Human uses of Poetry

Part 2 of an Interview with Dana Gioia

In this continuation of our interview with Dana Gioia, we learn more about how poetry can reach people beyond the page. Specifically, Gioia describes adaptations of his narrative poems for theatre, radio, dance, and even a santo sculpture. His work with other artists such as Helen Sung inspires us towards collaboration and cultural conversation—including how to start writing our own literary criticism: “One of the goals of contemporary criticism,” he says, “is to bring people into a conversation who never felt invited before.”

How did you begin writing narrative poetry, and how has that experience (in terms of both writing and reception) compared to your lyric poems?

I wanted to tell stories from the start, but I found myself working in a vacuum. It was assumed that contemporary poetry was necessarily lyric. Narrative poetry was considered a doomed enterprise. Modernism demanded that poetry achieve a lyric intensity that was at odds with the practical requirements of telling a story. This wasn’t entirely untrue. It’s hard to write a good narrative poem.

Nonetheless, I felt that certain types of experiences could only be conveyed as stories. Human beings communicate through both song and story, and so had poetry through most of its history. There was no intrinsic reason that storytelling had vanished in poetry. I struggled to find a useful contemporary model. Most of the modern narrative poems I saw were dull and prosaic—neither good poetry nor compelling stories.

How did you overcome that impasse? How did you find a way into narrative poetry?

I read Robert Frost’s North of Boston. This was his second book, published all the way back in 1914. It was the missing link between traditional and modernist narrative poetry. Frost’s narrative style is austere and understated. The language is ordinary speech stripped of any ornament. The emotional meaning is communicated only by implication. I consider it one of the most innovative books of twentieth century American literature, not just in poetry. I believe that Hemingway based a great deal of his early style on this book. Hemingway knew Frost, and he would have read the book. North of Boston has a Hemingwayesque style before Hemingway published his famously minimal early stories. Frost captures the ordinary speech of the poor in New England, but he never stereotypes his characters. He invests them with simple dignity.

I looked at these mostly neglected poems, and I knew I’d found a point of departure for my own work—the road not taken for modernist narrative. I didn’t want to copy Frost’s style. I wanted to tune it up. My characters had to come out of my own life experience. I needed to have the high notes that Frost was deliberately avoiding. I wrote and revised for an entire summer. I sketched out a couple of poems, all but one of which I discarded. That one made it into my first book. It’s a strange dramatic monologue called “The Room Upstairs.”

Since then, I have had one or more narrative poems in each of my books. I’ve gotten better at writing them. Subtler and foxier. Poetic narrative is a balancing act. You need to create a story that moves forward while modulating in and out of moments of lyric intensity. In a novel, the connective tissue would be huge. But poetry moves more quickly, so connective tissue is minimal.

You write all sorts of poems. Narrative is only one mode for you. You are best known for helping revive formal poetry. Why is narrative so important for you?

When poets gave up the power of storytelling, they diminished the art. It’s the same as when they gave up the power of song. Poems should raise language to the intimate physicality of song. Song and story are how the average person engages in poetry. If I were to expand the audience for poetry, storytelling had to be part of my project.

Is there a connection between your narrative poems and your opera libretti?

The two forms are very similar. Writing narrative poetry made it easy for me to plot and write for opera. Both forms tell stories in similar ways—alternating between narrative and lyric moments. In opera, the lyric moments need to be longer and more dramatic. Of course, opera is different in that it is a collaborative art. You work with a composer, and then a director. Finally, you work with singers. They become your voice. Writing libretti, I always imagine the singers. I strive to create words that allow them to become and then express their characters. That’s not something you think about writing poems for the page.

Collaboration is not a word that poets use often. Has artistic collaboration been important to you?

