Robert Pinsky: Agora

PINSKY: Dave, my father’s father, had a certain swagger, glamour and capacity for violence. I once spoke with a huge old Irish guy who said, More than once I seen your grandfather jump over the bar and knock a guy out. There’s something particularly thrilling and anomalous about that in relation to Jewish life; in Isaac Babel’s stories of Odessa gangsters there are issues and patterns I recognize. I guess violence is one side of that practical, physical skill. But my other grandfather, Morris, could fix clocks and motors; he courted his wife by dazzling her with a motorcycle. (She was married to someone else at the time.) He tuned up his own car, replaced the brake linings, and so forth.

INTERVIEWER: Do you consider that background an advantage to you as a writer?

PINSKY: I certainly wish I had those skills!—and I don’t. But there is a spirit there that I feel grateful toward, and some loyalty. Both grandfathers partook of the pleasures of the marketplace, a term that maybe connotes capitalism. But there’s a more ancient sense of the marketplace or agora, that’s very attractive to me: the public space. It’s the place where people see each other, where they venture out of the family—the shared home away from the hearth. From one point of view, the Odyssey is a great hymn not just to coming home but to cruising the sea, risking Poseidon to see what deals you can make, what you can achieve or learn. I think that the laboring, mercantile, small-town, lower middle class has a lot of respect not only for gain, but for exchange. To see someone, nod to that person and think, as you say hello, Oh yes, that’s an Odiotti. His father had the paint store—or was it his uncle? And he knows vaguely that I must be an Eisenberg or a Pinsky, and that I might have something to do with the bar. We exchange recognition. That’s all part of a certain marketplace fabric that includes a lower-class work ethic, a neighborhood sense of worth, a shrewd practicality. And yes, I suppose there is something in my work as a writer that extends that ethic or reacts against it.

- The Paris Review