What is a poem? What is it intended to do? Who is it intended for? A poet Dana Gioia and host Russ Roberts explore these questions and more as they talk about the meaning of poetry. The conversation touches on many personal topics: death, loss, family, and our common humanity. At the beginning of each episode, Roberts mentions EconTalk’s tagline: “Conversations for the curious”. This interview certainly fits the bill, as the two explore what various poems mean to them and their families.
Dana Gioia’s career as a writer, poet and critic has spanned many genres, including being a freetist for opera and jazz musicians. He has done community advocacy work in the arts as the State Poet Laureate of California and as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Here is a quote from Gioia about his strengths as a poet:
You know, when I was a young, ambitious writer at Stanford and Harvard and I was thinking about how I was going to make my mark, I had this English department’s idea of what a poem is, and its relationship to the larger culture and the history of ideas. But, these days, I think what a poem is, is this tool of language that you create, which is half a play and half a kind of spiritual exploration. But, the highest thing you can do is be useful, is for these words to be useful to people who are having problems in their real life. If you’re lucky, they’ll find uses for your poem that you didn’t even think of.
But, I had a very strange thing where I wrote a poem and got people to talk about it in a completely different context. And I read the poem, and I realized that it works in that context equally well. In fact, I loved that as much as I loved mine. Because, poems are like children. Once they are out of the house, they do things that you would not think of and that you may not agree with. But, what you are trying to do is enable them to live independent lives.
I know that sounds strange, but once my poems are published, I’m just one of the readers. I could be so much better-to be informed student, but if they belong anywhere, they are languages, for language students.
Gioia and Roberts agree on the power that poetry has in ordinary lives, whether that of a writer or an economist, a mother or a child, an opera lover or a pop song lover. Do you agree? Their conversation reminded me of bits of poetry that I memorized when I was young, in high school or college, and how they appear from time to time in my daily life. As an avid choir singer over the years, many of these poems are songs and have managed to make their way into my mind, almost by mistake, but somehow, with their words and rhythms, they match the feelings and thoughts I have years later.
What did you take away from Gioia’s interview with Roberts? You may want to consider some of the questions below:
1 – Many of Roberts and Gioia’s discussions focus on the power of poetry to connect us to past and future generations. Russ quotes a few lines from Septimus in Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia:
We spill as we pick up, like travelers who have to carry everything in their hands, and what we leave behind will be taken by those behind. The journey is too long and life is too short. We die on the march. But there is nothing but the march so there is nothing to lose in it. The lost plays of Sophocles will gradually change, or be rewritten in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves again. Mathematical findings summarized and lost views will have their time again. Don’t you think, my lady, that if all Archimedes had been hidden in the great library of Alexandria, we would have lost the corkscrew?
Sophoclesas a tragic playwright, he was certainly some kind of poet. Archimedes and the ancient physicians, however, belong to what we may call science. What about other ways of communicating people’s ideas? Do scientific or economic ideas also sometimes apply to this role of poetry, which connects people to people?
2 – Gioia defines poetry as something “intended to be hear it.” Historically, he points out that poetry has always been connected to song and performance. Perhaps this is true to some extent for any information expressed in human language, it is more than just a visual representation on a page. Can ideas exist without discussion? To what extent are poems conversational and playful?
3 – In the first part of the conversation, Gioia reads a poem he wrote, Meet me at the Lighthouse. This is dedicated to his cousin, who died young. It begins a discussion about the poem itself, which contains jazz, Yeats, and classic folktale themes, as well as references to the poet’s cousin’s memory. How do these references work together within the unit of the poem to convey meaning? What do they say about Gioia himself, or his cousin?
4 – Gioia mentions the Latin word for the poem as its name for the song, Carmen. Contemporary popular music often works like poetry. Is there a particular poem that has stuck with you throughout your life? What was that poem that made so much sense and why do you remember it? If a poem has a musical background, how does that enhance it? What is it about music that is necessary to a poem, or is it necessary at all? Does this apply equally to different genres and eras of musical poetry: JS Bach, opera, classical poetry, Bob Dylan, Taylor Swift (of the Victimized Poets Department), Kendrick Lamar?
Related podcasts
Dana Gioia on Reading, Poetry, and Reading with Miss BishopEconTalk
Dwayne Betts on Beauty, Prison, and Remaking, EconTalk
Cheryl Miller in Hertog and the Humanities, The Great Antidote
Zack Weinersmith in Beowulf and Bea Wolf EconTalk
More to explore
Shannon Chamberlain Poets’ Freedom: Thomas Wyatt as a Character in Wolf Hall in the Reading Room and, relatedly, that of Garth Bond The Freedom of Poets 2: Thomas Wyatt and Petrarch
This is Sarah Skwire’s place J’s Opportunity Cost. Alfred Prufrock in EconLib
Sarah Square to Milton’s Poetry and Prose: From the Liberty Fund Rare Book Room online Library of Liberty
Confucius’ King of Shi, the Chinese “Immortal Poems”. online Library of Liberty
The Bard and the Professor: The Influence of Adam Smith on the Poet Robert Burns at AdamSmithWorks
Adam Smith Also Teaches Good Teaching at AdamSmithWorks
The Art of Imitation: Some Interesting Views of Adam Smith’s Artistic Ideas at AdamSmithWorks
Ancient Opinions on the Value of Poetry in the Reading Room
The Poet as Intellectual: How the Romantics Took Over Thomas Malthus in the Reading Room
Nancy Vander Veer has a BA in Classics from Samford University. He has taught high school Latin in the US and held programs and fundraising roles at Paideia. Based in Marburg, Germany, he is currently completing a master’s degree in European Social and Economic History at Philipps-Universität Marburg.
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