Poetry: Robert Pinsky

Below is a poem by Robert Pinsky, who served as U.S. Poet Laureate in the late '90s. The new Journal of Literary Disability also has an essay, "Disability Haunting in American Poetics" by Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell that explores Pinsky's writings on disability in American poetry:

Pinsky’s essay about the thematics of haunting could be found culpable for its own repressions in the midst of formulating a theory of national identity that is based upon eradicating the conflicts of the past. In many of his examples, the haunting of the American poet is identified with the sudden eruption of ‘nightmarish figures’ that disturb the language of poetic revelation. Upon close reading, many of Pinsky’s haunting figures appear marked by cognitive and physical disabilities that upset the more abstract and utopian longings of American ideals. Because haunting operates as a barely discernible phenomenon (a ghostly presence often concretizes an otherwise repressed content), disability, as a metaphor for what Toni Morrison calls “unspeakable thoughts unspoken” (1989, 1), haunts Pinsky’s poetry of haunting. Better yet, the poets of which Pinsky writes may be fully aware that disability is their topic of contemplation, meaning that only Pinsky’s essay can be said to be haunted by the specter of disability.

So, in the above essay combined with Pinsky's poetry on psychiatrists some interesting ideas emerge. Here also, a psychiatrist comments on the poem below.

An excerpt from "Essay on Psychiatrists" by Robert Pinsky:

III. Proposition

These are the first citizens of contingency.
Far from the doctrinaire past of the old ones,
They think in their prudent meditations

Not about ecstasy (the soul leaving the body)
Nor enthusiasm (the god entering one’s person)
Nor even about sanity (which means

Health, an impossible perfection)
But ponder instead relative truth and the warm
Dusk of amelioration. The cautious

Young augurs with their family-life, good books
And records and foreign cars believe
In amelioration—in that, and in suffering.


IV. A Lakeside Identification

Yes, crazy to suppose one could describe them—
And yet, there was this incident: at the local beach
Clouds of professors and the husbands of professors

Swam, dabbled, or stood to talk with arms folded
Gazing at the lake ... and one of the few townsfolk there,
With no faculty status—a matter-of-fact, competent,

Catholic woman of twenty-seven with five children
And a first-rate body—pointed her finger
At the back of one certain man and asked me,

“Is that guy a psychiatrist?” and by god he was! “Yes,”
She said, “He looks like a psychiatrist.”
Grown quiet, I looked at his pink back, and thought.


Read the whole poem here.