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    Gulf Music: Poems
    Gulf Music: Poems
    Gulf Music: Poems
    Ebook84 pages45 minutes

    Gulf Music: Poems

    By Robert Pinsky

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    About this ebook

    Dollars, dolors. Callings and contrivances. King Zulu. Comus.
    Sephardic ju-ju and verses. Voodoo mojo, Special Forces.

    Henry formed a group named Professor Longhair and his
    Shuffling Hungarians. After so much renunciation

    And invention, is this the image of the promised end?
    All music haunted by all the music of the dead forever.

    Becky haunted forever by Pearl the daughter she abandoned
    For love, O try my tra-la-la, ma la belle, mah walla-woe.

    —from "Gulf Music"

    An improvised, even desperate music, yearning toward knowledge across a gulf, informs Robert Pinsky's first book of poetry since Jersey Rain (2000).

    On the large scale of war or the personal scale of family history, in the movements of people and cultures across oceans or between eras, these poems discover connections between things seemingly disparate.

    Gulf Music is perhaps the most ambitious, politically impassioned, and inventive book by this major American poet.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateAug 19, 2014
    ISBN9781466878402
    Gulf Music: Poems
    Author

    Robert Pinsky

    Robert Pinsky was the nation’s Poet Laureate from 1997 to 2000. An acclaimed poet and scholar of poetry, he is also an internationally renowned man of letters. His Selected Poems was published in paperback in March 2012. His other books include The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide and his bestselling translation The Inferno of Dante, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Award. He teaches at Boston University and is the poetry editor at Slate.

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      Book preview

      Gulf Music - Robert Pinsky

      I

      Poem of Disconnected Parts

      At Robben Island the political prisoners studied.

      They coined the motto Each one Teach one.

      In Argentina the torturers demanded the prisoners

      Address them always as Profesor.

      Many of my friends are moved by guilt, but I

      Am a creature of shame, I am ashamed to say.

      Culture the lock, culture the key. Imagination

      That calls the boiled sheep heads in the market Smileys.

      The first year at Guantánamo, Abdul Rahim Dost

      Incised his Pashto poems into styrofoam cups.

      "The Sangomo says in our Zulu culture we do not

      Worship our ancestors: we consult them."

      Becky is abandoned in 1902 and Rose dies giving

      Birth in 1924 and Sylvia falls in 1951.

      Still falling still dying still abandoned in 2006

      Still nothing finished among the descendants.

      I support the War, says the comic, it’s just the Troops

      I’m against: can’t stand those Young People.

      Proud of the fallen, proud of her son the bomber.

      Ashamed of the government. Skeptical.

      After the Klansman was found Not Guilty one juror

      Said she just couldn’t vote to convict a pastor.

      Who do you write for? I write for dead people:

      For Emily Dickinson, for my grandfather.

      "The Ancestors say the problem with your Knees

      Began in your Feet. It could move up your Back."

      But later the Americans gave Dost not only paper

      And pen but books. Hemingway, Dickens.

      Old Aegyptius said, Whoever has called this Assembly,

      For whatever reason—that is a good in itself.

      O thirsty shades who regard the offering, O stained earth.

      There are many fake Sangomos. This one is real.

      Coloured prisoners got different meals and could wear

      Long pants and underwear, Blacks got only shorts.

      No he says he cannot regret the three years in prison:

      Otherwise he would not have written those

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