Interview Highlights
1. What is poetry? Here’s a definition: “Poetry is a way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget.”
2. And who is the mother of the muses? Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory.
3. You can’t understand poetry until you start learning it by heart. Yes, memorizing it. The metaphor of knowing something by heart means storing a piece of wisdom in the center of your being and making it a part of you.
4. Poetry exists in the body before it exists in language. For him, great writing is about putting form to felt sensations.
5. First drafts are an act of madness. They’re messy and chaotic, and it’s worth embracing that. Only in the process of revision does the structure begin to reveal itself.
6. The most valuable ideas arrive suddenly, fully formed but fragile, and they won’t wait for you to be ready. If you don’t write them down immediately, you’ll probably forget them.
7. His artistic process: Confusion, followed by madness, exhilaration, and despair.
8. Aspiring writers who can’t find the time to write run the risk of living a life of regret, where destiny takes the wheel and steers them off-course. Seneca says, “If you follow your destiny, it guides you. If you resist it, it drags you behind it.”
9. What’s the purpose of art? Most people, most of the time, go through life half-awake. The purpose of art is to awaken us to reality and help us feel our situation. Done right, it excites, expands, and refines our complete human intelligence.
10. Can you write with a full-time job? T.S. Eliot had a day job at a bank. Wallace Stevens was an insurance lawyer. Dana Gioia worked a full-time job in New York and wrote in the evenings.
11. Life is like a wallet full of one-hour bills. You only have 24 hours to spend every day. If you want to do serious writing while raising a family and maintaining a full-time job, almost every hour of every day has to be budgeted.
12. Poetry should turn. It shouldn’t just climb to an emotional height. It should pivot, contradict, or contain its own rebuttal. But most new poems go something like this: “I’m sad, I’m sad, I’m sad, I’m sad, the end,” or “I’m happy, I’m happy, I’m happy, the end. There’s no twist, no turn.
13. You don’t need to be 100% original. All you need to do is assemble parts of the reality that already exists. As George Balanchine said, “God creates, I assemble.”
14. A foundational book in his life: The City of God by St. Augustine. He says there are two cities that exist: There’s the City of Man, which is ruled by wealth and power and all the laws of man. And there’s the City of God which is eternal and governed by the rules of God.
15. Great poetry exists at the level of intuition, and it’s the same intuition that academic education tries to suppress. With great poems, like great songs, you feel before you understand.
16. Art is an argument with yourself. Yeats said: “Out of arguments with others, we make politics. Out of arguments with ourselves, we make poetry.”
17. Great writing should astonish the creator, and if it doesn’t astonish the creator, it won’t astonish the reader.
18. Robert Frost once said: “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
19. Beauty is being able to see the form, the shape underneath reality, and to understand why it is right, even when it is destructive or terrifying or humiliating. The most powerful kind of beauty is to discover the secret shape and rightness of things that are terrifying.
20. On novels: Most people don’t understand what a novel is — and how revolutionary the form was. So, what’s a novel? It’s a story that tells you simultaneously what’s happening on the outside of a character and what they’re thinking on the inside.
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Transcript
First drafts as a mystical process
David Perell: You've discovered that, for you, first drafts are a quasi-mystical process.
Dana Gioia: When I'm doing literary writing, my inspiration is involuntary, and my artistic process consists of confusion, followed by madness, exhilaration, and despair. I feel the inspiration physically. When I have a poem coming, I feel it in my temples and in my throat.
It is beyond words; it's in a different medium. But there's one line, or an image, that's the transitional point from whatever this invisible thing is to the page. If I'm going, I write in a kind of frenzy, and then 30 or 45 minutes later, it just vanishes. Then I'm left with what I have on the page, which is always a mess. Part of what I need to do is to look at that and find the poem that's hidden.
It's even that way for prose. I'll be wanting to write about a certain subject, and I just don't have the entry. Then suddenly, it comes from nowhere, and I've got to get it down then, or I'll lose it.
David Perell: So, what happens if you're at dinner or you're asleep?
