When Robert Pinsky, former poet laureate of the United States and founder of the Favorite Poem Project, opened the floor to questions during Thursday's lunchtime talk with students, he promised to treat each one with respect. And why wouldn't he?

At the heart of his belief, shared in his 1984 book Poetry and the World, is that "an artist needs not so much an audience, as to feel a need to answer, a promise to respond."

But Pinsky, who later quoted a family aphorism -- "everything is what it is and the opposite" -- is a poet of contradiction.