By David Fedo

Robert Pinsky, now 72, has long been one of the most admired contemporary American poets, and with good reason. Ranging widely in subject, length and form, his poetic output has been prodigious: eight collections from Sadness and Happiness (1975) to Gulf Music (2007) and Selected Poems (2011). In addition, there is a score of insightful critical works – among them, The Situation of Poetry (1977) and Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry (2002).

He has also translated Dante's Inferno (1995), and The Separate Notebooks (1984) by the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. His translation/adaptation of the German playwright Friedrich Schiller's drama, Wallenstein, opened in a production to rave reviews just this April in Washington, DC.

The list continues. His novel, Mindwheel (1984), has been called a work of "interactive fiction", while his other works include anthologies and the libretto for an opera, Death and the Powers (2010), with music by Tod Machover. In the midst of all of this, Pinsky somehow has the energy to continue to teach in Boston University's famous Graduate Writing Program, and to serve as poetry editor for the online journal, Slate.

A native of New Jersey, Pinsky received his undergraduate education at Rutgers University, and his MA and PhD in English from Stanford University. He was named the Poet Laureate of the United States for a record three times, from 1997 to 2000. During his tenure as Poet Laureate, he initiated the extraordinarily popular "Favorite Poem Project", which attracted an astonishing 18,000 submissions from Americans aged five to 97, and from every state in the nation. Some 50 videos that were later made of citizens "reading and speaking personally about poems they love" are now in the archives of the Library of Congress.

Pinsky is also the recipient of numerous other awards, including the prestigious William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America. He currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife Ellen. They have three children and seven grandchildren.

1. What are you reading right now?
Witz by Joshua Cohen. Almost Invisible by Mark Strand. Unpublished poems by Louise Glück and James McMichael. Coriolanus.

2. If you were a famous literary character in a novel, play or poem, what would you be and why?
Thea Kronborg in Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark, because she is the most convincing portrait I know of an American artist. The scene where Thea wakes up the morning after her performance, for example…

3. What is the greatest misconception about you?
People kindly, generously, and meaning only well, sometimes describe me as "an advocate for poetry" or "promoting poetry"… which makes me wince, while smiling. The Favorite Poem Project never told anyone to read poetry, or that poetry was good. We asked people to say something about a poem they loved. The videos at www.favoritepoem.org and the anthologies from Norton demonstrate that. I don't see the point in marketing poetry as though it were a brand of soap. It is fundamental, like singing or dancing or cuisine. And as with those things, some of it is great, some of it is not very good, and a lot of it is somewhere in between.

So the misconception is that I am a smiling, sociable advocate or promoter. I think I am less nice, and more interesting, than that.

4. Name one living author and one dead author you most identify with, and tell us why.
Sorry, I don't identify with authors, living or dead. I read them, admire them (or not) in different ways... but I'm kind of work-centred, not author-centred. Like a teacher more interested in teaching the subject than the students (I guess I'm that, too, come to think of it). In The Situation of Poetry, I link Allen Ginsberg with George Gascoigne – comedians of the self – and J.V. Cunningham with Frank Bidart – cradle-Catholic logicians. A more author-centred writer would be interested in more biographical categories and associations.

5. Do you believe in writer's block? If so, how do you overcome it?
Perpetual fluency is rare. Trollope had it. A few dull scholars I've known had it. But most writers have times when we can't figure out what we are afraid of. The best resource, for me, is art: watch Ozu's Tokyo Story or Sturges' Sullivan's Travels; listen to Sonny Rollins' 'Airegin' or Bach's suites for lute; read Gogol's Dead Souls or Yeats' 'Adam's Curse'. You may be reminded why you want to make works of art. And at the least, you have spent your time well.

6. What qualities do you most admire in a writer?
Ear and imagination.

7. What is one trait you most deplore in writing or writers?
A mysterious carriage of the body to conceal the defects of the mind. In other words, style as deprecation, style as implying that the grand or the serious is impossible. Sometimes, it is a genial, chuckling dismissal of large ideas. Sometimes, it is an automatic assumption that language cannot mean. The two forms of deprecation may seem like opposites: middlebrow and quasi-experimental. But they amount to the same thing: two forms of retreat.

8. Can you recite your favourite line from a literary work or a piece of advice from a writer?
On love, on grief, on every human thing,
Time sprinkles Lethe's water with his wing.

– Walter Savage Landor

9. Complete this sentence: Few people know this, but I…
Did poorly in high school, was in the Dumb Class in the eighth grade, and I still find a lot of that in my relation to officials, authorities, organisations, etc.

10. At the movies, if you have to pick a comedy, a tragedy or an action thriller to watch, which would you go for?
Buster Keaton.

11. What is your favourite word, and what is your least favourite one?
A frequent question, and I've never had a good answer for it.

12. Please complete a couplet with the following words: spring, unwisely, hope.
Let the record show that I composed this in 10 seconds:

In Wallenstein, the characters all grope
All spring, unwisely, for elusive Hope.

13. What object is indispensable to you when you write?
My own mouth, breath and ears. "Write" is a misnomer for composing a poem.

14. What is the best time of the day for writing?
All are equal to me – if I have routines, I am unaware of them.

15. If you have a last supper, which three literary figures, real or fictional, would you invite to the soirée, and why?
Emily Dickinson, Nikolai Gogol and Homer, because the first two would have the good sense to be silent, on such a solemn occasion, while the third sang to us.

16. Is the Favorite Poem Project, which you initiated while serving as the United States Poet Laureate, still active in any way?

Yes, there are communities – like Newburyport, Massachusetts – which continue the Favorite Poem Project in various literary festivals in their hometowns. The impetus for these activities and events is the annual Boston University Summer Poetry Institute for Educators, which is now in its 11th year and which builds on the principles of the Favorite Poem Project – which is, as we say in our announcements, "committed to celebrating and documenting poetry's place in American culture and improving its place in American classrooms." I teach in this July programme, along with such colleagues and poets as Louise Gluck, David Ferry, Mark Doty, Gail Mazur and Rosanna Warren.

17. What would you write on your own tombstone?
Poet.

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