My career is different from that of any other poet I know because I’m constantly collaborating with other artists. The professional class of Ivy League critics think of poetry as an abstract and solitary art. To them, poetry is language in search of the limits of its own ability to express meaning. It all takes place on the printed page. That sort of theoretical physics is interesting, but I’m also interested in all of the possibilities of poetry. I want to write poems that exist both on the page and in spoken performance. I want to shape the sound of words to engage my audience. I think that is why composers are attracted to my work. They can hear it as verbal music. I’m pleased when another artist wants to do something with one of my poems. A good poem should lead a life beyond what the author intended. This is especially true of narrative poems. My stories have led interesting lives off the printed page.

A BBC Radio producer asked me to record my long narrative poem, “Homecoming,” which is spoken by a murderer. (Much of it is based, sadly, on my own family history.) He wanted to broadcast it on a show dedicated to short stories. I was fascinated by how well it worked, though I had never imagined it as radio. A few years later a Sirius-XM producer convinced me to premiere my narrative, “Haunted,” on her satellite show. Radio is the perfect medium for poetry. Verse actually sounds more naturalistic than prose fiction because poetry exploits pure sound.

More interestingly, the choreographer Mark Ruhala turned “Counting the Children” into a full-length dance piece. He was fascinated by a scene in which a group of injured dolls come to life. He said he suddenly saw the whole poem in choreographic terms. To my surprise, he also wanted to incorporate the entire text of the poem into the work with a narrator and singers. Initially, I was against it, but his instincts were right. The poem, long as it is, added a verbal layer of artifice to the physical emotion conveyed by the dancers.

Counting the Children was an extremely austere and powerful piece. I worried that it was too stark and demanding, but it proved very popular. The dance company extended the run twice. Many people came back to see it a second and a third time. Then another composer wanted to turn the poem into an opera, but that felt like a mistake, so I declined to write the libretto.

“Haunted” (with composer Paul Salerni), however, was turned into a dance opera, though I cut and reshaped its text. I couldn’t quite make the story wordless, but I tried. We had only one singer. The rest of the cast were dancers.

Can you really make a narrative poem into a mostly wordless theater work?

You wouldn’t think so, but you can. Stories have a life of their own. There’s something about narrative that can travel—the plot, the characters, the situations, even the tone. The narrative tradition originated in myth. Myths are mutable. They move naturally from one art form to another. Myths are not confined to language: the story and characters can turn into statues, paintings, dances, and songs. Tragic drama began as ritual choral songs and dances. Then the poet Thespis added a single actor to converse with the chorus. That engendered European theater and opera, which eventually became secular but remain rooted in myth.

By writing narrative poetry, I opened up this the mutable mythic energy. It was not intentional. I didn’t write any of these works to be anything other than a poem. I labored over every line as poetry and nothing else. I wanted them to work as well out loud as on the page. It never occurred to me that they would go off and lead independent lives.

Are there other examples of wordless adaptations of your poetry?

Let me tell you my most surprising experience. There’s a traditional art form in New Mexico, the carving or painting of santos—saints and sacred figures. It is one of the oldest arts in the U.S. It started 400 years ago when the Spanish came to Mexico and the Southwest. The artist who carves or paints them is the santero. New Mexico has had a continuous tradition of santeros that predates the creation of the United States.

Luis Tapia is a santero, probably the greatest living practitioner of the art. I wrote an essay about his startlingly original interpretations in the art for a museum show. A year later I was in New Mexico and, by sheer coincidence, bumped into the artist’s wife. She said Luis has been trying to find you. So I met him for a drink, and he brought out a huge box. “I’ve got something for you,” he said smiling. It was a santo he had made after reading my “Ballad of Jesus Ortiz.” He said that my poem about my great-grandfather’s life and death reminded him of his own family. I now have a wooden version of my poem sitting on the shelf of my library.

Your life has been a testament to the power of polymathy. Poetry can “awaken, enlarge, or refine humanity,” you’ve said. How do you believe poetry can be amplified when it works with other disciplines?

