Pinsky: All the Different Kinds of Language

I would like to keep and somehow unify all the different kinds of experience, and therefore all the different kinds of language, I’ve ever known. I grew up in a neighborhood that you might call—as my mother did, complaining endlessly about having to live there—a slum. It was not monochromatic. There was a lot of variety culturally, ethnically, in class and in kind of education. People spoke with various accents. Ideally, I’d like to write a poetry that pretends neither that I’ve been a professor all my life, nor that I’m still a streetboy. A poetry that doesn’t pretend that I’ve never watched television, and that doesn’t pretend, either, that I’ve never been to graduate school.
-Paris Review