Jersey Breaks
Becoming an American Poet
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- US$13.99
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"Truly the voice of the Jersey Shore." —Bruce Springsteen
“Evocative.”—New York Times Book Review
An alternatingly funny and poignant memoir from three-term poet laureate Robert Pinsky.
In late-1940s Long Branch, a historic but run-down Jersey Shore resort town, in a neighborhood of Italian, Black, and Jewish families, Robert Pinsky began his unlikely journey to becoming a poet. Descended from a bootlegger grandfather, an athletic father, and a rebellious tomboy mother, Pinsky was an unruly but articulate high school C student, whose obsession with the rhythms and melodies of speech inspired him to write.
Pinsky traces the roots of his poetry, with its wide and fearless range, back to the voices of his neighborhood, to music and a distinctly American tradition of improvisation, with influences including Mark Twain and Ray Charles, Marianne Moore and Mel Brooks, Emily Dickinson and Sid Caesar, Dante Alighieri and the Orthodox Jewish liturgy. He reflects on how writing poetry helped him make sense of life’s challenges, such as his mother’s traumatic brain injury, and on his notable public presence, including an unprecedented three terms as United States poet laureate.
Candid, engaging, and wry, Jersey Breaks offers an intimate self-portrait and a unique poetic understanding of American culture.
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In this vivid work, former U.S. poet laureate Pinsky (The Figured Wheel) catalogs his life in letters and reflects on the words and relationships that shaped him as a writer. He acts as his family's historian, tracing his father's life as the son of a Prohibition-era liquor distiller turned bar owner, and the life of his mother, the daughter of a nomadic family. Weaving through the past and present, Pinsky pauses on the formative moments that brought him toward poetry, such as chanting a haftorah at his shul in Long Branch, N.J., and forming a band in junior high, where he found respite from his struggles in the classroom through music. Soon, Pinsky exchanged his saxophone for a pen, honing his poetic craft among such luminaries as Henry Dumas and Peter Najarian at Rutgers in the early 1960s, and later at Stanford with respected writers and thinkers, including the abrasive but influential Yvor Winters. Pinsky's anecdotes are as humorous and humble ("I heard a critique of how I pronounce words, and inside my armor it made me sweat") as they are moving and reflective, and his concerns lie with poetry as much as they do the human condition. Pinsky acolytes and the poetry-inclined alike will savor every bit.