Dana Gioia: I lose it. You have no idea how many good things I've lost because I'm driving, or I'm in a meeting, or I'm in an elevator, and I don't have the 30 minutes just to sit there and write it down. Sometimes, I'll write down one or two things, and the next day, I'll look at it and say, "What the hell was I writing?"
I do think that really good writing comes both from the conscious mind and the unconscious mind, and a good writer can make the two of them dance a duet.
David Perell: Has this changed throughout your career?
Dana Gioia: I do two kinds of writing. In a general sense, you could say half of it's journalistic and the other half is literary, artistic. For journalistic writing, I can sit down and write the piece. I may not always have the lead, but, once again, if you have the lead, which comes as a kind of inspiration, the piece will write itself.
But when I'm writing journalistic articles, what I'm basically telling you is what I already know. When I'm writing literary writing or artistic writing, writing the piece, writing the poem, is for me a way of figuring out what the heck it is I want to say. Suddenly, when I write something that's good that way, I'll realize I've been writing it in the back of my mind for years.
I had all these things, and they never came together until now, but it surprises me. Robert Frost says, "No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader." A lot of stuff I read just has no surprises. It's well done in a conventional way, and you can have a kind of distant admiration for it. But the pieces that really grab you by your throat, you can tell that they astonish the writer.
The power of wonder and poetic turns
David Perell: Astonished is a good word.
Dana Gioia: I just finished writing an opera for kids, and they said, "What's the message?" I said, "No, what I want is to create a sense of wonder." I think that's one of the primary things that literary writing does, is to give you a sense of wonder, of awe, of joy, often from things that you see every day but you've never seen in quite the same way. If you don't have that, I think the writing, to me at least, feels impoverished.
David Perell: Give me an example. I want to hear from a poem, something that maybe has a more emotional texture, of what the inspiration looked like, what it felt like: the words, the sensations that came to mind, and then how you turned that into the first draft.
Dana Gioia: I'll have a poem, and I'll work on it, and it'll come in a couple lines, and I'll develop it into maybe 15 or 20 lines. And then, I'll just stop sometimes because I've got a whole emotional arc, a narrative arc.
There's a poem of mine that's basically about these two people that meet at a wedding; they have a moment, but nothing really happens. It's a really nice poem, and I finished it. I said, "But it's not enough." I waited a couple of months, and then suddenly I realized there's a turn at the end.
The last maybe eight lines of it, 12 lines of it, is about the guy remembering this 20 years later. Suddenly he goes, "There are so many might-have-beens, what-ifs that won't stay buried, other cities, other jobs, strangers we might have married." Then what happens is that this is good, and this is good, but when you join them up like that, they both double in their energy.
David Perell: Sure.
Dana Gioia: So, I'll start saying something, and I'll say it with all the power that I can have. I'm at the point where you're about to say, "Stop it, stop it!" And then suddenly, I'll say almost the opposite. I'll have pushed that insight as far as we can do it, and once I've got you totally emotionally involved for or against it, then I suddenly qualify it.
When you do this, it has a kind of energy. It's the energy that comes from debate, from argumentation. I think great writers are able to look at both sides of an argument. William Butler Yeats, the poet, said, "Out of arguments with others, we make politics. Out of arguments with ourselves, we make poetry."
Bringing poetry to prose
Dana Gioia: I started off as a journalist in high school, in college, in grad school, I was writing reviews, I was writing essays and things like that. And I got to be very good at journalistic prose, which I think is something that every writer needs to master because it's the basic medium. It's the lingua franca of writing or even broadcast.
And then I was writing poetry, and I had this kind of divided world: my prose was clear, concise, rational, and my poetry was kind of impressionistic, emotional, imagistic. And then I realized that I needed to take everything I knew as a poet and bring it to my prose.
Once I did this, I really became a much, much better prose writer. Sometimes the advice I would give some people is that I write prose in two ways. There's the piece that's going to be read on Monday, and then there's the piece I want to have read in 50 years. I take a very different strategy for both of them.
