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Not Dead Yet
Dana Gioia
01:08:59
Ok, they’ll bite. What is poetry? Poet and critic Dana Gioia joins the guys to talk about poetry. How do poems reward the reader? What can verse tell us about memory? What’s the deal with poets?
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Transcript105 lines
- [00:00]
Dana Joya
Foreign.
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Ben Sasse
Hi, I'm Ben Sasse.
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Chris Direwalt
And I'm Chris Direwalt.
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Ben Sasse
And this is not dead yet. We're all dying, but only some of us have been brought face to face with that reality.
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Chris Direwalt
However long each of us have to do it, though, we all want to
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Ben Sasse
live a good life, one with meaning, love and joy. And our guests are here to help us do exactly that.
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Chris Direwalt
Ben's asked, do you know what I did not know? Well, I do not know most things. I do not know most things, but I did not know that the Latin word for poetry is Carmen. Did you know that?
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Ben Sasse
I feel like once when I learned that my mom, who's Linda, the word is beautiful. I learned it once then, and I've forgotten it ever since I was 7. So thanks for the reminder.
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Chris Direwalt
So it comes from the same place where we get the word canary for birds canare. And I'm sure I'm butchering. My sons will reprove me for my Latin pronunciation, but for to sing. And I like this definition.
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Ben Sasse
Yeah.
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Chris Direwalt
Carmen was generally used to signify a verse, but in its proper sense, it referred to a spell or prayer form of expiation, execration, etc. Surviving examples include the Carmen Erivele and the Carmen Celere. So this is in for our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters. This is. They're still familiar with this idea of an incantative understanding of poetry.
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Ben Sasse
That's really nice. Latin isn't a spoken language anymore. Tell your boys to go fly a kite that they don't like your pronunciation. Getting at the etymology is going to help you on your SATs, going to
- [01:57]
Chris Direwalt
help you on your SATs. And the idea of a song, a song in your heart, the idea of poetry as something magical. Right. Something transcendent really tickled me. And I am very glad that we're talking to Dana Joya. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I think in certainly more than half. I don't know how many of these we've done, but certainly in more than half, poetry has come up as a reason for living, a way to live a good life. And I did not. That is definitely. There are many things about this podcast that I did not expect, but that would be high on the list
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Ben Sasse
to that we've only done, I think one episode that was viewer mail, but I read selectively in our listener mail.
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Dana Joya
And you do?
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Ben Sasse
I do. And the thing. Thing that surprises me quite a lot is when the young grandparents and our listeners, so, you know, let's call them 50 to 62 year olds resolve that one of the things they're going to do with their grandkids because they failed to do it with their kids is memorize poetry together. I wouldn't have guessed that people would write us about this Bad podcast to say that. And I read it three times this week.
- [03:21]
Chris Direwalt
Did you see the Atlantic piece about the death of reading?
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Ben Sasse
Oh, my goodness. Not only saw it, wept over it, shared it with everyone I knew, went through the stages of grief and tried to say denial. It must be wrong. Everybody ought to read it. It's tragic.
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Chris Direwalt
Yeah, we should add that to the show notes. But the loss of the ability to interact with the written word, the loss of true literacy and what's happening there has major consequences. And one of the things in the piece that struck me was basically that we will look back on literacy, the move toward universal literacy as a phase and not the norm, because there wasn't perhaps a long arc bending toward universal literacy, but that in fact it was a technological anomaly that will pass from the scene. And if that is true, then we need poetry more than ever. Right?
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Ben Sasse
Yeah. I mean, let's pull on two threads there. The first is, it surely looks like from what the social historians can teach US, late 17th, early 18th century Massachusetts is probably the most literate place any time in history and Scotland and the US and in particular a Protestant focus on being able to read scripture together definitely was a unique outlier. And yet it's preconditioned probably for the founding of this republic. So if people say, oh, no big deal, that you lose deferred gratification and long form deliberation and self governance, self control, self restraint, self educated to a certain degree, folks. And you say, well, that was kind of an accident. Well, is America in your parenthesis as well?
- [05:17]
Chris Direwalt
Yeah, ex. Quite. Quite so. All right, we should, we should hurry to get to Dana Joya and then we can unpack a little of what he had to say afterward after our listeners are treated to his very mellifluous voice. His. He, he definitely. And I, I hope that we'll get to hear him read some of his poetry.
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Dana Joya
Good, good.
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Ben Sasse
Objective. I, I think we want to start really basic, what the hell is poetry? And get him talking about all of
- [05:47]
Chris Direwalt
his Carmen, all of his Carmen, San Diego, et cetera. Dana Joya, born in Hawthorne, California, 1950. Working class family of Sicilian and Mexican descent. First person in his family to go to college. He got very fancy degrees. But my favorite thing about Dana Joya is that he knew he wanted to be a poet and chose to Go to business school at Stanford in order to become one professionally. Because he needed a gig that would pay the bills and not go into the academy. Because, as he would later write in a very influential essay that we'll get the chance to talk to him about. The academy kills the art of poetry. Right? The defined and official universe of professional poets has been a crypt from which poetry cannot emerge. And so he did spend those years at General Foods. If you. I think he's certainly the only person that you can say has been both the poet laureate of California and been the driving force behind Jello Jigglers. He quit in 1992.
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Ben Sasse
I want credit for self restraint about not bringing Carmen and Jello Jigglers together. Keep on if you.
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Chris Direwalt
If you're doing it right. That landmark essay came out in 1991. That definitely changed the discussion and was a way forward for what it was then and still called the new formalism. And Joya was one of the leaders in the effort to bring back rhyme, meter, narrative structure, and those things. Poetry. In the 1980s. That earned him a lot of awards in poetry. It earned him a distinguished teaching position at the University of Southern California. It led to him one day becoming the poet laureate of California, where he spent four years in doing that and went to every county in California. He also was the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts in the Bush administration, 2003-2009, where he spearheaded many efforts to get people talking and singing and educate young people about the virtues of the written word.
