SINGAPORE — Full disclosure: I’m a huge admirer of Robert Pinsky’s poetry. The former US Poet Laureate will be in town for the Singapore Writers Festival for a few events, including a panel discussion with Nobel Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon and PoemJazz, where Pinsky reads his poems to live jazz music. Here’s our email interview, where he talks about his projects to popularise poetry, his experience appearing in The Simpsons, flying to North Korea — and his promise to use the word “Singapore” in one of his future poems.

Q: I want to start with something fun: You appeared in an episode of The Simpsons years ago. What was that experience like? You read your poem Impossible To Tell — and had Lisa in the audience.

A: Those actors are so impressive. Among my friends, I’m considered semi-funny; I even try to do voices. But working with the likes of Dan Castellaneta, Nancy Cartwright, Julie Kavner was like working out with NBA players! I felt like Shelley Winters being helped up a ladder in a disaster movie.

Something I’ve never known how to deal with: I flew out to LA from Boston to tape that episode on September 10, 2001. The same flight as the horrors of the next day. So I was stranded in LA for those tense post-9/11 days, a guest of Fox. The Simpsons people were very kind and attentive. A couple of friendships have lasted. So my memories of something awful and something wonderful are strangely braided.

Q: I partly brought up this cameo in the popular cartoon show because in recent years, you’ve been kind of like an unofficial poster-boy for the poet-as-public figure. I guess it’s also because of your stint as US Poet Laureate. And you’ve also been one of the most vocal champions of poetry as a public art. What’s the connection between poetry and contemporary popular culture?

A: Poetry is like dancing, singing, cuisine — it’s a fundamental human art. Infants and toddlers love hearing poems and saying them, as they love dancing, vocalising, making pictures, playing with a ball. Then, alas, sometimes well-meaning school teaches us that we can’t dance, or that we don’t get poems right, or we’re not athletic, or we can’t draw. But these arts are fundamental.

Poetry is fundamental. It is too basic, too profoundly in the human animal, to need champions or poster-boys. It is not a product to be marketed like soap. The videos at http://www.favoritepoem.org are not to “promote” poetry but to demonstrate how these people (like the construction worker reading Whitman) love specific poems. Same for the forthcoming Art Of Poetry, my MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), which went live last month.

Q: So your Favourite Poem Project still ongoing? Can you share a bit about that ?

A: Yes, several brand new videos, shot in Chicago, are already up at the site. The site itself is much enhanced (large format, HD), thanks to the MOOC and the Poetry Foundation, and every July we have a one-week Summer Poetry Institute for K-12 Educators with teachers from around the world taking part. The idea is to avoid that “you can’t do this right” feeling I just mentioned. My poet friends like Louise Gluck, Carl Phillips and I talk about poems, and the K-12 teachers discuss teaching.

Q: Regarding your poetry online course, can you also share a bit about that?

A: The MOOC is an extension of the principles behind the Favorite Poem Project: Poetry as a vocal but not necessarily formative art; its fundamental relation, along with other arts, to human intelligence; pleasure in intellectual effort; and the idea that the more you learn about an art, sport, cuisine, animal, the more you can enjoy it. The central book of the course, Singing School is subtitled “Learning to Write (and Read) Poetry by Studying with the Masters”.

Q: What about the notion of accessibility. Where do poetry strains like, say, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E fit in? Do you think there’s any contradiction between the idea of poetry as elevated language and art, and poetry as a popular, everyday experience?

A: I can’t imagine a culture without poetry. What interests me, what seems to me poetry’s distinct nature among the arts, is the incorporation of the audiences’ body: The breath and voice box of each reader, or to put it differently, the mind’s voice. (As in the expression “the mind’s eye.) The force or momentum of what it might feel like to say the poem’s words.

“Accessibility” doesn’t mean much to me — if I’m having a good time with a work of art, I don’t care how little I understand. And no matter what the concept might be behind a piece of writing, if I don’t feel anything when I imagine saying the words, can’t feel them in my imagined voice and ears, then I can’t stay with it.

