When Robert Pinsky becomes the country's next poet laureate in May, the official body of American poetry will get a technologically savvy face. After all, Pinsky has been the poetry editor for Slate since its inception, and he published an interactive novel, Mindwheel, back in the pre-hypertext days of 1985.
Author of five acclaimed books of verse and a best-selling 1994 translation of Dante's Inferno, Pinsky explains that though poetry is the most venerable form of literature, and seemingly the most tradition-bound, it is the form most uniquely suited to the new electronic media, both metaphorically and technologically. Computers have "a natural alliance" with poetry, which is "designed like the computer in which speed and memory are enlarged," says Pinsky, who teaches creative writing at Boston University.
Although he is "always a little skeptical of people who get excited about multimedia" because it can suggest a lack of excitement about the text itself, Pinsky, 56, says that what makes computer technology such an apt partner for verse is its ability to reproduce the human voice.
"I know there are geniuses who can make works that use this medium, and they will," he says, but in the meantime the important thing is to exploit the Internet to distribute as much oral poetry as possible. The Library of Congress currently has 3,000 recorded hours of poets reading their works, and Pinsky wants to build on this base and work on disseminating it. He also envisions online anthologies of thousands of Americans reading their favorite poems.
His view of the future of the electronic publishing of poems and its effect on paper publishing is less clear. "I'm not a prophet," he says, explaining that verse poses some unique problems of ownership and presentation. Unlike other forms of art, like painting, you can own a poem just by memorizing it. "It's like free software," he says.
But a renaissance in poetry and Web publishing can certainly go hand-in-hand, he thinks. "There's a hunger for things that are not mass-produced," he says. "That describes both the Web and poetry."
Just as he brings a wired bent to the world of rhyme, Pinsky "can put a human face on the office technology for people - many of whom have found it so alienating," says Slate editor Judith Shulevitz.
Jennifer Hogan, who edits Columbia University's hypertext Dante Project, values Pinsky's ability to look beyond the mere power of the technology. "You have to understand that acceptance of poetry as something other than a leisure activity won't change just because it's distributed on the Internet. Pinsky is good at explaining the value of comprehending the meaning that's gotten out of that poetry, the transformative value of poetry for the reader."