- [08:21]
Ben Sasse
More middlebrow poetry. Let's roll.
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Chris Direwalt
Let's roll.
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Ben Sasse
Dana, thank you so much for being with us.
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Dana Joya
I'm glad to be here this morning.
- [08:32]
Ben Sasse
Chris, I know you have a better frame on an opening question, but just to allow you to mock me, I want to do a two by two by two. Dana, this is not a joke and it's not a 1983 Blue Book exam question, but I really would love it if you would help us define poetry across multiple dimensions. One of them is obviously high culture versus middlebrow and pop culture. But there's also an experiential piece for you because you've labored in so many different kinds of fields. And there's also a time element about how our conceptions of poetry have changed. But Chris and I are united in believing we need lots more of it. And people who live a healthy, flourishing, virtuous life care a lot about words to sense make. And so can you help us define poetry and not as the rifle shot. Right answer. But give us Lots of different ways into the question.
- [09:37]
Dana Joya
It's a very easy question for me to answer because it puzzled me for many years. And I understood that I lived in a culture which really couldn't define what poetry was actually. It couldn't define what beauty was. There were. It's like people faking their way through a cocktail party called culture. So I thought about it. The easiest way to begin is to. Let's define poetry simply as a very distinctive linguistic technique. And this is a universal human phenomenon. Poetry began as a special way of speaking that invited and rewarded a special kind of listening. Now, put yourself in an oral culture before writing, you know, and you know, Chris is saying something, you know you're saying something, and frankly, you've heard it all before because you guys have known each other for your whole lives, but you still surround yourself, as human beings do, with a web of speech, which is a social connection. But they developed a special way of speaking that cut through just normal talk. And what they did, it was in almost every culture, is by creating a rhythmic regularity, they created a kind of language which creates a mild hypnotic state. You know, it doesn't reduce you to passivity, but it heightens your attention and it also heightens your retention. If you look at Greek culture, who is the mother of the muses? What goddess is the mother of the muses? Memory nemnosign. And so cultures developed a way, and this is borrowing a phrase from Robert Frost here, a way of remembering what it would impoverish them to forget. And so you see this in New guinea, you see it in India, you see it in the Saxon north, you see it in the Latin south. They find a way of taking speech, which is noise moving through time and regularizing it. And so if I'm talking and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and I suddenly go, this is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines, and bearded in moss, in garments green, indistinct. And you know exactly the moment that I go from speech to verse. And so in ancient cultures, in tribal cultures, people don't have to define poetry because they go. It sounds like that it's a way of creating a special subclass of speech for important things. Now, the important things I was reading a comedy in translation of Aristophanes. The important things might be to make you laugh at human folly. It may be to remember the warriors who have died in battle, et cetera, et cetera. Now, as this comes into print, you know, first scribal culture, where they can start writing it down. You. You still Milton or Virgil, in Milton's case, it's rather obvious because he can no longer see when he's writing paradise philosophy are on the page writing and revising a poem to be performed aloud. Publication in ancient Rome didn't mean you went to the scribe and you bought, you know, gigantic scribes. It meant you go to someone's house and a trained speaker would recite the poem. A rhapsode would recite the poem. So there's a real continuity between tribal verbal culture and into modern poetry. It begins to change when you have the typewriter and you have poetry mostly being done in print, in print culture, but we'll talk about that later. So you sort of say, well, okay, you know, I can say the most. The most banal things in more or less a regular meter without even thinking about it. So is that poetry? Well, you say, well, you know, Dana, as an artistic performance, that was pretty disappointing. So, um. And so there becomes, you get the modern culture a distinction between verse, which is what we're talking about. There's speech and verse. And eventually there becomes written prose. And these are different modes of human communication. The. The prose grows out of orations. And, you know, and you can still read the Wall Street Journal opinion page. You're basically seeing small orations by their editorial board. And they're rather good at it. And so they say, well, okay. What makes poetry poetry? So I've talked about it as a technical form, a way of organizing the sounds in a language that create a kind of regularity, a kind of hypnotic focus for the listener. But when you look at it, well, you go to an ancient poet like Horus, and he goes, well, what does poetry do? It pleases, it instructs, it commemorates, it consoles. And so you start seeing it, you know, that what makes poetry different is that the language is always giving you pleasure. In the saddest poem ever written, you get a kind of pleasure from the language. I'm at the moment writing a kind of odd private book about Philip Larkin.
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Chris Direwalt
Oh, wow.
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Dana Joya
And Philip Larkin is the most. The saddest poet that ever lived. You know, home is so sad. It stays as it was left shaped to the comfort of the last to go as if to win them back. Instead it withers. So having no heart to put aside the theft and turn again to what it started as a joyous shot at how things ought to be Long fallen, wide. And I was just, in the poem, the resignation there. It's just a very sad poem, but it's beautiful. And you begin to see a kind of house where everybody's died, but perhaps the widow. And you see what it used to be, and you see what. It's withered, but it's extraordinarily beautiful. Larkin's poetry wouldn't work if he weren't so clever and so musical. So you have a way of organizing language. You have a certain set of human goals to delight as you instruct. You know, in Lucretius, he talks about, you know, the Greek doctors, who are the best doctors of the ancient world, will give you a medicine, and it's just unbelievably awful tasting. So they smear a little bit of honey on the cup. So the first thing you taste is the honey. And Lucretius says, that's what poetry is. It gives you these bleak truths about life. You know, the, the biggest one is mortality. But it, it honey coats it so that you can, you can bear to, to take in the truth. And that's certainly what Larkin is doing. So, so the technique, the human purposes. And now I'll go to the, to the thing I think that it's. That's most forgotten. Well, you know, the verse is kind of forgotten because we've been in a free verse culture for 80 years. But poetry, and this is true of fiction too, although in different ways, poetry is a way of using language that simultaneously addresses the whole human being. Now, when I read an economics article that Tyler Cowen has put on Marginal Revolution, that piece is at best only appealing to my analytical intelligence.
