30:2 Autumn 1978

ROBERT PINSKY

from An Explanation of America

An excerpt from Robert Pinsky’s An Explanation of America (1979) appeared in the Autumn 1978 issue of Chicago Review.  Pinsky recently commented upon “Braveries”:

This section from my book-length poem An Explanation of America has been quoted and excerpted more than some of the others, maybe because it moves through a couple of fairly distinct narrative images: the newborn infant recoiling from the sack of Saguntum by retreating back into the womb and the child taking formal lessons, inside a field house, while her somewhat out-of-place father watches.  Other sections of An Explanation of America proceed more eccentrically.  Publication in Chicago Review probably had something to do (though I can’t really remember) with Robert von Hallberg [who served on the faculty advisory committee for the magazine].  His understanding of my writing, and championing of it, I value beyond measure.

An Explanation of America was published by the Princeton University Press in 1979, and received the Saxifrage Prize, awarded to the best book of poems published by a small or university press.  The book is included in The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996, published in 1966 by Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux.

[DN, 1996]

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