So, I'm the least marketable writer you could possibly imagine. People will ask me for a piece, and I won't give it to them. I'll finish a piece and I say, "No, it's not ready." That actually has been, I think, the key to my success, is saying no.
David Perell: There's a real stubbornness about you and also your brother in that way.
Dana Gioia: I'm stubborn, but I'm not as stubborn as Ted. For example, I am so old that I've lived through a major transformation of culture. When I was a young man, all information was in books, in print, in magazines, in newspapers.
Now, that is really a historical period. Most information now is electronic. It's digital, it's audio, it's on film. We've gone from a culture of silent print on a page to living language in film or audio.
It actually brings us back to the origins of literature, the origins of human consciousness. That's not a bad time for a poet to be alive, because poetry is a technology that's older than writing.
As a poet, especially the kind of poet I am, which uses form, meter, rhyme, and things like that, the culture is closer to what poetry is about than what a novel or a print book is about.
Maintaining integrity in publishing (00:11:48)
David Perell: So tell me this. Do you ever feel like you're writing and you're so in love with your work that you're like, "Oh, my goodness, it's so good?" Or do you feel like you don't even have that gene? Or did you used to have that gene, you've kind of relinquished it, and you're now able to look at your work more objectively now?
Dana Gioia: The older you get, I think the more objective you become about your work, or the more deluded. But I think if you're a professional writer, you get to be a pretty good judge of your work.
Writing is like everything else in life. With somebody, you go, "Oh, they're so funny," then 20 minutes later, "They're so annoying." You have these swings.
That's what I say with my writing. You throw yourself into it, and you have this big thing, and it looks really good. The next morning, you read it and all you see are the faults.
David Perell: Yeah.
Dana Gioia: I just published a book on opera called Weep, Shudder, Die. I began it about 20 years ago. I'd written an opera, and people wanted to ask me about what it was like to write the words and lyrics of an opera. So I wrote this little piece.
I never reprinted it because I said, "It's not as good as it could be." Then it got to be a little bit longer. Finally, I was bringing a book of essays out, and it was just too long.
I just told the publisher, "I'm going to just take it out."
He said, "Well, why don't we use it as a little medium piece, and you can publish the scripts of your operas, the libretti."
So we're putting the libretti together, but the piece got longer and longer and longer, and finally it ended up being a book. The sad part about it is that it needed 20 years to personally grow into its form.
What makes writing last
Dana Gioia: When I'm writing, I'm writing for now and thereafter. It's not like I'm saying no one will understand my book for 30 years.
David Perell: No, no, no.
Dana Gioia: If it isn't good the day the book is published, you're finished. But the question is, what makes it last? What are the really basic issues I'm dealing with?
This is the funny thing: most writers don't do that. They're focused on the issue of the moment. Or if they're academics, they're focused on some chain of references and citations.
What I try to do is imagine two or three readers that are at very different stages of their life: a bright teenager that doesn't know much, a fellow writer who knows probably too much, and a person who's in between, who reads poetry or reads about music. And I ask, what can I say that all three of them will say, "Yeah, okay, that's an interesting question"? Or what can I say that two of the three don't even know about, and to the other one, I'm going to offer an angle that will surprise him or her?
I really do think about what to put in and what not to put in. I will spend a whole day working on a paragraph that has a couple of examples. My brother does this too, with A History of Jazz. What songs do you mention? What poems do you mention? What operas do you mention?
I'll go through there and I'll think, okay, from this angle, how does that work? From this angle, how does that work? This angle doesn't work. And then suddenly, it's like hearing a chord strike. You go, yes, I've got the right combination.
Some of it's rational, some of it's intuitive, but I really do try to strip away the things that are ephemeral. I try to get at the things that are more meaningful. If I'm going to have an example, I try to have an example that I know is going to be around in 20 years. Or if it isn't, that I explain that somebody else will get.
Balancing personal expression and technique
Dana Gioia: There's some wisdom that people always offer: if you're going to write, you've got to write from the heart. You've got to write from the innermost portion of yourself. And that's really good as a half-truth, because if you're really a good writer, you're writing from your personality, from your perspective; there's a tremendous sense of individuality in your writing. But the only way that you can bring that across is to master this impersonal, communal technique. The very notion of language is a social construction.
David Perell: Sure.
Dana Gioia: We have ways of saying things or not saying things. In order to write well, you have got to immerse yourself in all the ways that language works. You've got to see how it doesn't work.
The philosopher Schopenhauer once said, "You can never read bad books too little. You can never read good books too much." I think that's why you've got to read really good writing and see how it works.
David Perell: So you don't buy the idea of read everything, good stuff, bad stuff. You're like, I'm going to focus on the good stuff.
Dana Gioia: No, you've got to read everything, but you've got to figure out what's good and what's not good. You can learn many things from writers, and one of them is they can show you examples of how writers lead their lives.
Finding a path as a poet (00:21:29)
David Perell: When you say your life, what do you actually do all day? What does your day look like? What does your week look like? I actually don't—I realized I don't really have a sense for that.
Dana Gioia: Let me give you what my day was like at two stages in my life. I have had a job since I was nine. I worked during college, I worked during vacation, even on Easter vacation. I would come back for a week and I'd have a job set up, because we had no money.
I went to business school, and no one in the history of Stanford Business School graduated doing less work than I did, because I spent three to four hours every day reading and writing for literary things. I managed my business school studies in a very businesslike manner.
I achieved three things at Stanford for two years. I was publishing at least one piece a week in the Stanford Daily or some magazine in San Francisco. Secondly, I got my MBA. Most importantly, I met my wife.
Then I went to New York. So, for the next 15 years, this is what my day would look like: I'd get up about 7:00 AM, gulp down a cup of coffee, and drive through terrible traffic to work. I would work for 10 hours.
I was forced to the fact that I never had a really long period of time to work on anything. Your life is like a wallet full of one-hour bills. I'm going to take this hour, this hour, that hour. You only have 24 hours to spend every day.
I had three important things in my life. I had my marriage and my family. I had my job, which I had to have, because I had no money. And then the third thing was the writing. I could do all three of those things, but I couldn't have added a fourth. It worked, but it had to have this real focus.
When I was at my business time, almost every hour of every day was budgeted. So that's what I looked like in New York: totally disciplined.
Balancing physical and mental work
Dana Gioia: Finally, I decided to come back here because I had two small boys, and I wanted them to know their grandparents. I wanted them to know that they came from working-class Latins—my dad's Italian, my mom's Mexican—because in New York, they were being raised as generic upper-middle-class kids, without much of an identity.
Up here, I spend two or three hours a day in the morning doing physical labor, just to keep the natural landscape healthy around me. Then I'll work for a couple of hours, have lunch, do a couple more hours of physical labor, and then I'll work. If I'm really pressed on a deadline or something, I'll have dinner, then I'll work in the evening.
In New York, it was office work and literary work. Here, it's physical work and literary work.
I learned something when I came here. I'll be working on something, and I'll come to an impasse. I'll say, "I don't know where this poem is going." Or I don't... I'm writing—let's say I'm writing the libretto for an opera, the script for an opera—I won't know what these two characters are going to do.
I'll go out and I'll prune a tree for an hour, cut away the dead wood and things like that, or I'll drag the stuff down. And while I'm doing that, my unconscious works it out. Then I'll come back here and it's solved.
What I've learned here is the benefit of physical labor and the benefit of shutting off your rational mind and keeping yourself busy and everything else, so your unconscious can work. For a poet or for a literary writer, that's very invaluable.
Embodying poetry's rhythms
Dana Gioia: Years ago, when I left Washington D.C., I needed money. I took a job at USC each fall semester, and I had a big poetry class: 215 students. It was a very popular class.
One of the things I would do is I would take a really big set of keys and I would just throw them at some guy that struck me as kind of athletic. He would just go and catch it.
I'd say, "Well, did I tell you to catch it?"
He said, "Well, no, professor."
I said, "But why'd you do it?"
"Well, they were coming up there."
