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By Michael Falcone

Daily Bruin Contributor

At the threshold of the final month of his unprecedented three-year term as U.S. Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky stopped at UCLA on Friday for a poetry reading and discussion.

Pinsky’s appearance at the UCLA Armand Hammer Museum was marked by sadness at the loss of Doris Curran, the founding curator of the Hammer Poetry Reading Series.

“Poetry in Los Angeles has lost a most wonderful, utterly singular advocate,” said Stephen Yenser, professor of English and current curator of the Hammer Poetry series.

Curran, who died Thursday night at the UCLA Medical Center, initiated the series in 1969 and served as its curator until Yenser took over five years ago. Yenser said that the series enjoyed tremendous growth and success under Curran’s directorship.

“It became the best venue in the area – maybe even the West Coast – for poetry reading,” Yenser said.

“Most of the best American poets of our time came through here over the years,” he added.

Yenser announced that the remainder of this year’s series and all of next year’s would be dedicated to Curran’s memory.

Pinsky took the opportunity to honor Curran with a reading of William Butler Yeat’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” which he said was a fitting tribute because it represents “the spiritual power of art.”

For Pinsky, Friday’s poetry reading gave him the chance to present poetry in the way he likes best – out loud.

“Poetry is a vocal, but not necessarily a performer’s art,” Pinsky said.

“The medium for a poem is the voice of an individual reader, not necessarily an expert, the poet, an actor or performer,” he added.

Pinsky, who said his boyhood dream was to become a musician rather than a poet, incorporated sonorous changes of pitch and tempo into his reading – a technique that some members of the audience said gave new meaning to the poetry.

“Robert Pinsky has a very distinctive voice, and the way he pronounces things lends a certain amount of weight to the words that you couldn’t necessarily get just by reading,” said Suzanne Karpilovsky, a fourth-year English and philosophy student.

Though many of the poems Pinsky read on Friday were his own, he also shared excerpts from “America’s Favorite Poems,” a new poetry anthology featuring the stories and favorite poems of Americans from across the country.

The book and its accompanying Web site, www.favoritepoem.org, are the result of Pinsky’s Favorite Poem Project – what he considers to be the defining achievement of laureateship.

The goal of the project was two-fold: first, to further his goal of promoting poetry as an oral art form, and second to prove that poetry is alive an well in the United States today. Even with a limited marketing effort, Pinsky said the 18,000 responses he received were overwhelming.

“It happened that I began the project, and the project evoked the kind of participation and energy that the Web site and anthology exemplify,” Pinsky said.

“I couldn’t know that tens of thousands of people would respond as they have,” he added.

Though Pinsky, is near the end of his tenure as Poet Laureate, he said he will continue to work toward expanding the Favorite Poem Project and getting it distributed to a wider audience through television and the Internet.

Though the job of Poet Laureate has few official duties, Pinsky has been very active reading and lecturing throughout the country – a choice that he would not necessarily advocate for his successor.

“I think it would be entirely appropriate for the next person to stay home and quiet, to simply think about poetry and write poems,” Pinsky said.

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