At the Foundling Hospital: Poems

by Robert Pinsky

“Since the death of Robert Lowell in 1977, no single figure has dominated American poetry the way that Lowell, or before him Eliot, once did . . . But among the many writers who have come of age in our fin de siècle , none have succeeded more completely as poet, critic, and translator than Robert Pinsky.” ―James Longenbach , The Nation

With all the generosity and mastery we have come to expect from our three-time Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky has written a bold, lyrical meditation on identity and culture as hybrid and fluid, violent as well as the enigmatic, maybe universal, condition of the foundling. At the Foundling Hospital considers the foundling its need to be adopted, and its need to be adaptive. These poems reimagine identity on the scale of one life or of human from “the emanation of a dead star still alive” to the “pinhole iris of your mortal eye.”

What is a particular person? How unique? What is anyone born as? Born with? Born into? The poems of Robert Pinsky’s At the Foundling Hospital engage personality and culture as improvised from a creative effort so pervasive it can be invisible.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

Published October 3, 2017

About the author

Robert Pinsky is an American poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator. From 1997 to 2000, he served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Pinsky is the author of nineteen books, most of which are collections of his own poetry. His published work also includes critically acclaimed translations, including The Inferno of Dante Alighieri and The Separate Notebooks by Czesław Miłosz. He teaches at Boston University and is the poetry editor at Slate.
wikipedia

Reviews

[Jon Nakapalau · Rating 5 out of 5]

The thematic undercurrent here is identity; identity found and identity given. How we define our identities as we interact with others is always tenuous; we are always looking for ways to remain individual while seeking to connect in meaningful ways - ways that force us to identify in new ways as we go through life.

[C. Hollis Crossman · Rating 1 out of 5]

Well, good for Robert Pinsky for winning all those prestigious awards and teaching in the graduate creative writing program at Boston University. Too bad he can't write poems.

You'd think an established poet would be past having to plagiarize, and especially past having to plagiarize a rock band's lyrics. Granted, the band he copied is one of the great rock bands of all time (both lyrically and musically), but come on.

The offending Robert Pinsky line: "He wrote sentences the way a great boxer moves." This is in the poem "Grief," copyright 2016. It's a very pedestrian way to describe a noble vocation.

The pilfered Cake line: "Adjectives on the typewriter / He moves his words like a prizefighter / The frenzied pace of the mind inside the cell." This is from the song "Shadow Stabbing" on the album Comfort Eagle, copyright 2001.

Not only is the Cake line more evocative, it's far more poetic, using simile in a fresh way to describe something common in a way that makes us think more deeply about it. (And if you think rock lyrics can't do this, I have a list of albums for you to listen to.) Pinsky's line, by contrast, uses simile in the most prosaic way possible, simply to describe an action rather than to tell us something meaningful about it, or to draw out the implications.

Which is the problem with all the poems in At the Foundling Hospital. Pinsky drops pop culture references, mythological and religious references, and other snippets he finds compelling into an a-lyrical stew that contributes nothing to the soul or mind of the reader.

Why is it so hard for contemporary poets to at least make their poems poetic? And why do they all think they're Beat poets? The Beats were a mid-20th century literary school that was creative, brilliant, often stupid—and of a particular time and place. (Or places, rather—New York and San Francisco.) Be influenced by them, certainly. But don't try to be them, especially when you aren't nearly as good as them.

[Jeff · Rating 2 out of 5]

I only connected with a couple of the poems in this collection. I probably inferred too much from the titles of the books Pinsky wrote about poetry, many of which refer to poetry's sounds. I found most poems here to be without rhythm, cadence, rhyme, alliteration. Maybe i'm unable to hear his music.

I might eventually try other works.

[Artie · Rating 2 out of 5]

All respect to Pinksky, I think I just really don’t like poetry. Reading this felt like a chore and I just couldn’t find my footing. Shoutout Liam for getting me this.

[Jennifer J. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my favorite book of Pinsky's poetry yet. This narrow volume explores the facets that make us who we are, mourns their losses when they are lost, and reaffirms their arbitrariness when they come together.

The core image is that of tokens, "a least irreducible particle of meaning." The titular poem, "The Foundling Tokens," speaks precisely to this, weaving together images of the notes left with abandoned infants, verses chalked onto walls by Chinese immigrants incarcerated in San Francisco, the names captive Africans carved into the hulls of slave ships "as though someday to be pronounced again."

Pinksy asks readers to sit with the idea of names, as tokens of us as individuals--or as social narratives. In the poem "Names" he writes:

"Found and to find, Sandra Bland.
Tereke, Ehud. Jason. Duy. Quan.
Lost and to find,
Stammering Moses of Egypt, found
Afloat among bulrushes, Royal."

Elsewhere the key token of identity given to scrutiny is symbolic, as shown in the verses of "Culture":

"Bewildered, bewildering ape. Absinthe. Circumcision. Couplets.
Grudges, beliefs. War of my childhood, Europe tearing at itself.
Scarification. Conceptual art. Celebrated scholarly papers
On Trobriand Islanders, more fiction or poetry than science."

And that final line, "more fiction or poetry than science," calls forth the foil against which these meditations on tokens, on names, on assuredness that we have truly been here, are poised. How many of the tokens that we value or worship are haphazard? In "Running with Noodles," Pinksy observes:

"Spaghetti with red sauce is Aztec and Chinese.
Noodles from the East, Gold apples from the West.
Creole inventions that time makes pure. Tipico
Italiano."

The poem "Creole" takes readers down a similar path, but, keeping with the two-sidedness of this volume, pauses to celebrate this creation at the margins rather than point to the hollows that lie beneath the floor boards of our precious, bounded cultural existences.

