What is your favorite poem? Robert Pinsky, poet laureate of the United States, begged that question of a nation supposedly brain-drained by information overload and received an astonishing 10,000 plus replies.

By postcard, letter, e-mail, even audio- or videocassette, the rhymes -- and the reasons for tucking them away in memory or pasting them to the refrigerator -- flowed in from town and country.

In meters merry and sad, the unleashed bard sang from truck stops and hip-hop bars, from trailer parks and prison cells, from seniors' centers, library reading rooms and gin mills staging the subculture craze of poetic "slams," and from a park ranger deep in the forests primeval of Oregon sighing beneath the brim of his Smoky the Bear Stetson: "I think that I shall never see, a poem lovely as a tree."

Pinsky's respondents. include, he joyously reports, "a bank courier, a welder, an antiques dealer, a supermarket checkout clerk, a TV sitcom writer, a ballpark hot dog vendor, the real Dr. Patch Adams of recent movie fame, a dancer in a Broadway musical, several commercial pilots, a mail carrier, a retired parole officer, lots of actors, farmers, students, priests and rabbis -- just an amazing spread of professions and educational backgrounds."

Pinsky conceived the Favorite Poem Project as a 200th birthday gift to the Library of Congress, where the poet laureate has an office high in the rafters.

His idea was to have a broad cross section of Americans choose their favorite poems and briefly explain why.

From these, now flowing at the rate of a dozen a day into computers staffed by graduate students at Boston University, l,000 will be asked to read their favorites aloud on audio tape and another 200 on video tape.

The tapes will reside in the Library of Congress archives as a sort of metrical time capsule recording a nation's poetic consciousness. "If in a thousand years from now anyone should ask who Americans were, this archive might help give an answer," Pinsky muses.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, supposedly the most moribund member of the dead poets society, was the eighth most memorized poet in a field led by Robert Frost. Poetry lovers by the score quoth "The Raven" evermore, putting Edgar Allan Poe near the top, along with Shakespeare, Yeats and Dickinson.

Like Walt Whitman, in 12th place, the poet laureate heard America singing in voices as varied as Shelley and Shel Silverstein, Keats and Ogden Nash, Langston Hughes, e.e. cummings, Dr. Seuss, Alexander Pope and Pope John Paul II. The mixture of the sublime and the scorned pleases the poet laureate, who set out to prove that poetry is alive and well beyond ivy-clad college walls, off-campus coffee bars and graduate seminars like the one he teaches in poetry writing at Boston University.

The author of five books of poetry and three collections of essays, Pinsky put Dante on the best-seller list after 700 years with his translation of the Inferno. He helped Polish Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz translate his poems into English.

With his love of languages, Pinsky is delighted that poems in many tongues were nominated.

"It would not be American to limit the choices to English," he explained in the book-lined den of his suburban Boston home.

"We have on our Web site poems in Yiddish, Persian, Spanish, Italian and many other tongues. There is a Japanese haiku and a poem in American sign language. We do ask that a translation be provided. Original poems, however, are not acceptable."

Entries close at midnight April 30, and an anthology of the favorites will be published by W.W. Norton.

Launched in April a year ago, the Favorite Poem Project, or FPP, as it came to be called, was encouraged at more than l00 poetry events in libraries, schools and town halls across the land. President Clinton was so impressed he adopted the FPP as part of the nation's millennium celebration.

Shortly before Pinsky's turn at the White House, the 58-year-old poet laureate found himself in a Chicago saloon judging a poetic "slam."

"Slamming is somewhere between serious poetry and karaoke, and it should be encouraged," said Pinsky, who regards poetry as a performing art.

All this exposure has convinced many Americans that this nation indeed does have a poet laureate, and the title is not reserved for British blokes in velvet knee britches bent on rhyming their way into the monarch's good graces.

Pinsky, who has just been given an unprecedented third one-year term, is the 9th U.S. Poet Laureate since Robert Penn Warren was so designated by the Librarian of Congress in 1986. When not teaching, he frequently appears on PBS' The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer, musing on the headlines in verse. He is poetry editor of SLATE, an online magazine.

There is a touch of the poet in most of us, the poet laureate avows, whether computer nerd, professional wrestler, brain surgeon or taxi driver.

-- Associated Press
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