To Bear The Weight Of life

An Interview with Dana Gioia

When what counts as a poem is expansive and ever-growing, how might we define poetry? To what unique standards can we hold this art as we write, read, and listen? Of a poem’s effect, renowned poet and critic Dana Gioia says, “You feel instinctively whether a poem has cost the author anything.” In part 1 of this 2-part conversation, Gioia speaks about his inspiring career across poetry, criticism, and business. Even in unexpected places, he describes a hunger for poetry and the powerful stakes it can raise: above all else, poetry shakes illusions.

You’ve spoken about how poetry is not a subject matter, but rather a language. Can you tell us more about this statement?

In my own education—half a century ago at Stanford and Harvard—we talked a lot about poetry. But the conversation was mostly about aesthetics. Poetry was taught as a history of literary styles. In retrospect, I realized there were two essential questions that my teachers never addressed. No one ever attempted to define what poetry actually was. Neither did anyone ever discuss (or even speculate about) its practical human uses.

Later I spent years thinking about these questions. (I’m a ruminative person, though no one believes it.) I was greatly influenced by Eric Havelock’s The Muse Learns to Write, which deals with the period when classical Greece went from oral to written culture. I also pondered Walter Ong’s brilliant Orality and Literacy. (Father Ong was a student of Marshall McLuhan.) I gradually changed my sense of poetry. I now understood that poetry is not a particular style of language; nor is it a set of evocative subjects or genres. Poetry is a special way of speaking, different from ordinary speech, that invites and rewards a special way of listening.

Poetry originated in oral culture. It is an art which was perfected as an oral medium before humanity developed writing. The advent of writing allowed the art to develop new forms of expression, but the nature of poetry remained constant—an alternative form of language that attracted and sustained heightened attention. Imagine living in an oral culture where the only medium is live speech by people physically present. Humanity created a special kind of speech that was used in a variety of special occasions—mostly sacred rituals—to express the things the community could not afford to forget.

How does an audience recognize this “special kind of speech”?

The language is stylized in ways that native speakers immediately recognize. It is shaped for expressive effect—by audible stress patterns, syllable count, tone patterns, rhymes, or whatever. The stylization announces its special status as ritual language. Most cultures use some form of meter, but different cultures have different techniques. The key thing is that the stylization can be heard. Even today, if someone reads a poem in public, the audience can tell the precise moment that the speaker goes from speech into poetry. The language of the poem and the delivery of the speaker changes from ordinary speech.

Poetry is easiest to recognize if the lines are in meter. If I’m talking and I suddenly say, “It was many and many a year ago / In a kingdom by the sea, / That a maiden there lived whom you may know / By the name of Annabel Lee...,” you can recognize the exact point at which I’m going from ordinary speech into a ritual language.

New oral forms of poetry such as hip-hop have elaborate stylization. No one misses the distinction between the rap and ordinary speech. The audience enjoys it not despite its differences from everyday speech, but because of them.

Is that need for stylization also true for written poetry?

In writing, it’s a little more complicated. At first, ancient poets and scribes simply tried to record the oral performance. It was a way of preserving the recitations of poets such as Homer. But as the culture of writing developed—first in handwritten manuscripts, later in printed books, and more recently on digital screens—the distinction between poetry and prose also had to become visual. Poets changed the way their work was laid out on the page. You recognized a poem on the page as different from prose. The visual arrangement signaled and exploited its differences. Poetry now also became a special way of writing which required a special way of reading.

The important thing to remember is that poetry is an alternate form of language. It can say anything speech can say. It can speak in countless styles. It can be exalted or vulgar. The key thing is its effect—a spell of heightened attention. In defining poetry, I’m empirical and permissive. Poetry is a stylized way of speaking. and different cultures, historic periods, and authors have used it for different purposes.

But one must not forget its tribal origins. If you go back to ancient poetry (or the poetry of aboriginal cultures), you see its purposes were sacred, religious, and ritual. Poetry was a language meant to unite the human and the divine, the temporal and the eternal.

Is that sense of the sacred still relevant to poetry?

The history of poetry is the gradual secularization of the art. Yet the sense of its sacred origins lingers on. If you ask the average person what’s more exalted, prose or poetry, the answer will always be poetry. The art still has a residual sense of sacredness. That’s probably why some teachers and critics try to exclude the comic, the vulgar, and the mundane from the poetic canon. Any subject will work if the artist can arrest your attention. The oldest and most predominant way of focusing attention is meter. It creates a mild hypnotic spell. It also increases the mnemonic power of the language. In oral cultures, poetry had to be memorable. We know from historical sources that the training of bards was heavily mnemonic.