"The Roman colonizing and mixing, the Imperial process
of legal enslaving and freeing, involved not just the inevitable
Fucking in all senses of the word, but also marriages and births
As developers and barbers, scribes and thugs mingled and coupled
With the native people and peoples. Begetting and trading, they
Had to swap, blend and improvise languages--couples especially
Needed to invent French, Spanish, German: and I confess--
Roman, barbarian--I find that Creole work more glorious than God."

In all, this book explores the creation, violence, necessity, and feebleness of existential boundaries with a voice that is simultaneously celebratory and mournful, filled at times with awe and at others with a deep grief that can only come from living a life well-lived.

[Cathy]

I really don't want to rate this book, because this is a collection of poems, and really out of my comfort zone, and if I were to rate it I would give it a low rating, and I don't think it is fair to the author or his works :P I'm not a poetry person, I didn't understand most of the poems I read in this book :P :P :P I think out of the 30 poems in this poetry collection I only (believe I partially) comprehended about five or six. But here's my favorite one (I think it's about mankind and mankind's capabilities. I'm not sure :P ) :

Instrument

It was a little newborn god
That made the first instrument:
Sweet vibration of
Mind, mind, mind
Enclosed in its orbit.

He scooped out a turtle’s shell
And strung it with a rabbit’s guts.
O what a stroke, to invent
Music from an empty case
Strung with bloody filaments—

The wiry rabbitflesh
Plucked or strummed,
Pulled taut across the gutted
Resonant hull of the turtle:
Music from a hollow shell
And the insides of a rabbit.
Sweet conception, sweet
Instrument of mind,

Mind, mind: Mind
Itself a capable vibration
Thrumming from here to there
In the cloven brainflesh
Contained in its helmet of bone—
Like an electronic boxful
Of channels and filaments
Bundled inside its case,
A little musical robot

Dreamed up by the mind
Embedded in the brain
With its blood-warm channels
And its humming network
Of neurons, engendering

The newborn baby god—
As clever and violent
As his own instrument
Of sweet, all-consuming
Imagination, held
By its own vibration:

Mind, mind, mind pulled
Taut in its bony shell,
Dreaming up Heaven and Hell

[Scott · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read a lot of poetry in high school and college. I wrote a lot of poetry in high school in college. Every couple of years I get the itch to go back, pick up a new volume from someone I've read before and see what they've been up to.

At its best, great poetry resonates by using the power and rhythm of language to conjure in the mind of its hearer/reader feelings, deeper understanding, or new perspectives. I often think of it as a sort of magic language.

And the best poets are able to do that and often impress upon the reader/listener these sensations of giving a form and shape to profound insight with words.

At their worst, poets obfuscate deeper meaning for a broader audience in rhythmic or arhythmic turnings of phrase that apply only to them. We as readers are left to wonder what inside joke we are missing. And that is largely what I came away with from this collection.

What appears to be an opening salvo to set the theme for the work very quickly is dispersed through a loose collection of words and themes that often do not relate to what another.

Robert Pinsky is a very talented poet and I remember being captivated by his words when he gave the commencement speech when I graduated with my master's degree. I'm less impressed by this collection, but not off-put completely. I just didn't really connect with this in any meaningful way.

[Thomas McDade · Rating 5 out of 5]

"What has six arms, an appetite, and roams over the earth devouring experience with omnivorous reverence? The poet Robert Pinsky, that's who."


Page 13

Mixed Chorus

My real name is Israel Beilin. My father
Was a Roman slave who gained his freedom.
I was first named Ralph Waldo Ellison but

I changed it to the name of one of your cities
Because I was born a Jew in Byelorussia.

I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not.

My other name is Flaccus. I wrote an essay
On the theme You Choose Your Ancestors.
It won’t be any feeble, conventional wings

I’ll rise on—not I, born of poor parents. Look:
My ankles are changed already, new white feathers

Are sprouting on my shoulders: these are my wings.

Across the color line I summon Aurelius
And Aristotle: threading through Philistine
And Amalekite they come, all graciously

And without condescension. I took the name
Irving or Caesar or Creole Jack. Some day they’ll

Study me in Hungary, Newark and L.A., so

Spare me your needless tribute. Spare me the red
Hideousness of Georgia. I wrote your White
Christmas for you. And my third name, Burghardt,

Is Dutch: for all you know I am related to
Spinoza, Walcott, Pissarro—and in fact my

Grandfather Burghardt’s first name was Othello.

[Caitlin Conlon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wasn’t a huge fan of this collection, although I can appreciate the clear theme & motifs that ran throughout.

[Stephen Byrne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not my favourite Pinksy poetry book, but decent all the same and highly crafted as expected.

[Alison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Difficult, allusive, and powerful. My favorites: "Evolution of the Host" and "Creole." There's also a fine translation or re-writing of Góngora's sonnet on the brevity of life.

[Connie Clark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Complicated and beautiful. These poems demand some investment of attention and re-reading to yield their depth. My favorites were "At the Foundling Hospital" and "Grief."

[J. · Rating 3 out of 5]

never misses but never really hits either

[Ryan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Its chief virtue is brevity.

[Sarah · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not for me.

[Aaronlisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ve said it before and I will say it again, I find it hard to rate poetry fairly. I enjoyed quite a bit of this book but some of it also felt inaccessible to me.

[Leonard · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had high expectations for this collection but was disappointed by what I consider poems that were unusually dense, incomprehensible, and not very poetic.

[c · Rating 2 out of 5]

There's a poem called "Names" about names. There's a poem called "Culture" about culture. There's a poem called "Grief" about grief that ends "...it isn't comfort--it's grief."