A standing-room only crowd packed Campbell Recital Hall last night for a poetry reading by the Mohr Visiting Poet and former United States Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky ‘65.

Pinsky — who delivered Stanford’s Commencement address in 1999 — is a professor at Boston University but is a visiting professor at the University this quarter, and he gave his reading as part of his role as the Mohr Visiting Poet.

Sara Michas-Martin, a poetry lecturer, said Pinsky’s position is a prestigious one.

“It’s a very special honor to have the position,” Michas-Martin said. “Only one writer has the position per year.”

Ned Henningsen ‘09, who is in Pinsky’s “The Occasions of Poetry” course, said he admires Pinsky both as a teacher and as a poet.

“We write poems and he leads a workshop of them in class,” Henningsen said. “He is hilarious, and a good teacher. [...] But what’s funny is how he’ll tell us that the only way to really get better isn’t to hear him or anyone speak, but to write our own poetry and study that of great masters.”

Pinsky’s “The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996” was awarded the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

English Prof. Ken Fields, who introduced Pinsky, said last night’s speaker is the only three-term Poet Laureate (he served from 1997-2000). Pinsky and Fields were Stegner Fellows at Stanford together.

“Robert and I shared a Wallace Stegner Fellowship when we were graduate students just a few years ago,” Fields joked. “What an extraordinary time that was becomes clearer to me every year.”

Pinsky commented on his own experience at the University, discussing his gratitude but also his feelings of alienation.

“It is truly wonderful to be back here amongst old friends and new friends,” he said. “[But] when I came to Stanford, I did not feel at home. I was from the East Coast. I was Jewish. The place was nicknamed ‘the Farm.’”

He added that art can draw upon such experiences of alienation.

“Writing about hometowns is based on the idea that you don’t belong there,” he said. “That human phenomenon of feeling quiet different from someone and quite like someone [at the same time] is what life is made of ... it’s what art is made of.”

Pinsky began his reading with poems from “The Figured Wheel,” including one called “ABC” that contained only 26 words in alphabetical order. He also read more recent poems, including “Poem of Disconnected Parts” from his book “Gulf Music,” which will be released in September.

“I’ve gotten interested in the idea of disconnection,” he said. “I would like to be able to write poems that involve politics that are not sermons.”

Pinsky spoke about how his own life figures in his poetry.

“I really was in the eighth grade in the dumb class, also known as the bad class,” he said. “That’s a background of this poem. [I’m] trying to use the feelings of those days to focus my political feelings now.”

In one of the event’s more touching moments, Pinksy read an elegy for a late friend who he said loved jokes.

“I really like jokes,” Pinsky laughed. “And by jokes I don’t mean witty remarks. I mean the Pope and an optometrist and a zebra go into a bar. And there’s a punch line.”

Adhaar Desai ‘09 commented afterwards on Pinsky’s engagement with the audience.

“It was almost chilling to feel the entire audience hanging on his words,” he said, “waiting for him to turn the page so we could exhale.”