The Work of Robert Pinsky
Event Information
Event description
Description
A Martha Heimberg Salon!
RSVP for address or write wordspace@wordspace.us
ABOUT MARTHA:
Former long-time WordSpace Board Member Martha Heimberg facilitates an evening of analytical review and comparative investigations of works by Robert Pinsky. All with her inimitable warm hospitality and refreshments provided by WordSpace.
Martha Heimberg has been writing about theater, the arts and historic preservation for over 40 years for numerous Texas newspapers and magazines, including, D Magazine, Texas Monthly, and The Texas Tribune. She currently is a contributing theater critic and arts writer for Theater Jones and Dallas Weekly, and is a member of the American Theater Critics Association. She has won multiple awards from the Dallas Press Club and the Texas Historic Commission and is a founding member of the Dallas Fort Worth Theater Critics Forum, WordSpace, and the Historic Preservation League (now Preservation Dallas). Founder and coordinator of DART’s Poetry in Motion program, she currently serves on the board of directors of Junius Heights Historic District Association and Friends of Aldredge House. Her degrees in English and comparative literature are from Southern Methodist University. For over 40 years, she taught English and creative studies at Richland College, Southern Methodist University and Northwood University. She retired from full-time teaching in 2015, and now teaches a twice-weekly adult literacy class at Literacy Instruction for Texas (LIFT). She’s also a messy and ardent amateur painter, printer and potter.
ABOUT POET ROBERT PINSKY:
Robert Pinsky received a BA from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and earned both an MA and PhD in Philosophy from Stanford University, where he was a Stegner Fellow in creative writing, and studied under the poet and critic Yvor Winters.
He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011); Gulf Music: Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 2007); Jersey Rain (2000); The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 (1996), which received the 1997 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and was a Pulitzer Prize nominee; The Want Bone (1990); History of My Heart (1984); An Explanation of America (1980); and Sadness and Happiness (1975).
He is also the author of several prose titles, including Singing School: Learning to Write (and Read) Poetry by Studying with the Masters (W. W. Norton, 2013);The Life of David (Schocken, 2006); Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry (2002); The Sounds of Poetry (1998), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Poetry and the World (1988); and The Situation of Poetry(1977). In 1985 he also released a computerized novel, Mindwheel.
Pinsky has published two acclaimed works of translation: The Inferno of Dante (1994), which was a Book-of-the-Month-Club Editor's Choice, and received both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award; and The Separate Notebooks by Czeslaw Milosz (with Renata Gorczynski and Robert Hass).
About his work, the poet Louise Glück has said, "Robert Pinsky has what I think Shakespeare must have had: dexterity combined with worldliness, the magician's dazzling quickness fused with subtle intelligence, a taste for tasks and assignments to which he devises ingenious solutions."
From 1997 to 2000, he served as the United States Poet Laureate and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. During that time, he founded the Favorite Poem Project, a program dedicated to celebrating, documenting and encouraging poetry's role in Americans' lives.
In 1999, he co-edited Americans' Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology with Maggie Dietz. Other anthologies he has edited include An Invitation to Poetry (W. W. Norton, 2004); Poems to Read (2002); and Handbook of Heartbreak (1998).
His honors include an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, both the William Carlos Williams Award and the Shelley Memorial prize from the Poetry Society of America, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is currently poetry editor of the weekly Internet magazine Slate.
Pinsky has taught at both Wellesley College and the University of California, Berkeley, and currently teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University. He served as a Chancellor for The Academy of American Poets from 2004 to 2010. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
RSVP for address or write wordspace@wordspace.us
ABOUT MARTHA:
Former long-time WordSpace Board Member Martha Heimberg facilitates an evening of analytical review and comparative investigations of works by Robert Pinsky. All with her inimitable warm hospitality and refreshments provided by WordSpace.
Martha Heimberg has been writing about theater, the arts and historic preservation for over 40 years for numerous Texas newspapers and magazines, including, D Magazine, Texas Monthly, and The Texas Tribune. She currently is a contributing theater critic and arts writer for Theater Jones and Dallas Weekly, and is a member of the American Theater Critics Association. She has won multiple awards from the Dallas Press Club and the Texas Historic Commission and is a founding member of the Dallas Fort Worth Theater Critics Forum, WordSpace, and the Historic Preservation League (now Preservation Dallas). Founder and coordinator of DART’s Poetry in Motion program, she currently serves on the board of directors of Junius Heights Historic District Association and Friends of Aldredge House. Her degrees in English and comparative literature are from Southern Methodist University. For over 40 years, she taught English and creative studies at Richland College, Southern Methodist University and Northwood University. She retired from full-time teaching in 2015, and now teaches a twice-weekly adult literacy class at Literacy Instruction for Texas (LIFT). She’s also a messy and ardent amateur painter, printer and potter.
ABOUT POET ROBERT PINSKY:
Robert Pinsky received a BA from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and earned both an MA and PhD in Philosophy from Stanford University, where he was a Stegner Fellow in creative writing, and studied under the poet and critic Yvor Winters.
He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011); Gulf Music: Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 2007); Jersey Rain (2000); The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 (1996), which received the 1997 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and was a Pulitzer Prize nominee; The Want Bone (1990); History of My Heart (1984); An Explanation of America (1980); and Sadness and Happiness (1975).
He is also the author of several prose titles, including Singing School: Learning to Write (and Read) Poetry by Studying with the Masters (W. W. Norton, 2013);The Life of David (Schocken, 2006); Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry (2002); The Sounds of Poetry (1998), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Poetry and the World (1988); and The Situation of Poetry(1977). In 1985 he also released a computerized novel, Mindwheel.