Q: Do you remember how you got into poetry? Any particular poem or poet that really influenced you?

A: Yeats, W.C. Williams, Dickinson, Ginsberg. The prose of Twain, Cather, Dickens. But before poetry, music: The phrasing of Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, Sinatra, Al Hibbler, Nina Simone.

Q: Speaking of jazz, we’re looking forward to your PoemJazz performance at the Singapore Writers Festival, where you’ll be “jamming” with musicians. Can you tell us something about PoemJazz and what’s the connection between your musician side and your poet side?

A: Yes, I’m very excited to be working with Rick Smith, have been really loving his approach to music, as I’ve learned about it online.

I was a poor student in high school. Music, playing the saxophone, sort of kept me in school and on the planet! In my graduating class I was voted Most Musical Boy. As I learned I wasn’t really all that good as a musician, I turned toward poetry! The PoemJazz album, working with wonderful musicians for the last ten years or so, has been a wonderful restoration of those days.

Q: Branching off from jazz and poetry — what are your thoughts on hip-hop, and rap music in particular? Do you consider rap as a logical extension of poetry?

A: Rap and hip-hop, with the voice very much on the beat, have a lot to learn from the appeal of verse by, say, William Carlos Williams, Sylvia Plath, Robert Hayden, where the rhythm is intense but the voice more subtly teasing around the beat in a jazzy way. And contemporary poetry in English, with its loose, prosy rhythms, often slack, has a lot to learn from the appeal of rap and hip-hop. One way to describe my PoemJazz work is that it is rap, but in a totally different musical idiom and language idiom.

Q: You’re pretty plugged into the Internet. How has it changed the way people consume or create literature? How has this affected you as a writer?

A: The main things — the sound of a voice, at the centre — not necessarily a performer’s voice, any radar’s voice — remain the same. The videos at http://www.favoritepoem.org demonstrate that old, stable principle.

Q: Somewhat related to this, I’m curious to know what your thoughts are regarding e-books. It took a while for you to release e-versions of your books — does this mean you are now comfortable with poetry published in such a format?

A: It’s kind of baffling why it took so long for electronic media to honour the typography for lines of poetry. You’d think a programmer could solve it in a few hours! But it seems that they now have it right.

On the other hand, didn’t the Greek and Roman poets run all their words and lines together to save wax or papyrus or parchment? I may have it wrong but maybe their meters and rhythms were so firm they didn’t need the visual notation for them! (I’m not advocating that.)

Q: If I recall correctly, there’s quite a few Asian references in your poetry. Why is that? And Malaysia gets name-checked in your famous poem Shirt. Any chance of Singapore getting a mention in a poem in the future? 

A: It seems I do mention places I’ve been and I do incorporate interesting patterns of vowel and consonant like the musical name “Singapore” but always at a kind of angle or in an out-of-left field way. Like Malaysia in Shirt, as you say. I hereby promise to use the word someday.

As for Asian references in my work, well, yes — it’s a big part of the world! I’ve been to Japan and Korea (even North Korea). And I’ve sometimes thought I have a circular, rather than linear, sense of time, which I’ve heard is true of some Asian religious concepts. But my best, true answer is, “I don’t know.”

Q: How did you find yourself in North Korea?

A: Well, it was a Poetry and Peace assembly of poets from around the world, sponsored by the Manhae Foundation. We went to a famous mountain shrine where there was a new, quasi-Western hotel. Some of the Korean poets wept when we crossed the border. Unforgettable moment when Wole Soyinka and I pulled cords and canvas covers came down to show, on a long wall, poems on the theme of peace by hundreds of poets from every continent. I’m very proud to say I am a recipient of the Manhae Award, named for the Korean poet and statesman.

Q: Finally, are you working on a new poetry book or any project at the moment?

A: Yes, I’m hoping that this year I will finish a new book of poems, possibly entitled Creole.

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Robert Pinsky will have a panel discussion (with Paul Muldoon) and a lunch session on Nov 1. His poetry reading-meets-jazz event will be on Nov 2. For ticketing and other information, visit https://www.singaporewritersfestival.com