I advise young poets to think of themselves as artists rather than academics. You can have a conventional career as an academic to teach creative writing in an MFA program—if you can get a job, that is. Or you can choose to be a poet in a broader cultural context where your potential audience includes everyone. Teachers work with students and other teachers usually in a fixed place. Artists work with all sorts of people. Many arts are necessarily collaborative. You generally can’t put on an opera or theater piece by yourself. Poets in our complicated, dynamic culture will find themselves working with composers, choreographers, painters, printmakers, dancers, singers, filmmakers, sculptors, and even architects. Each opportunity summons creative responses that would not have happened to writers limited to the printed page.

Can you give an example of one of these unexpected collaborations for poets?

I met an architect in LA who was designing a large garden. He wanted to build it with a path marked by stones with haiku inscribed in them. He wanted the haiku to be responses to the actual landscape around it. He asked me to write them. I pled incompetence but put him in touch with an excellent haiku poet.

Meanwhile composers are desperate to find poets to help them create operas, choral works, and songs. It seems to me a very odd notion of poetry that doesn’t include writing words for music. Shakespeare and Dryden did it, so did Yeats and Auden. I love the challenge of writing song lyrics that can stand on their own as poems on the page. I wrote poems for the jazz pianist Helen Sung’s album, Sung with Words. With the composer Lori Laitman, I created a children’s opera, The Three Feathers, which is about to have its seventh or eighth production next year in Colorado. These projects were not only artistically engaging. They were fun.

Aside from the fun, have these creative partnerships changed your sense of your own art?

These collaborations helped me answer my original question: what are the human uses of poetry? Poetry matters because we need the words to express what we feel and think, especially at crucial moments in our lives. Until I worked with other artists in other forms, I didn’t realize how many places poetry played a necessary role. How did our culture end up confining poetry to the classroom? I learned that poetry belongs in every corner of the culture, even in jazz clubs and public gardens. People may not always know they need it, but the appetite remains. When they encounter real poetry, they respond.

In his book Technic and Magic, philosopher Federico Campagna describes magic as the ability “to modify our own reality-settings beyond the diktats of our social context, even when history tells us that we are powerless and stuck.” You’ve noted the connection between poetry and magic, and we’d love to learn more about how poetry has been—and continues to be—a life-changing force.

In primal cultures, poetry was inseparable from magic. Poetry was a kind of magical speech used in rituals. The purpose of the rituals was to change or maintain reality. These rituals mostly protected the community by uniting humans with the divine, the living with the dead, the temporal with the eternal. Magic became coded into the language of poetry. In Latin, the word carmen means a song. It also means a poem, a prophecy, and a magical spell. In ancient Roman consciousness, those things were all related.

Magic continues to be coded in our own language: carmen becomes chanson in French, which becomes chant in English, but most interestingly, enchantment. If I find the two of you enchanting, it means that you have the power to arrest my attention. Kids still use charms in the schoolyard: “Rain, Rain, go away, come again some other day...” These are magic spells. What is a love poem but a verbal construction designed to make your beloved reciprocate your passion? Let’s take it one step further: what is a poem but a verbal construction designed to change your awareness, your emotions, your perceptions of some aspect of reality? Potent poetry is necessarily magical.

Do you apply that belief in your own poetry?

Without getting loony about it, I think that we strengthen poetry by acknowledging its magical roots, its occult structures, its supernatural longings, and its prophetic possibilities. This is easier for me, perhaps, because I’m Catholic. I have been raised in a world full of powerful symbols. Unlike secular people, Catholics believe these symbols actually connect to a metaphysical reality.

My own poetry is about the interplay of the physical and metaphysical. I think very most people believe in a metaphysical realm even if they don’t have a language for it. There is a nearly universal sense that there is more to existence than the surface of the physical world. Even physicists are obsessed with discovering the hidden shape of reality—to find things beyond what we easily perceive. Poetry and its sister art of music both bring us into a metaphysical state of awareness.

