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A Postcard from Robert Pinsky
Robert Pinsky's real audio greeting
Wednesday, April 7, 1999
I am in the midst of eleven days away from home, then one day back and
another week of travel. I hope Poetry Week is a good idea. Favorite Poem reading in DC
tonight, with William Cohen & Eleanor Holmes Norton & Harold Varmus, head of the
NIH joining schoolkids, cabdrivers, etc. Then tomorrow nite in NY schoolkids joining in
with Joyce Carol Oates, Grace Paley & other fiction writiers. The project is thriving,
with over 10,000 hits a day at the web site www.favoritepoem.org.
And we have completed the first video!
I have learned from the project that these events bring communities together: people of
diverse kinds from one town or city, all sharing works they treasure, none of them an
expert or the author—it creates understanding and respect, fosters attention, in ways
I had not anticipated. It is as though readers and poems, in the absence of the authors of
the poems, fulfill some of Whitman's vision of holding things together.
Good wishes,
Robert
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