Earshot Jazz Festival

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FRIDAY, OCTOBER 15 NORDSTROM RECITAL HALL, 7:30PM
Robert Pinsky w/ Marc Seales & Paul Gabrielson
$20-$50 use code PIN1011EJF at checkout BUY NOW
Presented in association with Seattle Arts and Lectures.

Greatly inspired by jazz, Pinsky’s reading will be a collaboration with two of Seattle’s most sensitive and accomplished musicians: pianist Marc Seales and bassist Paul Gabrielson.

As a teenager, Robert Pinsky played the saxophone and dreamt of becoming a jazz musician. As an award-winning poet, he has emphasized the relationship between poetry and jazz. “In American culture,“ Pinsky says, “poetry and jazz are kind of advance scouts, making discoveries and innovations that are incorporated into other forms, sometimes softened or diluted a little. Poetry is the most vocal and musical verbal art, short of actual song.”

Pinsky’s poems appear in magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Threepenny Review, American Poetry Review, and frequently in The Best American Poetry anthologies. His poems have earned praise for their wild musical energy, vitality, and ambitious range. The Boston Globe wrote of Pinsky that “no living poet has greater reach of imagination.” His volume The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 was a Pulitzer Prize nominee. Pinsky’s Tanner Lectures at Princeton University were published as Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry. He has written six books of verse, most recently Gulf Music: Poems, as well as prose on the subject of poetry, including Poetry and the World and The Sounds of Poetry. Pinsky is also a translator, perhaps best known for The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation.

Robert Pinsky served an unprecedented three terms as United States Poet Laureate, the public ambassador for poetry. He founded the Favorite Poem Project, in which thousands of Americans of all ages shared poems that were significant for them. Pinsky appears regularly on PBS’s The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. He writes the weekly “Poet’s Choice” column for The Washington Post and is the poetry editor for Slate. In 1999 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is one of the few members to have appeared on “The Simpsons.” Pinsky is the winner of the PEN/Voelcker Award, the William Carlos Williams Prize, the Lenore Marshall and the 2008 Theodore M. Roethke Memorial Poetry Award, among many others.

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