What advice would you give to poets looking to engage simultaneously in criticism? Can looking at poetry so theoretically be a danger to your own writing?

Literary culture is a conversation. It’s an ongoing conversation that began before our births and will continue after we’re gone. This conversation has many voices coming in from many sides. It encompasses both the creative and the critical. If you go to a play, it’s very odd if you don’t talk to your partner about the experience. The conversation is the natural outcome of encountering a work of art—unless it was so boring that it left you numb. But for any good work of art, the conversation is a natural aspect of the artistic experience. Creativity and criticism exist in a dialectic.

Since all poets exist as part of that conversation, writing criticism is the most natural thing for a poet to do. That being said, not many people can or will write criticism well. First, like all forms of writing, it is a craft you have to learn. And it takes a great deal of time to write a good review or a good essay.

For a poet, writing criticism is an act of generosity, a gift to the art itself. One reason that American poetic culture doesn’t currently achieve its potential is that the criticism is so small and so bad. Academic criticism has become remote and hyperspecialized. Almost no one reads it, even in English departments. Journalistic criticism has almost disappeared along with the newspapers and magazines that once supported it. The electronic media has little interest in poetry. Criticism mostly survives in semi-private blogs and podcasts with tiny audiences.

When I quit my business job, I made my living as a writer. I wrote a lot of journalism for newspapers, magazines, and radio. I had a regular gig on BBC Radio. Most of those places no longer exist or no longer cover poetry.

How did you conceive your work as a critic? Did you consider yourself as a journalist or an artist working in another medium?

I divided my prose into two categories: the pieces that I wanted someone to be able to read thirty years from now, and the stuff that was due on Monday. I wrote the first kind slowly in the same way I would write a poem. I wrote the second as quickly as my wits allowed.

Now I have almost given up journalism. I want to write serious essays. To write essays that matter, you must summon all of the talents you bring to a poem and then some. You need to labor over every sentence. You have to put the emotion in as well as intelligence. You need to use your imagination to let it take flight. Great critics such George Orwell, Anthony Burgess, and Virginia Woolf had a genius for the genre.

How does a young writer begin as a critic?

You learn by doing. Begin by writing a couple of short reviews. Don’t wait for an editor to ask you. See if you like the process. See if you’re any good at it. Try to write clearly, engagingly and honestly. The biggest problem with American poetry reviews is they’re dishonest. They heap praise on everybody, because people are writing them to make friends, and indeed every editor knows this which is why most editors don’t run poetry reviews. If after having written three or four reviews you like using that part of your imagination, if you feel it brings you more deeply into the art, then write a longer piece. Put all of your literary skill into it. You will get published. Editors never have enough good, dependable reviewers.

I must confess my notion of criticism is still largely defined by print culture. That world is contracting, but there are new possibilities for criticism in electronic culture. Those new media are still developing. My brilliant brother Ted writes serious jazz and music criticism on Substack, and he has developed a large following. But he is immensely prolific. He writes something every day and publishes a substantial essay every week. Few writers, especially young ones, can sustain their own brand. They need the support of editors and journals (print or electronic). Very few on-line journals can afford that sort of support. Most writers and editors need the support of a community. 

A writer also has to adjust his or her work for the medium. When my filmmaker son asked me to record some of my poetry lectures on film, I knew I’d have to reshape my content for the new medium. I have to change the pacing and work in coordination with images. Done properly, you can pack a huge amount of information accessibly in a film. We did a fine film on Edwin Arlington Robinson. We have another on Wallace Stevens as well as a three-part film about Charles Baudelaire. These films are serious critical enterprises.

On a less serious vein, I’ve also done—at my son’s request—a seven-part series of very short films with practical advice about writing when you have a full-time job.

Do you have any sense of the future of poetry criticism?

