Although Springsteen and Pinsky had never met, the similar themes in their work made the pairing a natural one. Springsteen came equipped with half a dozen guitars and an annotated copy of Pinsky’s poetry, given to him by his wife, Patti Scialfa, and he arrived ready to read.
Midway through, Springsteen started reading from Pinsky’s epic “An Explanation of America.” The images seemed like they could have come from some newly unearthed outtake from "Born to Run":
“America, where do you fly?
This country is thundering madly down the highway
While highways, murmuring in the night, are
like a restless river, grown unpredictable the way that rivers don’t.
I love a car.
A car, I guess, is like one’s personality.
Corrupt and selfish.
Full of hypnotic petty pains and joys.”
Springsteen paused, laughed, cracked a joke–“I’m going to use all of those on my next record”—and launched into his own exploration of these ideas: “In the day, we sweat it out on the streets of a runaway American dream…”
The highlight was probably the seamless segue from Pinsky’s impassioned reading of his poem “Shirt” into Springsteen’s equally haunting version of "The River," complete with an otherwordly howl on the outro. All in all, Springsteen performed six of his songs while Pinsky or Springsteen read a half dozen poems plus passages from William Carlos Williams and William Savage Landor. And while both artists talked seriously about their work, there were more than a few class clown moments.
“I was the poet laureate of New Jersey,” Springsteen deadpanned, “but that got taken over by the cast of Jersey Shore.”
Pinsky on New Jersey
“My standard answer (to the question): “You’re from New Jersey?” “Only in the sense that the Pope is Catholic.”
I’m completely loyal and proud of this state. When they were looking for a new thing for the license plate they asked me and I said maybe, “The Best State…"
Springsteen on his early influences
“When I was growing up there was Sinatra in the house. He sang very colloquially, the way people speak and he had a world view that was very specific and quite complete.
"If you wanted to know what the 1940s or the 50s or a certain part of the 60s felt like for a particular group of people in New Jersey, you could go to Frank Sinatra. Once a needle goes down on a record, a world is summoned up. That interested me. I want to catalog my times in a similar fashion, and the first thing is a sense of place.”
Pinsky On poetry:
"…the nature of poetry, it’s on a very human scale. The poet’s instrument is [the reader,] someone you’ve never met.”
Springsteen on opera:
“Somehow or another I met Luciano Pavarotti, the opera singer. And he made me spaghetti in his apartment one night.
I’d seen an opera, which I had never seen before.
At the end of the night …He says, ‘The pop singer. The pop singer has it over the opera singer.’
“I said. ‘Really?’
“Yup.”
“How?”
“He sings the way people speak.”
On Poetry and Songwriting:
Pinsky: “Pat Alger, who’s written a lot of country hits, we did a few shows together and we were interviewed by a disk jockey in Texas. He said, ‘What’s the difference between writing a song and writing a poem?’ Before I could answer, Pat, who’s a poetry buff, and a [Robert] Frost collector, said, “A little poetry can really help a song. Too much poetry can sink a song.”
Springsteen: “I’ve practiced both disciplines.”
Springsteen on Pinksy’s "The Want Bone":
“That, and ‘Sandy’ are about screwing on the beach, if I’m correct.”
Springsteen on poetry:
“You have to be careful if you’re a songwriter reading poetry. Because the temptation to steal is ever-present. It’s a very concise form, with those little phrases in there. And you come across one and you go, ‘Damn.”
Pinsky on influences:
“Bruce said a really important thing: his heroes were people with big audiences in popular culture. One of my heroes [is] the great saxophone player, the late Dexter Gordon. A recording I have begins with an interview, [Gordon is asked,] “Where do you get your inspiration?” The first two words out of Dexter’s mouth are, ‘Lester Young.’ {He then adds,] ‘The music that thrilled me when I was young still thrills me today.’ And here it is: [Gordon says,] ‘I remember the feeling it gave me. I would like to give other people that feeling.’ To me that’s the truest thing I ever heard about art.
"I remember the feeling that Emily Dickinson and Alan Ginsberg and William Carlos Williams and Ben Johnson and Shakespeare, and John Keats and William Butler Yeats and Elizabeth Bishop gave me. I would like to give that feeling to someone else."
Springsteen on Nebraska, his 1982 acoustic album in which the bedroom demos were released as a finished album.
“The record was really an accident. I had been recording for ten years and I was broke because I spent all my money trying to learn how to make records. This can’t go on. I have to find out if my songs are any good before I get into the studio, because I’m killing everybody.
"So I sent my guitar tech out and he came back with a little tape player. We set it up in the room with a couple microphones like this. Pretty lo-fi and very, very rough. We took it into the studio as demos and every time we did something to it, it was worse.”
Pinsky on Springsteen’s Nebraska:
“That record was shocking at the time. And was shocking, for a word we used earlier: intimacy. It had a quality of reality and directness…It’s as though the artist reaches out and physically touches you. Like someone tapping you on the shoulder. And that’s what that record was like…You can’t have those characters, the state trooper who arrests his brother, be part of something that’s super polished. It has to feel raw and intimate. That’s easier said than done.”
Pinsky on revisions:
"At some point I decide, ‘God can make it better. Robert can’t. Go on to the next one.’”
Springsteen on Pinsky:
“This is a stanza from ‘An Explanation of America’…What I’ve been trying to write about for 40 years, Robert manages to get in a single poem. It’s just amazing.”
End Note:
“It really felt like a fertile paring,” said moderator Wesley Stace, a novelist who performs music under the stage name John Wesley Harding. “I think the two of them knew it would be good, but I don’t think they knew quite how good it was going to be until they were up and rolling.”
What’s on tap for next year’s Wamfest?
“It’ll have to be Bob Dylan and T.S. Eliot,” Stace joked.