(MUSIC)

FAITH LAPIDUS: Robert Pinsky was born in nineteen forty. He grew up in New Jersey, in the working-class town of Long Branch near the Atlantic coast. He found happiness playing jazz in the high school band. That experience also led him to find happiness in poetry.

ROBERT PINSKY: “When I was a teenager, just about the only thing I could do right was play music. In my high school graduating class, I certainly was not voted most literary boy. I was voted most musical boy. And the one thing led to the other.”

CHRISTOPHER CRUISE: Mr. Pinsky says jazz and poetry are similar.

ROBERT PINSKY: "Jazz and poetry both involve a structure that may be familiar and to some extent predictable. And then you try to create as much surprise and spontaneity and feeling and variation while also respecting that structure.”

CHRISTOPHER CRUISE: For Robert Pinsky, poetry is not just an emotional experience but also a physical one. He moves back and forth as he reads one of his poems, called "The Want Bone." The bone is a shark jaw that he found on a beach. Here is part of that poem:

ROBERT PINSKY:

The bone tasted of nothing and smelled of nothing,

A scalded toothless harp, uncrushed, unstrung.

The joined arcs made the shape of birth and craving

And the welded-open shape kept mouthing O.

The beach scrubbed and etched and pickled it clean.