I said, "Yeah, because your body has all this intelligence in it."
Poetry likes that kind of intelligence. Poetry likes the rhythms of your body and the movements of your body. I realized that, for me as a poet, the more physical intelligence I could put in my poems, the better they were, because the one thing we have in common is the same body. We have hearts and lungs, and the kind of rhythms of living are very much the same. You can feel those things. You create things where the sound does the work.
Years ago, there's a jazz pianist named Helen Sung. Helen wanted to do an album of vocals, so she asked me if I would write the lyrics. I said, "Well, we start talking about what it would be."
At the same time that was happening, I found out that this girl I dated in my early twenties—beautiful girl, she was so beautiful it was a curse—had died. She had died, I think, at 50. I began thinking about what a cursed beauty was.
This is the lyric that I wrote. It's called "Pity the Beautiful."
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 ten
That drop dead gorgeous,
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.
Balancing production and consumption (28:30)
David Perell: And the "ten out of tens" feels so colloquial, exactly what I'd say to my friends.
Dana Gioia: On the other hand, I could show it to a professor of classics, and they would say, "That's the kind of poem that a Roman would have written during the reign of Augustus. Catullus could have written that poem." I like that it's a poem that's unpretentious, but it's rooted in almost any angle that you look at it.
David Perell: You talk about coming here to work and doing two to three working sessions a day. How do you think about production versus consumption? Because you're so well-read, but you've also produced so much. How do you balance those things?
Dana Gioia: People think that writing is easy for me, and it isn't. It's because I work all the time. I'm happiest working.
If you are lucky enough to do the work you love, I mean, to me, I want to work the work I love, and I want to be with the woman I love. I don't need to go to Tasmania or Greenland or Patagonia to be interested. I'm just fascinated by every day of my life, doing the things that I love.
I write in such a way that anybody who's an expert on writers would say, "Dana, you're impossible. You have the stupidest kind of schedule possible. You don't do things practically." But to be practical is to do what works, and what works with me is not what works for most people.
Studying the craft of poetry
Dana Gioia: Very early on, I would come across a piece of poetry and I would say, "God, that's beautiful. How do they do it?" I have a whole book here of poems that I love. I didn't do this all at once. But I come across a poem, a passage, that I just say, "I love the way this sounds."
I write the poem in ink, and I do all the notations in pencil. I have the number of syllables, the rhyme scheme, where the metrical stresses fall, and where the speech stresses fall. It gives me a sense of how these people created sound. So I've got books like this.
David Perell: How do you make time for that? Because that seems in the important but not urgent category. You showed me your office of all the projects that you're currently working on.
As you're thinking about how to block out your weeks and how to really use your time, well, how do you think about cultivating the space in order to build this compounding knowledge?
Dana Gioia: Most people waste most of their time. Your time is your life. You don't have any life that doesn't exist in time. So when you just waste time, you never get it back. And worst of all, you become accustomed to the habit of wasting time. The key to getting things done is to not waste time and to love what you do.
Sometimes I'll be writing something, and it's just not working. I'll go and I'll just take an author I really like, George Orwell, and I'll read two or three pages. I'll say, "God damn it, he writes!" It gets me mad that he's writing so well. So, I'm going to show George Orwell.
So I go back there and I write it. Then I look at my piece and I'll just say, "Look at this crap that I was writing!" And I'll just start covering it through.
Radiating energy in writing
Dana Gioia: Much of my writing process is to look at what I'm writing and say it's not good enough for the vision that I have inside of my head of it. If you look at where I work, I'll have a chapter and I'll go through it, tear it apart, and write it again. 24 hours later, I'm writing it yet again. I'm going through every page. I'll just take a paragraph, cut it out, and say there needs to be another paragraph. You just keep working on it.
This whole file that I've got here is pretty much the drafts of one or two chapters from this book that I did. And these are short chapters. What happens is it comes to a point where suddenly, I get it.
It's radiating more energy than I can possibly put into it. And I know it's done.
David Perell: Why do you use those words?
