began his artistic career as a saxophone player, but Robert Pinsky switched to poetry in college. Even as a child, "I enjoyed reading things that I couldn't understand. I liked the smoky atmosphere and haze of reading something too old for me or simply opaque. I liked the mystery of it and figuring it out." As a poet, he seeks out the challenge of writing in an unusually public voice, conjuring "the way people spoke and the manners they had when I was a child in a largely black, working class neighborhood. I like thinking of them as part a continuum with people who have read a lot of books. In my work I've struggled to understand history not as the long-ago doings of kings and powerful people but as a kind of force, visible and sometimes subterranean, in everything people do." Pinsky began his heralded 1995 translation of Dante's "Inferno" when he was asked to translate just one canto and couldn't stop. "I always feel most relaxed and comfortable doing something that seems unlikely and that I'm not prepared for or expected to shine at. I was always the kid who preferred the pop quiz. Thinking about trying something impossible makes me feel light-hearted." On "Eve Tempted by the Serpent" by Defendente Ferrari, and in Memory of Congresswoman Barbara Jordan of Texas Rare spirit remembered with a pang Of half forgotten clarity or density A quality, quilled, a learned freshness Unshattered though not perfect not Eden No rippled meander through new islands The parentless leaves and branches tender The green marsh the blue the white feet Of our adolescent mother, myth of Perfection painted just before unperfecting Itself as if by impulse nor have we any idea Where bright spirits are culled from, our Admiration is a form of self exculpation-- Who is this strange bird we say as if that Excellence were accident as in the documentary About a guady parrot escapee from Some domestic cage into azure margins Of California with its green wing and crest It joined a band of crows flew with them Fed with them conducted itself as one brilliant Crow accepted by them we prefer that to this other Realized soul excellence eloquence made of our Same eggs and flowers and waters plumed As we are no scaly or feathered exception Immune to that first of all Aprils where The serpent spiraled in his tree petal-skinned Has a man's head bignosed bearded Stuck onto the tube of body already Limbless old partner helpless knowing Beholder leering full of our childish Legend of our imperfection we fell We fowl of a feather we feel we fail And not that she made it look difficult Or easy but possible and we fall Robert Pinsky's book "The Figured Wheel," is published by Farrar Straus Giroux. photograph by Sigrid Estrada