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Chris Direwalt
It's a very good plug for Tyler, though.
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Dana Joya
That's good. There's no emotion in it. There's no creativity in it. It's just numbers. And I'm good with numbers. And so I like using that part of my brain. But when a poem talks to me, it addresses my intellect, my emotions, my physical senses, my human body, my memory, my imagination, my intu. Simultaneously, without asking me to divide them. Now you say, well, that's rather primitive. You know, we're bright, brilliant people now, but we really aren't. We walk around 23 and a half hours of the day in a kind of a sloppy, holistic, intuitive way. And then suddenly we'll start to think. And it kind of hurts when we really think and start going through these things. And so what poetry does, and this sounds very primitive, but poetry addresses the human, human beings as they really are. Now you can. Jacques Maritain, the French philosopher, says what he's. What poets are giving you is pre conceptual knowledge. Now, let's say we walk down the street and we see like an old lady and a kid, and somehow something that's going on there just breaks our heart or it delights us or whatever. Then we walk away and we begin to reflect on why that was the case. Well, that person reminds me of my grandmother or that, you know, blah, blah, blah. But poetry is the moment where it's happening to us. We're feeling it, we're beginning to think about it, but we haven't tightened it up into a concept. And that's one of its human values.
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Chris Direwalt
All right, if we have video and this is the crisis in literacy and the numbers change from year to year, about what percentage of Americans are able to read at a seventh or eighth grade level? And the numbers aren't great. Right. Real literacy, of course, is more than phonetic and being able to decipher symbols on a page. Real literacy is the deeper knowledge that comes that the. That within words and within phrases, there are these bundles of things. They're like price signals built into words that we. I can read the writing, the writings of the Paul of Tarsus, Saul of Tarsus. I can read them thousands of years later, and I can still unpack those concepts and ideas in my mind, even through a translation, even over time. So that sort of real literacy is sort of essential to being a full person and certainly a full person participating in a republic, in a republic of self government. Video, though, tells us that we don't need that. Right. The allure of video and now artificial intelligence driven. And it can be slick and it. Can it. We. If, if poetry is a honeyed truth, Video is just honey, right?
- [21:15]
Dana Joya
It's, it's, it's all artificial honey, probably.
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Chris Direwalt
Yeah. Yeah. So if you will talk about what real literacy is, how does poetry work in that and why is that essential?
- [21:28]
Dana Joya
Well, I, I agree with everything you're saying, but I would take the pieces apart a little differently. Can people have people through most of civilization gotten by without being able to read? Yeah, you know, there's, you know, literacy was a relatively rare thing until the first areas that began universal adult literacy were Scotland and New England. It was a function of the Protestant religion that it was essential for these people to be able to read the Bible. And it gradually spread across the developed world. Now the question is, how do people attain linguistic mastery and depth? And they do it by playing with language. The entry point for that is probably poetry. If you take a little kid who can't read, they love poetry because they love hearing the, you know, the way that words can play. They love the stories and things like that. As soon as you know, they start to learn to read on the page. They disconnect that in some ways. Now, a lot of that has to do with the way the bad and inefficient and ineffective way in which reading is taught in the United States definitely do that. Once you get into the school system, rather than giving kids the poetry they like, they give them haiku to write. You know, and I. I have the great respect for haiku, but it is not an entry level genre. And they. And I have had teachers tell me proudly that. That how important it is for them to tell that poetry has nothing to do with rhyme. It has nothing to do with it's. It's a way of looking at the world, et cetera, et etcetera. And so you have a system in which the parts don't move. In the old world, children learned poetry at an early age. They memorized it and they learned to recite it. Because what it's recognizing is that language is both something you receive and you generate and you take the child. You know, I got a tape a couple of days ago in which mine nephew, I think he's nine years old, recited from memory all of Paul Revere's ride.
- [23:51]
Chris Direwalt
Oh, listen, my children and you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere until you.
- [23:56]
Dana Joya
Yeah. And now Longfellow has been completely banished from the American curriculum. But kids love Longfellow and they love the sound of Longfellow. Longfellow was probably the most popular poet in the history of the United States. And. But anyway, the kids then become this vector where great language comes in, and then they generate it. They talk about things that they've not yet experienced, emotions they haven't experienced. And so there's a kind of an emotional imaginative growth that is matching the purely linguistic growth. And you maintain that all the way, really, through college. Alfred, Lord Tennyson's father, would not let him go to Cambridge until he had memorized in Latin all of Horace's odes. And Tennyson just thought that was a reasonable request.
- [24:50]
Chris Direwalt
Ben did that. He did that between wrestling practices in Nebraska.
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Dana Joya
So anyway, you have this kind of. This tremendous literary. And then you should be teaching writing and reading through phonetics, where you connect the sound of the word with the pronunciation with the word, the way that you write a word, and that way your written language connects with your spoken language. And then if you have both of those things, I think you have the possibility of generating a higher level of linguistic capacity and hopefully literacy. Now, my mother, Mexican woman, never had much higher Education. But she had to memorize poems in what was then called grammar school. And these were very precious to her because she was raised in brutal poverty and they were among the few beautiful things that she encountered. But on the basis of those poems, she really created a great linguistic mastery. And she had to learn grammar and spelling really, in her early adult life, which she did, you know, but it was the poetry, was the linguistic battery. Now we, you know, I imagine, you know, my friend Mark Bauerlein, who worked for me at the National Endowment for the Arts, and Mark and I did these studies of American reading and, you know, he demonstrated through statistics generated by UCLA itself that you can get through UCLA without having basic literacy. And so we're in a culture right now where a lot of people don't need to read and write. That's a great loss. What scares me, however, is when our so called intellectuals and leaders can barely read and write, who have no historical consciousness, no, no subtlety in terms of their language or their. And you don't have subtlety in terms of language. I don't think you have a great deal of subtlety in terms of your conceptual thinking. So, you know, I'm. I'm more concerned, you know, with the people that are the, you know, the. Are running the great bureaucracies of the nation, of corporations, of political groups, you know, et cetera, et cetera, who lack that. My bailiwick is poetry. And I can make a very good case of its impact in education and in civic life.
