Over the past week, as I thought about my introduction for Robert Pinsky, I had to keep reminding myself that all of you were coming here today to listen to him read, not to listen to me introduce me. I know I need to be as brief as possible, but I also want to convey to you why Robert Pinsky's work has meant so much to me and to so many poets of my generation. There is no other contemporary American poet whose work has been so formative and inspiring to so wide a range of poets, and this has to do, I think, with a quality of attention enacted by his poems, a quality that has remained the same throughout his work even though stylistically the poems have changed from book to book, from the essayistic meditations of his first two collections, Sadness and Happiness and Explanation of America, to the more alogical and visionary idioms of History of My Heart, The Want Bone, and the new poems in The Figured Wheel, his collected poems which recently won the prestigious Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets. The best word to characterize this prevalent quality is improvisation. Whether he's moving among ideas or images, meditations or stories, liturgy or slang, Robert Pinsky moves in language the way a Jazz musician moves in melody, inventing continiuities and harmonies from moment to moment out of the stubbornly disharmonious materials of contemporary life. To understand the kind of discipline and imagination entailed by an aesthetics of improvisation, we might compare a jazz musician with a symphony player. Whereas the symphony player follows the external promptings of the score and conductor, following by rote a continuity forged by others, the jazz musician, in Martha Nussbaum's words, forges continuity freshly, remaining at every point awake and responsive as he brings an intimate understanding of the history of his art and of his fellow musicians to bear upon the requirements of each unique occasion. To improvise freely does not imply or license ignorance of the past or lack of commitment to tradition, but a desire to renew tradition by testing it at every moment against the discontinuities and surprises the artist invites and accommodates. In his book of essays, The Poet and the World, Pinsky defines the responsiblity of the artist in just this way. The artist's first responsibiliy, he says, is to continue the art, but he can only fill this first responsibility by a second opposed responsibility, which is, to change the terms of the art as given. To continue the art is to acknowledge the historical and communal nature of the artist, but to change the terms of the art as given is to acknowledge that the artist is never entirely possessed or defined by the any one community or tradition. To fulfill both responsibilities is to acknowledge continuity and discontinuity, tradition and the individual talent. It is to harness individual and collective memory to the dense, particular, mongrel, contradictory, ever mutable energies of the present. For Robert Pinsky, though, improvised inventiveness is more than just a quality of art. For the self and the world the self inhabits are like jazz too. The chairs we sit on, the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, the buildings we construct, the bombs we make, are like the songs we sing, the religious rituals we perform, the poems we compose and read--everything in the world, like poetry, has to be made up first (imagined, invented freshly) before it can be made real. The imagination at work in the poem is like the imagination at work in the world, creating artifacts, images, ideas and idioms by which we individually compose ourselves and by which we are communally composed. If Robert Pinsky is one of the most important poets in America today, it is because no other poet has written as inclusively or memorably about the improvised, heterogenous nature of the desires, loves and commitments that make us who we are. Please join me in welcoming our Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky.