PINSKY, ROBERT

born Oct. 20, 1940, Long Branch, N.J., U.S. American poet and critic whose poems searched for the significance underlying everyday acts. He was the first poet laureate consultant in poetry to be appointed for three consecutive one-year terms, beginning in 1997. A graduate of Rutgers (B.A., 1962) and Stanford (Ph.D., 1966) universities, Pinsky taught at Wellesley College, the University of California at Berkeley, and Boston University. The title poem of Pinsky's first collection, Sadness and Happiness (1975), comments on the poet's own life. His long poem An Explanation of America (1979) probes personal and national myths. Vivid imagery characterizes his other collections, which include History of My Heart (1984), The Want Bone (1990), and The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems (1996). Landor's Poetry (1968), The Situation of Poetry: Contemporary Poetry and Its Tradition (1976), Poetry and the World (1988), and The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide (1998) are among his critical writings. He was poetry editor of The New Republic from 1979 to 1986 and from 1997 of Slate, a weekly on-line magazine published by Microsoft. Pinsky cotranslated poems by Czeslaw Milosz that were published in The Separate Notebooks (1984). His verse translation of Dante's Inferno (1994) is notable for its gracefulness and its faithfulness to the original terza rima form. In addition to editing several poetry anthologies, Pinsky devised and published an interactive quest romance called Mindwheel to be played on computers. In 1997 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.