- [27:29]
Chris Direwalt
I want to dog ear this page. Ben, I know has a smarter question than mine. The Harvard guys stick together. But the question that. Well, two things. One, if you'll favor us with a reading of one of your poems at some point before we're done, that would please me. And the credible threat that I can offer is that if you don't, I will. And you don't want to hear me read your poem, number one. And number two, who was the poet? What was. When you were a. Because you wanted to be a poet, you aspired to be a poet as a young man. Who did you read that made you love poetry? And by extension, maybe young people now might read to spark that love.
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Dana Joya
Well, the poet who always excites children and adolescence is Edgar Allan Poe.
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Ben Sasse
Oh, yeah.
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Dana Joya
Much despised by literary critics as a poet, but, you know, he, you know, he created, I mean, the hypnotic, you know, once upon a midnight dreary while I pondered, weak and weary, you know, and from the moment he begins, you feel, you know. Yeah. You feel the hypnotic spell and my mother used to recite Twas Many and Many a year Ago, and of Kingdom by the Sea that a maiden there lived, whom you may know by the name of Annabella. And she would recite this with great feeling. It wasn't until I was an adult that I understood what it meant to her. It was a kind of, you know, Philip Larkin says that what he's doing in a poem is he's creating a little machine that when the reader operates it, it recreates in them the experience that the poem is trying to. To preserve. And, you know, and I was able to decode my mother's. You know, it was a way of her dealing with all these terrible losses that she had in her life. But that made me like poetry. Rudyard Kipling was still, you know, rather what my 8th grade nun made us memorize some and recite some Kipling. But I did not think I was going to be poet when I was younger. I thought I was going to be a musician. And so I loved poetry, but it was not. It didn't. It never occurred to me it was going to be my profession. It sort of sneaked up on me. And literally one morning When I was 19, I was in Vienna, Austria, studying music that I realized I didn't want to be a composer. I didn't have the skill to be a professional musician. And that poetry was what I had always wanted to do but not realized it. And I think at that point I was reading W.H. auden. But I love poets who have tremendous musicality in their language and then have something to say.
- [30:21]
Ben Sasse
I've got two different thoughts, two question thrusts which overlap, but might sound different. But I want to throw them both out there. One is, we've talked a lot in other episodes of this podcast about music, and in particular about how the brain craves a return home. There's obviously a part of the brain that wants the melody and expects it. And jingles get stuck in our head if they're incomplete because our brain is feeling like that process hasn't been completed. And I wonder if poetry is speaking to the same part of the brain, and is that why kids can grab onto it and why adults, as Chris just did, can pull bits of poetry from the cobwebs of our brain. So some of it's the structure of our brain and how the relationship.
- [31:11]
Dana Joya
Two observations. If you go to the ancient world, there is no distinction between poetry and song. All poems were sung or chanted or danced, enchanted. And this is probably goes on till sometime in the Roman Era. But. But if you ever hear Russian poets recite or you hear Tennyson, there's a. We actually have a recording that a colonel who was licensed by Thomas Alva Edison went over to England to record famous voices because it never occurred to them that people would want music on these discs. And they got Tennyson. And, you know, Tennyson is there, and he goes, come into the garden. Mod for the black bat Night is flown Come into the garden. And he's chanting it. Yeats does the same way where, you know, there's a recording of Yeats, you know, and I will arise and go now and go to Innisfree. And so they ask him, you know, why he reads that way. And he said, I went to a great deal of trouble to put this poem in verse, and I will not read it as if it were prose. And it's true, because Yeats, you know, who is, you know, maybe one of the last tremendous bardic poets that we had, he understood that what made poetry poetry was the music. And so it has to be as tangible as a song. And so it's going to the same part of our brain. It's our. You know, I tell this to my students. I can't memorize. I can't do this. And I'll say, well, you know, what sport do you play? And they'll say, well, I play tennis. I said, well, do you think through every move? No, I just move and I get the beat going. I said, take the poem. Memorize it while walking around this. This building. And when you. You know, and when you come. You know, when you memorize, come back and recite it. And they. They said, oh, you know, when I was walking and I do it and I time it with my steps, it's very easy to memorize it. Yeah, because the trouble with you is you're trying to memorize poetry on the wrong side of your brain. You're trying to memorize it on your visual side. And I have students that come there, and they'll look at me, and they'll say, let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment. Love is not. They're reading it. They're reading it from a visual text that they put into the visual side of the brain. But you don't. You just let it flow. And you put it the same way where you put athletics and music, your muscle memory.
- [33:52]
Chris Direwalt
So if we are. If we are spiritual beings who are living a physical life, poetry is one of the things that pierces the veil between.
- [34:02]
Ben Sasse
That was Poetic, Chris.