How might this understanding of poetry as a language apply to broader poetic categories such as filmed poetry?

Let me make one distinction before we talk about film. The basic form of language is speech. People talk all the time. There are two conventional ways of organizing all that gab. One is to arrange it by rules of rhetoric. We call that method prose. Prose is not speech—it is highly reorganized speech. The second way to organize the chaos of speech is by applying a metrical rhythm. We call that method verse or poetry.

Movie scripts are not written in prose. Screenwriters want the dialogue to sound like real speech. Only documentaries tend to use prose—mostly as voice-overs. Prose makes actors sound as if they are reading, not talking. If you hear my voice on the radio, you know at once if I am speaking or reading a text. It’s intuitive. Each form of language sounds different from the other. The natural medium of film is speech. Since poetry is closer to speech than prose, it works naturally on film—as long as it is spoken rather than read.

Do screenwriters and directors exploit the relationship between poetry and speech?

Yes, they do it constantly, though few literati notice. I have been taking notes for years on the use of poetry in film and TV. If we could move our zoom camera into my studio closet, I could show you a huge pile of notes—each one recording a particular instance of poetry in a film or television show. People don’t believe me, but I can offer close to a thousand examples, collected at random. You can’t watch TV regularly without hearing poetry quoted—sometimes overtly, often covertly. In a detective show, for example, one of the characters will turn to the other at a crime scene and say, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” And so on.

Why do you think so much poetry is quoted in film and TV?

I suspect there are two reasons. One is sociological—the script writers are desperate to let the world know that they’re educated and literary people, despite the generally trashy stuff they produce. “Hey, we’re serious writers, too! We read poetry.” The other reason is artistic. In the oral world of film, poetic quotation provides an instant elevation to the sublime. You think slightly differently about a psychopath, when he quotes Blake. Poetry is a powerful dramatic tool.

I first noticed the start of this trend many years ago, before the two of you were born, in Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters. At one point, Michael Caine wants to tell Barbara Hershey that he’s in love with her. They’re both married, so it’s an adulterous attachment. He bumps into her at a bookstore and buys her a copy of E. E. Cummings’s Collected Poems. As she reads the poem he recommended later in her apartment, you hear Michael Caine’s voice on the soundtrack:

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond

any experience,your eyes have their silence:

in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,

or which i cannot touch because they are too near.

It surprised me to hear a full poem in a popular movie, but the audience around me was mesmerized. The experience made me understand that there was still a hunger and appetite as well as a proclivity for poetry in the general audience. At Harvard and Stanford I had been told repeatedly that this audience no longer existed. I began just to take notes whenever I saw quotations and references. It became a great inconvenience, because poems appeared at such frequency that I could no longer relax while watching TV and movies. I had to get up and find a notecard. One also now often sees poets used as characters in films and TV. Poetry has become chic.

Let me summarize my meandering comments. Poetry is closer to speech than prose, so it can easily be used in film. And recently filmmakers all over the English-speaking world are using poetry as a way of adding depth and texture to their films. They are also more interested in using poetry or poets as subjects.

From our understanding, while you were working in business your poetry career began to re-surge with your books Can Poetry Matter? and The Gods of Winter. Are there any tenets of good poetry that you feel apply to good business practices from your experience working across both worlds?

On the surface, the worlds of poetry and business have nothing in common. But they’re both human enterprises. As my Mexican grandfather used to say, anything you learn in one part of life, you use in another. There is no conventional wisdom to offer on the infrequent meeting of these two worlds. I’m even reluctant to generalize because the term “business” itself is a wild abstraction—there are so many kinds of businesses from the corner newsstand to the global corporation. Even poetry is a kind of abstraction.

So, let me answer it in a specific and personal way. I took a job in business because I was a working-class guy from a poor family. I wanted to be a poet, and I decided not to be an academic. I needed a job. I’d worked since childhood, mostly in manual labor. I decided to get an MBA to improve my prospects. I had family responsibilities to my parents and my siblings. I left graduate school because I felt academia was bad for my poetry. That doesn’t mean that it’s bad for everyone’s poetry, but in my case, it made me too self-conscious and intellectual. Those were two things I didn’t need more of in my poetry. As odd as it sounds, I went to business school to be a poet. It seemed a better option than getting a PhD.

I ended up living in two completely separate worlds. It was hard to balance them in my early years. Poetry did nothing to help me in business. I was in product management—calculating production numbers, sales trends, and budget forecasts. My work was quantitative analysis. That early business experience didn’t help my poetry. With each passing year, however, my job responsibilities broadened, and the two fields began to influence each other.

