When Carol Ann Duffy, the poet laureate of the United Kingdom, announced that you had won the Eliot Prize, she called it the crowning moment of your career. What did you think of that?

We’re metaphor makers as poets, but no, I didn’t feel anything on my head. For many of us, whatever walk of life we’re in, it’s hard sometimes to take in praise, so I tried to not to close the doors but to open them up and take it as energy and pleasure.

Did you write Stag's Leap in the white heat of the moment or are these emotions recollected in tranquility?

I have always written when the feeling is high. I'd find it hard to recollect extreme emotion in tranquility.

Were any poems too personal to include?

The only thing that made me leave out poems was the feeling they weren't good enough. I wrote hundreds – most didn't work.

Did you show your ex-husband the collection before publication?

The woman many regard as America's greatest living poet lives in a sprawling Upper West Side apartment where, for the past 40 years, she has written in a rocking chair overlooking the Hudson. When she gives a reading, people queue around the block to hear her - the night before we meet, so many fans turned up that they had to crouch on the floor and on window-sills.

"One secret thing happened

at the end of my mother's life, when I was

alone with her. I knew it should happen -

I knew someone was there, in there,

something less unlike my mother than

anything else on earth."

Dana Levin: I wanted to start by asking about your new book, A Village Life, which is coming out this Fall. Time feels spatial in the book, as if all the book's varied voices are speaking, events are happening, in a simultaneous temporal moment.

Joshua B. Nelson: In your mind, what makes War Dances what it is? It seems to be doing something that not very many people are doing stylistically, in terms of form.

EWR: How was your experience guest starring on The Simpsons?

Robert Pinsky: The show is very well written, and performed by superb vocal actors. The literary, cultural and political allusions tend to have engaging backspin. So supplying the voice for my character—a poet with my name and some of my attributes, but a jerk—was a large challenge.

Guernica: When and how did you get into poetry? When did you write your first poem?

Robert Pinsky: What I got into was art, even before I could use the word “art.” My daydreams always have involved making something: a building, the design of some object, a picture, a dance, a song, a movie, a story.

You once went to the Letterman Show with some friends. Was it a negative experience?

The interview took place at Violi's Putnam Valley, New York home in May 2004

Martin Standard: How do you look back on thirty years of doing this, of doing this "poetry life" - both in terms of your life as a whole, and how the poetry has developed over that time. I know it's a big question.