- [34:03]
Dana Joya
Exactly. Well, I mean, one of the great advantages, I mean, this is what people, everything about the way poetry is taught in the university is pretty much wrong. And it's, you know, they're, well meaning. People think that this is the way to do it. But, you know, you know, at Harvard I was taught that poetry is so sophisticated, only the most clever people can decode it and blah, blah, blah, blah. It's not, it's the most primitive technique we have. And you can tell if a poem is any good in your physical body. You know, you feel it intuitively and physically, and if you don't, it's sort of dead on the page. And so poetry is a wonderful way of taking a young person and taking great language and fusing them together, and they respond to it in the fullness of their humanity. I mean, I'm sure that my, my nephew is named Giacomo. He's, he's a Mexican and Italian, his mother is Korean. So I mean, he's the true American. You know, I don't know if Giacomo understands all of the historical events that are being talked about. You know, in, in Paul Revere's mind. I bet he doesn't know what a Middlesex is and you know, but he embodies it and he grows into this language. You know, when I was the chairman of the nea, we wanted to create arts education projects, but we didn't have enough money to do anything that was, you know, that was worthwhile. I mean, we couldn't buy instruments, we couldn't do this, that or the other. So we went to poetry, which has got a fantastic advantage of being dirt cheap. You know, you don't have to buy instruments you don't have to buy. And we created a thing called Poetry out Loud, which is a national poetry recitation contest. 49 of the 51 states, because I put 50 district of Columbia there, said they did not want to do it, that memorization was repressive, doing arts and competition was degrading. This con, this contest would discriminate against minorities and foreign born students. And finally, young people did not like poetry, so they just didn't want to do it. So I did what any good politician would do at that moment. I bribed them and I said, try the program for one year. If it doesn't work, you can use the money for whatever you want. And so, and I just laughed. I mean, they said, yeah, what an idiot I was to, you know, give them this ongoing thing. By the end of the first year, they discovered it was the most successful school program they'd ever tried. And what happened is that kids like poetry. When a kid memorizes a poem and recites gives, it's a kind of thrill that he gets. People in audiences love seeing things that are in competition. Looking at a recitation thing in competition completely changes the psychological profiles of the audience and the participants. And I was amazed because I would go to the national finals and people would sit in it for six, seven hours, you know, the way that they would, you know, you know, in sports events and things like that. And so anyway, it became very, very important. But then something interesting happened. Starting where we began this program, poetry readership in the United States began to grow. We had about half a million kids in this every year. So it was a significant event. And so who did it? Well, kids did it and their parents and their teachers watched. So we had actually two cohorts. And I will say this right now, nobody believes me, but the numbers way out. Poetry is the only growing literary or performative art in the United States. It has been growing now since the initiation of this program. It's growing among now every segment of the population, racial, gender, age, income and education. So people that say, well, poetry is just not popular. It's because the way we've been doing poetry is not popular. It's not the right way of teaching a performative, auditory, experiential art. We've made it intellectual exercise.
- [38:48]
Chris Direwalt
35 years ago, you wrote, it is time to experiment, time to leave the well ordered but stuffy classroom. Time to restore a vulgar vitality to poetry and unleash the energy. Now trapped in the subculture. There is nothing to lose. Society has already told us that poetry is dead. Let's build a funeral pyre out of the desiccated conventions piled around us and watch the ancient spangle feathered, unkillable phoenix rise from the ashes. I mean, come on, brother. That is, that's some. You, you may write poetry, but that is some dynamite.
- [39:24]
Dana Joya
Yeah, Atlantic wanted me to cut that paragraph.
- [39:27]
Chris Direwalt
No, baby, that's.
- [39:28]
Dana Joya
And they said, well, it's too overwritten. And I said, look, I've just written this, you know, and this thing on poetry. You got to give me a chance to do a little bit of poetic language at the end and deal with metaphors and images, et cetera, et cetera. Well, the problem with poetry is not the art of poetry, it's the educational bureaucracy. It's the historical situation in which poets and critics find themselves. It's the fact that poetry has become an educational specialty in universities that holds you back.
- [40:04]
Ben Sasse
You said a minute ago, Dana, you were being magnanimous. You said that almost everything about the way poetry is taught in universities is wrong. And you said, but they're well meaning. Can I push back on behalf of the people of the Plains for a minute? I think Nebraskans really actually like poetry and would like more poetry in their lives. But they do feel like there's a professionalized bureaucratic elite that does look down on them and say the purpose of poetry is exclusion. Only we, certain kinds of elite, highbrows really know. And you people, you like your verse that rhymes. What the heck's wrong with you, Heathen. So can I push back on your assumption a little bit? Isn't part of the problem that the academic bureau.
- [40:54]
Dana Joya
Well, I can't. Let's say when I, when I was in years and years ago, you know, half a century ago, when I was in the university, they were still well meaning. I think now it's gotten more complicated. But I think you're absolutely right. Is that so much of intellectual specialization at the university are strategies of exclusion. You know, keep people out of my, you know, piss in my corner and you stay out of it. You know, actually last night I, I was writing a piece about going. I had, I was producing an opera, Children in Kansas City. I had one day off and I saw. I drove to Lincoln, Nebraska, you know, 200 miles and spent the day in the archive of a Nebraskan poet that I've championed for many years, Weldon Keys. And I discovered an unpublished sonnet. And so the sonnet has come out and people are, people like it and they're writing imitations. So an editor asked me to describe, you know, this impromptu trip I took to Nebraska to spend eight hours in dusty boxes. So, you know, it's. I think Nebraska takes pretty good care of its, of its art. So I go to the Heritage Room at the Lincoln Public Library, things like that. But, you know, it's. You can spend all your time fighting people and God knows we all have done, done a lot of that. My belief now is screw them. I'm going to create a model of what actually works, leave them behind. I mean, that's what the classical school system is going. They say, you know, we're never going to reform that. The teachers unions, you know, in New Jersey, so let's just create that we do. Same thing is that, you know, I've created a couple of writers conferences that teach poetry the way we feel they do. And these conferences with no money, no support, within a few years are the Largest things of their kind in the United States because most, you know, there's a lot of people who have the right instincts, but most people find it very difficult to act on their own. They need to be part of a community. And I've created a community for Catholic writers. I did a conference at usc. I didn't tell anybody at USC what I was doing, except for a couple of priests. And we had hundreds of people show up. And now it's this conference that goes around the country and there's a whole revival of Catholic, serious, Catholic literary writing in the country. Because these people, they were on a faculty and they were the only person they knew who was a practice and Catholic. So they really felt like, either I'm crazy, I'm a dying breed, or I'm powerless. And suddenly they find themselves in a space with 400 very well read, articulate, creative people who share the same spiritual allegiances that they do. And every time we do it, it gets bigger and bigger, you know? Finally, we had one at Notre dame. We had 1400 registered people, Doc, counting the students that were in the room. And I told him, I said, we have enough people in this room today to change American culture. If we could find employment for you, if we could find a meaningful role. And these people, mostly young, full of young men, these young men, I'd ask them, well, what do you do? Well, I've just finished Brothers Karamatsov and Madame Bovary. And right now, you know, I'm. I'm reading Balzac. I mean, I never hear students like that. Graduate students when I taught at usc, that were reading that way. These are very disciplined, ambitious, idealistic people. And what I worry is that they won't be able to participate in the changes they'd like to see in society. But my whole orientation right now is I'll just talk about my two alma maters, Stanford and Harvard. I can't do anything to reform Stanford or Harvard, but what I can do is I can, for a fraction of the cost, I can create a community that's more positive, more effective, and more innovative than what they have.