So what happened when you moved into the world of business? Did you find it alien to your poetic side?

In business, I worked with people who were smart, funny, and verbal but definitely not literary or intellectual. They were not the people I’d hung around with at school. My college friends had been writers, musicians, and self-styled intellectuals. Unlike me, they were from affluent homes, and they despised the bourgeoisie. (From my background, a middle-class life didn’t seem so bad. It beat being poor.) I went from hanging around these dissident and argumentative loners into a world of positive, practical, team-players. It was a great shock like changing countries, and I sometimes felt like a spy, afraid of being discovered. Yet working with this new crowd taught me a lot about everyday language and how people told stories to one another people. Because it was slightly alien, I could see the differences more clearly. This new linguistic environment helped me de-academicize my poetry.

Did your relation to the business world change over time?

Yes, the higher up you get in business, the more your key decisions are qualitative. You look at complicated data, find the hidden, meaningful shape it reveals, and then develop a narrative to explain it. Business analysis starts to resemble reading and explaining a complicated novel. Unlike the people around me, my imagination had been trained in the arts. The others had been trained in finance, economics, or engineering. In areas such as marketing and advertising, I had an obvious advantage, but my background also helped my strategic thinking. I was able to solve complicated issues that the company had been working on for years.

Please don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t able to solve these problems easily, but after spending months analyzing and playing with the data, I repeatedly found innovative and effective solutions. Ironically, it would take me even longer to convince the company an idea would work. Breakthrough ideas always face resistance. But finally, management would say, “Well, okay, but if this fails, it’s your funeral.” In two cases, the ideas saved huge businesses that had been caught in long-term declines.

The skills you learn as an artist are valuable in business if you can survive your apprenticeship. Creativity can cross from one field to another, but you need first to master both fields. Most literary people can’t or won’t invest that sort of time or energy. I didn’t have the luxury of choice. If I didn’t make it, my family didn’t make it—my younger brothers and sister, my parents. It was my responsibility as the oldest son in an immigrant family. I accepted that role. If you take business seriously and you take poetry seriously, the two of them help each other.

Did you learn any other lessons in business that helped you as a writer?

In business I learned how to recognize my failures and learn from them. That doesn’t happen in academia. On Monday morning I might get a horrible sales report or terrible test results on some product. It was painful, but in that culture by the end of the week you’ve studied the data and are fixing the problem. In business, everyone has failures—all the time. Your skill is demonstrated in how you solve them to improve your results. In academia, people maintain a facade of infallibility. Someone might profess a crackpot theory for 40 years. All the data in the world won’t convince him or her that it’s wrong. I admired the objectivity and pragmatism of business. Companies that aren’t empirical disappear.

I also learned how to work in teams at business. This was very hard for me. Poets are private, moody people, at least I was. But I learned the power of working with groups or partners. One learns to design projects in which everyone wins. This is probably one reason why I have been successful in working with other artists.

How did you incorporate poetry as a daily practice in your business life? Could you share potential learnings and benefits experienced by inter-linking your poetry and business lives?

I’m often asked this question. But people never like the answer. I worked nine or ten hours a day at the office. I came home and had dinner with my wife. We’d clean up and have a cup of coffee together. Then I would go downstairs to the basement to work while my wife read upstairs.

For years I did very little except to work, write, and be with my family. Those were my priorities. I gave up everything else. Do you see why people don’t like my answer? Being a poet cost me a great deal. It was the necessary cost of artistic growth. As jazz musicians say, you gotta pay your dues.

Does that attitude really apply to poetry? Do poets have to pay their dues?

Yes, it applies. When you read poetry, you feel instinctively whether a poem has cost the author anything. You understand how deeply a poem goes or whether it goes nowhere. It took me years to appreciate this mystery. Poetry isn’t about technique, though technique is essential. It isn’t about ideas, though ideas can animate poems. Talent isn’t enough, though you need it. Poetry is about finding an expressive shape for your truest impulses. Most of us only find ourselves through suffering. It strips away our self-deceptions and illusions. I know now that I have to write poems that bear the full weight of my life.

I learned this most painfully when my first son died. I didn’t write anything for almost a year. Words seemed useless. Finally, I decided to finish a narrative poem I had abandoned—”Counting the Children.” It was a nightmarish poem about the father of a young daughter who has a horrifying experience in his job. The first two parts of the poem were written while my son was alive. The last section was written after his death. I now saw the earlier sections as an Inferno and Purgatorio. The new part became a visionary Paradiso. My son is not mentioned anywhere in the poem, but the grief of his loss nonetheless radiates through every line. The poem had to become something that could bear the weight of my love and sorrow.