five-and-a-half of the poem's 30, toe the line between nonsensical sounds (taken from various sources, including New Orleans jazz and Hebrew prayer) and real, honest, human utterance. They brutishly and weirdly suggest the strangeness of language itself. Pinsky startles and alienates his reader initially in order to call attention to the incapability of words to depict human sadness, but in doing so, he also celebrates humanity's attempts at expression, par ticularly in art forms that require the human voice. The miraculous power people have to name things (including themselves), a power which originated with the earliest humans and which the poet here assumes for himself like a mantle, appears in the poem several times. After two or three turns reading the poem aloud, its lines start to feel like normal music again, especially like jazz.

Pinsky even describes his impulse to write in terms a composer would use: “I can't remember ever not having a desire to make music.” And though poems are made of words on a page, it is the speaking voice behind them that Pinsky considers crucial to the final product. “It is vocal art,” he says. “The medium is a human voice, but not necessarily the artist's voice. The poem happens in time—it happens every time someone reads it.” Pinsky explains that poets tend to be born with a particularly attentive ear. In an e-mail conversation following our interview, he records an incident from his own childhood:

For as long as I can remember, I have paid close attention to the pitches and cadences of speech. Hearing the tunes of language is a deep personal custom. When I was very young, I might hear the melody of a train conductor's chanted warning: “Passengers going to Hoboken, change trains at Summit.” Those three decelerating triplets at the beginning, the third triplet or dactyl the name of a New Jersey municipality. Then the long pair: Change trains, followed by the quick little Dizzy Gillespie fillip with a second

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place name, at Summit. Chanting it over to myself, playing its rhythm in my mind against a 4/4 time signature, hearing the syncopations and subtleties, the relation of pitch to cadence…while immersed in all that, deeply involved and attentive, I would forget to change trains.

This story about the music of everyday speech touches on another topic important to Pinsky's writing (and to psychoanalysis too): human memory, especially as it pertains to the American historical identity. “Everyone has a history,” he says, fascinated by how things in life are forgotten and remembered and expressed in different ways.

In his note to Gulf Music, Pinsky complains, “The trite notion that Americans lack memory or historical awareness is unsatisfying. How might we lack it, severally and collectively? One doesn't need to be a Freudian to understand that memory and forgetting are partial, willful and involuntary, helpless and desperate, in mysterious measures. Forgetting is not mere absence. The repressed does not simply return, it transforms and abrogates, rising and plunging like a dolphin, or Proteus.” Such ideas about memory and history are poetic—they are, he says, the big subject of his poetry. But they are analytic, too. “Everything comes from somewhere. That's something we poets share with psychoanalysts.”