- [45:07]
Chris Direwalt
As the sand runs through the hourglass, I want to tee Ben up for. I want to remind you that the credible thread of me reading one of your poems in front of you, which would be more painful even for you than for me. And number two, my question is, and I will play devil's advocate a little bit here and say, what do we need new poems for? We have millennia of poems. What do we need new poems for? Why don't we just. Why don't we just look at the old poems and say how great they were?
- [45:39]
Dana Joya
Well, I think we should always look at the old poems and think how great they are. And that poetry is a living continuum that takes us back to the beginning of recorded language. The reason we need new poems is the world changes, we change, our circumstances change. And we need memorable, powerful words to address our own situation in the world. But they make most sense when they're read against this great continuity of human intelligence and creativity, which, you know, in a broader sense is the Western tradition. But in the poetic tradition, I'll recite one of my poems. This is the poem that breaks every rule of how contemporary poetry should be. It rhymes, it's metrical, it's amusing up to a point where it shifts, it uses unpoetic words. And I can read it to a 14 year old girl or a 70 year old man and they'll both get it. So it's the least exclusionary poem you can imagine. It's called Pity the Beautiful.
- [46:49]
Chris Direwalt
I love this one.
- [46:51]
Dana Joya
Pity the beautiful, the dolls and the dishes, the babes with big daddies granting their wishes. Pity the pretty boys, the hunks and Apollos, the golden lads whom success always follows, the hotties, the knockouts, the tens out of 10, the drop dead gorges, the great leading men. Pity the faded, the bloated, the blowsy, the paunchy Adonis whose luck's gone lousy. Pity the gods no longer divine. Pity the night, the stars lose their shine. And so, you know, I, I wrote it, you know, it also to be set to music. It's a very difficult poem to set to music because you can get it going. But then I change the mood, you know, Shakespearean turn towards the end, which I, I think, you know, the composer didn't, you know, quite know what to do with. But, you know, but I like that poem because it's made out of slang. It takes the metaphors that are in the slang seriously and eventually brings it into the classical tradition. It's an ubisut poem, to use the Latin term. Where are they? Where have they gone?
- [48:15]
Chris Direwalt
Oh, is that what that is? Ubisut.
- [48:18]
Dana Joya
Okay, Sunt s u n t S
- [48:20]
Chris Direwalt
u n t. I'm getting a secondhand classical education doing this podcast with Ben.
- [48:25]
Ben Sasse
I don't want us to close without getting a recommendation of a, you know, top five poems to be memorizing with those under 10 in your house household. So I want to flag that we have to land there. But for a minute, can you Talk about bad poetry. I think one way of saying it is a poem could be bad because the linguistics are bad, even if the content is really good. But I assume the opposite quadrant is also true. You can have a beautiful poem. We have to quibble about maybe what beautiful means, but that defines and celebrates a really ugly thing. Do good poems, in your estimation, need to be truthful on substance and beautiful in form, or can they degenerate on one side or the other?
- [49:16]
Dana Joya
Well, I think at the highest level of poetry, truth is beauty and beauty is truth. I would not have accepted that when I was 20 or when I was 30. But what beauty is, is one of our most refined cultural and personal mechanisms for recognizing the underlying truth and order of the world, of the universe. And what we see again is that, and this is the basic problem, you know, that all artists face, is so much of what we see in the world that we recognize as truthful is awful. It's terrifying. You start off with his personal extinction age, you know. You know, I lost my first child at four months. You know, I'm not be silly for me to deny this happened or whatever, but it's so you what the artist does with a great art. I mean, the minor artist says, roses are beautiful, isn't spring nice? And by golly, my girlfriend's good looking. You know, you can write that kind of poem, but, you know, it's usually more complicated than that. So what you're doing, and I think, you know, I'm a Catholic, and so I understand this, which is that you look for the deeper orders of things which seem disordered on the surface. You look at the meaning of suffering and that's what the first great theatrical form, tragedy, tried to do. You know, why, you know what happens when people are trapped in a terrible fate. So. So I think what a poet does is to take the world in which he or she finds himself and connect it to the longings of the imagination. It reconciles it to our sense of reality. So I think one of the greatest poets, and this is very controversial, I think in some ways whoever lived is Charles baudelaire. I've done three films on him, you know, that are on YouTube. And I talk about the poetics of evil. Baudelaire was a drug addicted, alcoholic, syphilitic, bankrupt genius. And after a while he realized he was damned, he was going to hell. And so he decided, well, why not join the satanic party then? And so he began, in a sense, to celebrate the evil of the world. But, you know, being essentially Catholic Trained. He found it as a way of going in and seeing it as part of divine order. I mean, it's the most mysterious thing. A lot of the very best critics of Baudelaire have been theologians, you know, and it's, you know, as. He, in a sense, makes the subject matter of his poetry his own damnation. You know, he actually reveals profound things about human existence, morality and redemption. And there are people who refuse redemption. And that's, you know, we cannot. You know, we see them every day. My wife volunteers with the homeless. And these people perennially make the same mistakes, even though intellectually they know better because, you know, we're creatures that are fallen creatures. So, anyway, there's that. But, I mean, the. The greatest, you know, writers we have, I think, are probably a little less problematic than Baudelaire. I mean, they. They celebrate the virtues which are difficult to practice, but. But whose maintenance in one's life assures something else. I mean, this. You know, great poems. I mean, you think of the Aeneid. The Aeneid is a poem about a hero who doesn't want to go on the quest that he's required to. He wanted to die with honor beside his family in Troy, but he's ordered by the gods to go on this long, dangerous voyage to create a