What may save poetry criticism is that your generation has a broader and more flexible view than my generation did. My generation was mostly locked in academic templates that became less relevant with each decade. The critical conversation it cultivated was limited to academic specialists. The readership became so small as to be negligible. It is important to bring new people into a conversation if you want it to stay lively. You need diverse people who bring divergent points of view. Generally the more inclusive the conversation, the more interesting it becomes.

One of the goals of contemporary criticism is to bring people into a conversation who never felt invited before. I’ll give you one example. When “Counting the Children” was being turned into a dance, there were 12 women, about 17 or 18 years old, who were dancers and a couple who were singers. In the course of this drama, the entire text of the poem was spoken. By the time we were at the dress rehearsal, these dancers had not only heard it two dozen times, but they had been asked to become either characters or emotional moments in the piece, which is interesting because they had to bring a nonverbal talent. When I came in, they wanted to talk about it. One girl raised her hand and she asked a really good question, then they all begin asking me questions and it became the single most interesting conversation I have ever had about my own work. And they were not people who were “literary” or even old enough to have gone to college. But they had an artistic, creative intelligence, something nonverbal and non-literary that brought a new level of emotional and human insight to the work that just astonished me. I walked away from that day thinking maybe if we change the people we talked to about poetry, we might get some more interesting conversations.

Now, whenever I give a reading I ask if people have any questions about my poetry or anybody’s poetry. And there’s a moment’s pause, then suddenly you can’t shut the audience up, they are so hungry to have a serious conversation about poetry. Maybe the whole point of poetry is the energy that we create between the speaker and the hearer who are different sides of one another’s humanity. We’ve truncated that conversation, that relationship. We limit it so much that we have no idea of the real magic that we’ve inherited.

Have you ever connected poetry with the sciences either theoretically or in your own work?

I found that the classes I took in physical science and astronomy contributed more to my poetic consciousness than most of the literary classes I took. This became much more important to me living in the hills of northern California. When I first moved here, it was an entirely rural landscape. I’ve been here off and on for twenty-seven years. It has become suburbanized on the fringes, but I still see more animals each day than I do people. I have a deer that comes to my back door when I call her. I am fascinated by every aspect of the place, but I wouldn’t call my amateur naturalism by a word as exalted as “science.”

How did this move to the country change your sense of yourself?

My sense of my own existence is very different now from what it was when I lived in big cities. I was once a consummate urban creature. I didn’t know anything else. I was raised in Los Angeles. Then I lived in Boston, Vienna, New York, and Washington. I loved the world that humans made. I hardly knew the natural world. I didn’t discover the world that God made until my late forties. Once you start seeing yourself as a tiny element in a vast non-human world that moves without any human agency, you revise your sense of yourself. I can get bored with myself, but I’m never bored with the woods and hills around me. Trees bloom, leaves fall, lupine emerges and disappears, flowers cast their seed. The vultures do their mating rituals on the trees down the hill. I see a new generation of deer born every year. I have learned the names of every tree and bird I see, and almost every wildflower, though there’s always something new coming up.

Right now, I’m looking out the window at two acorn woodpeckers. I’m not quite sure what mischief they’re up to. Living here is like being in a club where you know the names of all your fellow members. This non-human company gives me joy in my daily life.

Living here has changed my sense of poetry. It deepened my appreciation for the Californian visionary Robinson Jeffers, who is one of the greatest nature poets of American literature. He was the first poet in our literature to see the natural world from a non-human perspective. For him, humanity was not the measure of all things. It was just one species out of many, and a very disruptive one. Jeffers was catalytic for the environmental movement. It’s surely not coincidental that he was trained in the sciences.

Nature also brings interesting human encounters. I don’t meet many literary folk out here, but I encounter people learned in other areas—trees, birds, grapes, marine life. When my wife and I go tromping around in marshes and hills, we often meet fanatical birders. They have bulky telescopes and super binoculars. I admire their ability identify five different sorts of terns at 200 yards. I learn things from them. I enjoy their company in the same way I appreciate musicians and poets. I like the company of passionate eccentrics. After all, I am one.