Pinsky has published two acclaimed works of translation: The Inferno of Dante (1994), which was a Book-of-the-Month-Club Editor's Choice, and received both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award; and The Separate Notebooks by Czeslaw Milosz (with Renata Gorczynski and Robert Hass).
About his work, the poet Louise Glück has said, "Robert Pinsky has what I think Shakespeare must have had: dexterity combined with worldliness, the magician's dazzling quickness fused with subtle intelligence, a taste for tasks and assignments to which he devises ingenious solutions."
From 1997 to 2000, he served as the United States Poet Laureate and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. During that time, he founded the Favorite Poem Project, a program dedicated to celebrating, documenting and encouraging poetry's role in Americans' lives.
In 1999, he co-edited Americans' Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology with Maggie Dietz. Other anthologies he has edited include An Invitation to Poetry (W. W. Norton, 2004); Poems to Read (2002); and Handbook of Heartbreak (1998).
His honors include an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, both the William Carlos Williams Award and the Shelley Memorial prize from the Poetry Society of America, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is currently poetry editor of the weekly Internet magazine Slate.
Pinsky has taught at both Wellesley College and the University of California, Berkeley, and currently teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University. He served as a Chancellor for The Academy of American Poets from 2004 to 2010. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Organizer WordSpace
Organizer of The Work of Robert Pinsky
WordSpace is a group of artists that support artists. We are a volunteer board of working writers, artists, musicians, educators and performance artists.
Founded in 1994, by Robert Trammell and Adrienne Cox Clay. WordSpace has presented and paid honoraria to over 2000 diverse writers of all genres. WordSpace Everywhere includes Dallas Poetry Slam Features, ArtSpeak@MFA Gallery, Oral Fixation @ Dallas City Performance Hall, First Hearings at Wild Detectives, WordSpace at The Kessler, New Dialogues at South Dallas Cultural Center, TransNational Impressions @ Latino Cultural Center, Salons, and Next Generation Project. Dallas Lit Hop is a month long festival spanning Exposition Park, Deep Ellum, Oak Cliff, White Rock Lake, Uptown, Downtown neighborhoods.
Special events have included Townes Van Zandt, Jeff Liles, Booker Prize winner James Kelman, Terry Allen, Ed Sanders, Walter Mosley, Chris Abani, Tyehimba Jess, Tina McElroy Ansa, Andrei Codrescu, Saul Williams, Karen Finley, Sandra Bernhard, Dan Savage, Dagoberto Gilb, Nikki Giovanni, John Waters, Amy Sedaris, Laurie Anderson, Anne Waldman, Vievee Francis and Lonnie Holley.
Special events have included Townes Van Zandt, Jeff Liles, Booker Prize winner James Kelman, Terry Allen, Ed Sanders, Walter Mosley, Chris Abani, Tyehimba Jess, Tina McElroy Ansa, Andrei Codrescu, Saul Williams, Karen Finley, Sandra Bernhard, Dan Savage, Dagoberto Gilb, Nikki Giovanni, John Waters, Amy Sedaris, Laurie Anderson, Anne Waldman, Vievee Francis and Lonnie Holley.
GUIDING PRINCIPLES:
Mission Statement
WordSpace is a non-profit literary organization that supports education and writers, connecting Dallas with the best of world literature. Founded in 1994, the organization hosts authors, readings, student workshops, concerts and salons to promote established and emerging artists who use imaginative language in traditional and experimental forms. Through diverse, multi-cultural programs, WordSpace enhances the development of language artists of all ages, facilitates communication throughout the literary community, and contributes to expanding the Dallas literary scene to the widest possible audience.
WordSpace is a non-profit literary organization that supports education and writers, connecting Dallas with the best of world literature. Founded in 1994, the organization hosts authors, readings, student workshops, concerts and salons to promote established and emerging artists who use imaginative language in traditional and experimental forms. Through diverse, multi-cultural programs, WordSpace enhances the development of language artists of all ages, facilitates communication throughout the literary community, and contributes to expanding the Dallas literary scene to the widest possible audience.
Inclusiveness
WordSpace embraces values, policies and practices that ensure that all people are represented and treated fairly in the work of our mission, places of work, and delivery of service, without regard to race, ethnicity, national origin, age, physical or mental disability, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, socioeconomic status, citizen status or religion. Our programs engage audiences to participate in the interconnectedness and awareness necessary to transform society through the arts. WordSpace, through its board, auxiliary board, advisory board, and programming partners, draws strength from and welcomes the engagement of diverse voices and perspectives in shaping and furthering its work.
WordSpace embraces values, policies and practices that ensure that all people are represented and treated fairly in the work of our mission, places of work, and delivery of service, without regard to race, ethnicity, national origin, age, physical or mental disability, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, socioeconomic status, citizen status or religion. Our programs engage audiences to participate in the interconnectedness and awareness necessary to transform society through the arts. WordSpace, through its board, auxiliary board, advisory board, and programming partners, draws strength from and welcomes the engagement of diverse voices and perspectives in shaping and furthering its work.
Cultural Equity
The WordSpace mission aligns with values, policies, and practices that ensure that all people are represented in the development of arts policy; the support of artists; the nurturing of accessible, thriving venues for expression; and the fair distribution of programming, financial, and informational resources. In its internal operations and external programs, WordSpace prioritizes strategies that result in more equitable access for artists and audience that have, in the past, been systematically oppressed, leading to less opportunity for philanthropic and governmental support.
The WordSpace mission aligns with values, policies, and practices that ensure that all people are represented in the development of arts policy; the support of artists; the nurturing of accessible, thriving venues for expression; and the fair distribution of programming, financial, and informational resources. In its internal operations and external programs, WordSpace prioritizes strategies that result in more equitable access for artists and audience that have, in the past, been systematically oppressed, leading to less opportunity for philanthropic and governmental support.
