The medium of poetry is not words, the medium of poetry is not lines-it is the motion of air inside the human body, coming out through the chest and the voice box and through the mouth to shape sounds that have meaning. It's bodily.
Robert PinskyFor Aliki Barnstone, poetry seems a natural medium. The vision and cadences of these poems suggest a sensibility for which poetry is as inevitable as breathing or eating.
Robert PinskyIn jazz, as in poetry, there is always that play between whatโs regular and whatโs wild. That has always appealed to me.
Robert PinskyA sentence is like a tune. A memorable sentence gives its emotion a melodic shape. You want to hear it again, say itโin a way, to hum it to yourself. You desire, if only in the sound studio of your imagination, to repeat the physical experience of that sentence. That craving, emotional and intellectual but beginning in the body with a certain gesture of sound, is near the heart of poetry.
Robert Pinsky