second Troy. And he is pious. He is loyal to his duty. He does, you know, what he. What, as it were, his code expects of him. And so it's this tremendous tragedy. I think it's, you know, it's much more interesting, I think, in some ways, than Homer because it's closer to the modern situation, you know, we are put in. We often do things that are tremendously difficult, that go against our instincts, but we know that that's the course of justice or the. The course of success. A poet that I wish was back in education is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who was the first great American poet who took really upon him as his mission to create the songs and the stories that would represent an extraordinarily variegated diverse nation. You know, he creates, really the first great poem in the Western tradition celebrating a Native American culture from their. From the inside. In fact, he even uses Ojibwe words, you know, which, you know, people ridicule. Who. Saying, well, you know. You know, he's probably. But he was. You know, he, in a sense, saw that culture from the inside. One of the greatest poems in American culture is Evangeline, which is about the. You know, the British kicking out these. These French farmers from Acadia. Putting them in ships, breaking up the families, and then dumping them in Louisiana where they become the Cajuns. And about a pair of lovers who become separated, who spend the rest of their lives looking for each other, you know, and it's tremendous poem. Then you have these smaller poems like Paul Revere's Ride. Paul Revere was not a national hero. He was a Boston hero until Longfellow celebrated him. And why did Longfellow write the poem? He wrote the poem to celebrate American heroism as at the eve of the Civil War, because it ends up with Paul Revere remembering us that there are other times where we will be called, you know, to defend our country, defend the union. And so these are wonderful poems. Kids like them, village blacksmith kids, you know, kids alike. Children's Hour is a poem that parents like. I have an old Carnegie Library in South Pasadena where I spend part of the year, and they have a big sculpture, you know, from the Carnegie era of Longfellow with his three daughters, reading. And it's called In a Children's Hour. And it's as perhaps Longfellow intended it. But the poem's more than this, an encouragement for parents to read to their children. Who are the people who are the biggest readers in the United States? Can you find a behavioral thing? The behavioral thing is they are parents whose kids. Whose parents read to them as children. That's the single biggest predictor of an adult reader. A curious one is that the next group behaviorally is the, you know, the. The kids whose parents said, get out of. Out of this room. I'm reading that they saw their parents read. You know, they associated it with. With adult behavior. So, you know, it's every family, every child that we fill with the love of language and poetry, I think is the. Is the most electrifying of the. Of the media, especially for children. Every children we do will make a difference as. As he or she goes on in life. And if we can, you know, if we can do this with, you know, 10, 15% of the population, we can change the country. I'm absolutely, absolutely confident of that.
- [57:21]
Chris Direwalt
I'm. We will rise Phoenix, like just, just as you. Just as you wrote long ago, Phoenix, like, we. We will. We will rise up. You've been incredibly us, and thank you so much for letting me importune you into having a reading, an impromptu reading. I would just tell everybody you're a. A beautiful writer. It's. It's your.
- [57:45]
Ben Sasse
Your.
- [57:45]
Dana Joya
Your.
- [57:46]
Chris Direwalt
Your work is beautiful and it is a machine that can unlock a feeling inside people. So we are extremely Grateful to you for being with us today.
- [57:55]
Dana Joya
I've enjoyed every moment of our conversation. Oh, God bless. God bless you both.
- [58:01]
Chris Direwalt
Thanks, Dana. Well, professor, what did we learn today?
- [58:05]
Ben Sasse
We didn't get a linger on Carmen, but I do feel like we got to marinate in his really useful definition of poetry. Poetry as a distinctive linguistic technique that began as a way of speaking that wanted to reward a special kind of listening. I didn't have that back and forth between speaker and hearer, did you?
- [58:30]
Chris Direwalt
No, I did not. And that's a, that's a, the, the elevation that is really the Carmen idea. Right.
- [58:35]
Ben Sasse
You.
- [58:36]
Chris Direwalt
This is a special kind of way of talking. And then I'm trying to impart something to you. And when you think about the liturgy and the, the times in which that you can tell the difference, if you go to even a very groovy church, you can tell the difference between a reading the sermon and the announcements about the bake sale. Right? The, the. There, there is a way that you can tell that those things are different and what you're supposed to be really paying attention to and what you can doodle on the back of the leaflet during.
- [59:12]
Ben Sasse
We need to linger on liturgy just for a second, right? Because obviously the right answer is bake sale announcements have to come after the benediction. You do the announcements after the call to worship, the whole service, the dismissal and the benediction are over. Then you can do the crappy announcements about potluck. But I still think your point. Not still. In addition to your good point there, there's also the really useful thing that happens dialogically in worship when the pastor turns forward and back and sometimes is speaking with we the congregation toward God and sometimes is speaking on God's behalf as God's representative to us. And that spinning back and forth that, that rotation of whether it's backs to us or facing us is a super helpful setup for a lot of the dialogical nature of really great conversation. And when I think about the Youngs right now, how sad is it that they. They by and large are decreasingly able to have synchronous conversation. A huge part of the special melody of conversation is the back and forth.
- [60:16]
Chris Direwalt
I'm not going to attack you over your desire to have two hour long church services that, that never end because there is an unlimited amount of time for announcements to be held after the service. It's obviously, I won't do it because it's obviously true that you have to pack it in, make it concise, and do it before the communion. You Got to just put it in there, move on. If church is more than an hour and 15 minutes, the human mind can only absorb what the human posterior can withstand, Ben says. And, you know, it's.
