Gulf Music by Robert Pinsky

For starters, I’ll make no pretensions about being an expert on Robert Pinsky. In fact, I’ll even admit that, besides a select few poems (“The Want Bone” comes immediately to mind) I have never read any of Pinsky’s work – that is to say, I have never read a truly complete work by Robert Pinsky, because to read a book of poetry is to read a deliberate collection of symbols, metaphors, words, and thoughts, each relating and alluding to the others in some way, however delicate. This, then, is not only a discussion of a collection of poems, but it also serves as a sort of introduction of a poet, at least for me, and the introduction of a longer discussion of contemporary poetry. This is certainly not an analysis of Gulf Music’s place in the Pinsky canon, nor is it an attempt to situate these poems in any sort of literary context. This is, first and foremost, an attempt to wade through and bask in a rather curious collection of poems.

Gulf Music, the collection itself, is divided into three simply numbered sections, each with its own distinct character and thematic elements. The first is the most immediate and anxious of the sections, particularly between the opening salvoes of “Poem of Disconnected Parts” and “Gulf Music,” both of which delve into present political and social issues in fragmented, sometimes nonsensical lines. In a collection largely concerned with memory and forgetting, these poems fit only tangentially, particularly because Pinsky forgoes his otherwise delicate touch in favor of a fractured prose poetry that ends up feeling far too heavy-handed. The right idea is there in eschewing political propheticism and its dramatic baggage for simpler, more humane description, but the poems simply feel too safe – too much of a summary of news items one could have read in the paper this morning. However, that said, Pinsky’s very unique concern with historical memory and the American civic conscience is on full display, and lesser poets would never attempt such an audacious (and admittedly refreshing) project.

The second section opens with a prose poem exploring the etymology of the word thing, which sets the stage for nine peons to objects, seven of which are contained under the framework of the poem “First Things to Hand.” Taken by themselves, the poems are clever and playful, particularly the wonderful eponymous first section of “First Things to Hand,” but they on first glance feel like traditional odes and nothing more. However, in his “Note” at the end of Gulf Music, Pinsky reflects on these poems: “Every artifact, every natural object, with its ghostly wrapping of associations and meaning, begotten and forgotten, is a gathering of minds or contending voices: every thing is an invisible assembly.” In looking back at these odes after reading this declaration, one finds that they construct an etymology of connotations and associations – these objects tell their stories through their name and the baggage that word carries when spoken or written.

The last of this collection’s three sections is, without a doubt, the strongest and most compelling, and it sees Pinsky move from the disjointed potential of the first section and the understated simplicity of the second to a magnificence that I can only imagine is the poet in full flight. He transitions with two poems tracing poetic concepts instead of things: “Rhyme,” which feels more like its tangible brethren, and then the flowing “In Defense of Allusion,” one of the most impressive poems in this collection and certainly one of more thought provoking, even more so because of its morally ambiguous closing. Pinsky manages to sum up a large chunk of Gulf Music’s verse in the latter poem’s simple opening declaration: “The world is allusive.” Each word is an allusion to a thousand others, and each line of verse takes the place of hundreds more spread across the years, from the inmate in Guantánamo in “Poem of Disconnected Parts” to the dying lines of Dante’s Paradiso that closes Pinsky’s collection. Gulf Music is partly about recalling these allusions, but it is even more so about the way in which we forget them: “Forgetting is never perfect, just as recall is never total: the list or the person’s name or the poem or the phone number may be recalled in the same detail, but never with the exact feeling it had. And conversely the details may be obliterated but the feeling lingers on.”

-Will Cogswell