- [60:53]
Ben Sasse
There are lots of different elements. I'm definitely in favor of two hours over one hour, but that is not. That is not the same as being in favor of three hours over two hours. We used to attend a black church for a while, and one of the pastors there would just get livid, and he's like, I'm so sick of my own tradition. Do we not understand that a huge part of why we had these whole day services is because of a history of a bunch of broken stuff where this was a place where we could freely assemble, and that's why we would linger for four and five and six hours. Anyway, There's a good argument against three hours. There's a pretty crappy argument for only one hour. If you mean we don't need to grow our attention span.
- [61:31]
Chris Direwalt
115. 115.
- [61:33]
Ben Sasse
I can live with that.
- [61:34]
Chris Direwalt
I'll accept it. That's the sweet spot. Dana described poetry. He had a lot of good definitions for poetry, but one of them was remembering what would impoverish us to forget that this is the furnishing of the mind. Right. That you have to know these things in order to be alive. So we've created a mnemonic by which you can retain them. That we would be poorer if we forgot these things. I loved that very much. Obviously, I love the stuff about I forget which Greek poet, he said that it was that you would smear a little honey on the rim.
- [62:17]
Ben Sasse
Medicine.
- [62:18]
Chris Direwalt
Yeah. So the Lucretius, maybe. I will totally defer to you on questions of Greek poetry. Smear a little honey on the rim so that you can bear to take in the truth I thought was very good. Here's another one. A way of using language that speaks to the entire person. And that's where I rift with him about. Not that we are spiritual people, spiritual beings experiencing a physical world and the doing both. He talked about preconceptual knowledge. But my favorite. And you heard me ooh and ah when he quoted it. Poetry is a machine that when the reader operates, it unlocks a feeling, Baby. Yeah, I dig it. All right.
- [63:08]
Ben Sasse
So the nerd in me needs to qualify. You were saying Greek poets, and I threw out Lucretius, Roman, therefore. Or surely I was wrong. Anyway. Yes, it unlocks a feeling. And it reminds me. I have a buddy who says that reading is sort of like running in that you need both long runs and short runs. And I think of poetry as something of both. It's often quick, and while you could do it quickly, it's also good to go long and ruminate on it. There's the poetry that you want to memorize, and there's a poetry that just the. The melodic feel of it means you want to not just read it in your head, but read it aloud. And it feels like good poetry, makes you want to return to its substance, partly because of that feeling you just unlocked.
- [63:52]
Chris Direwalt
Yes. And for. Do you have a favorite. I didn't ask you. Do you have a favorite American poet?
- [63:59]
Ben Sasse
No, I should, but I don't. What about you?
- [64:02]
Chris Direwalt
I'm a Carl Sandberg man. I. I love that there is a sort of Hemingway, Faulkner kind of split in the. In the world. I don't know if anybody still cares about that, but between the Robert Frost and the Carl Sandberg. And I definitely identify myself on the Carl Sandberg side of that as a sort of person of the interior of the United States. But as I grew up and got older, I came to appreciate Frost more and more. In a book, I ended up writing a chapter that was sort of anchored on stopping in the woods on a snowy evening and about the importance of literacy and the importance of language. And so I've come around. But I'm still Sandburg first.
- [64:58]
Ben Sasse
I mean, I. I appreciate why you say that, but I will admit that his Lincoln biography is so under edited that I got tired of the length. So it's hard for me to, you know, become a zealot fan, but I feel like we need to just scream here. Back at you, Walt. Mother bleeping Whitman, dude.
- [65:18]
Chris Direwalt
Under. Oh, talk about over estimated.
- [65:23]
Dana Joya
We need a barbaric yacht.
- [65:25]
Chris Direwalt
He's got some great lines, but a song. Song of myself. Yeah, no, no, duh. Definitely, definitely. It's a song of himself.
- [65:36]
Ben Sasse
My. If my wife were here, she would slap me because she's like, don't act like you're given a dumb version of a high school commencement speech. But there's still a thorough flutter in my heart about going to the woods to live deeply and not, when I had come to die, realize that I had not yet lived.
- [65:55]
Chris Direwalt
Yeah, no, Thoreau. Thoreau's doing. The Transcendentalists are doing a lot of
- [66:00]
Ben Sasse
stuff, but a lot of stuff wrong.
- [66:02]
Chris Direwalt
A lot of stuff wrong. But. But it's good verse and also, like, we shouldn't be afraid of that. These. These are profane and these are sacred because they're all it's all poetry. And you may connect with some part of one that you don't with the other. The, the. I will just say it here. The most important poem to me by a long shot is Tennyson's Ulysses, because that was a very important poem for my father in me and the one that we recited to each other as Helae dying. And that for me is if there's a single poem that is the most valuable, it is that. And actually all of our poetry discussion has caused me to go back and sort of remember Ize and re refresh my mind on that. It is. It's dynamite, brother.
- [66:59]
Ben Sasse
It's. It's hard to beat American hymnody as well. So when I, when I think poetry, I kind of think if you've had a collective experience of singing Great is thy faithfulness or Amazing Grace or All hail the power of Jesus name and how great Thou art, like having done it in common, it's just tough to beat the memory of shared poetry.
- [67:24]
Chris Direwalt
All right, well, then I'm going to just. I'm going to leave us with this from Carl Sandberg. The fog comes in on the fog comes on little cat feet. It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on. What do you think about that? How about a little Sandberg there? America? Okay, that's it.
- [67:47]
Ben Sasse
Nice. Silent haunches.
- [67:49]
Chris Direwalt
Nice. She's got great haunches.
- [67:51]
Ben Sasse
Dude. We're going country lowbrow as the sign off for American Poetry episode.
- [67:56]
Chris Direwalt
That's right. That's it for this week's episode. We hope you'll like, review and subscribe and tell a friend. Feel free to email us with your thoughts, corrections, questions, or whatever else is on your mind, because apparently Ben Sass is reading these. Write us@sassandstyrewaldmail.com this podcast was produced by Scott Emerget with the help of our colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute. The music is from Drew Holcomb and the neighbors. Thanks for listening and keep living the good life.
- [68:33]
Dana Joya
Sa.