Dana Gioia: I like the notion of atomic energy. You take some potentially radiant element, and you apply energy. You push, and you push, and you push. Then it comes to a point where it begins to radiate energy on its own. When you're dead and gone, it's going to be on a page, and somebody can either open that page and participate in it, or they can't.
What I like about this book here is it's a book about opera. I got a lot of stuff that's intellectual about the history of opera, but really what it's about is this weird art form that you go there and you watch and you weep in the dark, feeling the emotions of the people on the stage. There's this strange, primitive transaction that happens in opera that I wanted to capture in words.
Leaving out the scaffolding
David Perell: As you're writing that, and you're trying to put it into words, what are you doing? Are you reading books about opera? Are you talking to experts? Are you going to the opera? Are you going on long walks? What are you actually doing to take this felt sense that you have of weeping in the dark and that entire experience and actually translate it into language?
Dana Gioia: This book has the advantage of a lifetime of experience. One of the most important things I learned as a poet, and it spilled over into my prose writing too, is to leave things out.
You create a poem; you've got all these scaffoldings, and you're building it. Most people leave the scaffolds. I remember one poet in his poem introduces the poem reading, "Well, I was in Cleveland, and it was raining, and I had just broken up with Trudi, and I was heartbroken. And I was walking down McClellan Avenue in the rain, and I had a copy of Garcia Lorca." The scaffolding is all there, and by the time you get to the poem, you're worn out.
But more importantly, by the time you get to the heart of that poem, it's not your poem. It's his poem. He hasn't left any room for you.
But if I say, "Pity the beautiful, the dolls and the dishes, the babes with big daddies granting their wishes. Pity the pretty boys, the hunks and the পাওয়." You picture those things from your own life. The beautiful girl and the ugly girl in the audience both go into that poem, but by a different door. She goes, "Wow, the pretty girls always get the favoritism." And the other one goes, "Yeah, I've got this kind of pretty privilege."
Leave enough out so people can bring their own life into the poem. And so what I do here is I'm creating this argument about opera. My argument is really quite simple: Opera is the most powerful form of poetic drama. It's the most intense form of theater that exists.
Drawing readers into your work
Dana Gioia: I start tracing, and it's not really a highbrow form. It's actually a very popular form, for which we have the barrier of language because most of them are in Italian or German or French. I'm just talking about the nature of song, how you can feel the meaning of a song even though you don't know the words.
I'm creating a very intellectual argument, and it's a very good argument. It's a very original argument, if I may say so. But I'm not giving a doorway into it for people who don't have a preexisting interest. I'm not creating a doorway for people who don't know about classical music or don't know about musical theater.
But suddenly I talk about being raised in an immigrant family, having my father put on Enrico Caruso and tell me how good he is because he's Italian. When this thing came out, all these people wrote me and said, "Yeah, that was like my mother did this and my father did this." Often it had nothing to do with opera.
I gave these people, who don't really have any preexisting interest in opera, a way of getting into it, and they like it. I'll give you an example of a thing that surprised me.
I wrote a poem called "Reunion." It began in the most mundane way possible. I made the mistake of going to one of my Stanford reunions, and I hardly knew anybody there. The only people that were there were people that I didn't never like to begin with or didn't recognize.
I came back, and I began to write a poem about being in a place that's supposed to be meaningful to you, but you don't recognize anybody. It's almost like there's a drama going on around you that you should be part of, but you aren't.
Ten years later, I'm giving a reading in Palo Alto or Menlo Park, and this woman comes up to me. She says, "I want to show you something." She has a framed copy of my poem. Then she takes the frame, and she turns it around, and there's a picture of an older man who is her father.
She says, "This poem just explained my dad to me because he has Alzheimer's. And this is how he must feel." He's in this place that he should recognize. He sort of recognizes the voices, but he can't put the names to them and everything else. She goes, "It was so important when I read this poem because it helped me understand my dad."
I said to myself, "Well, this is not how I intended the poem to mean, but it's exactly what I intended the poem to do." Which is to say, to have an independent existence from my own intention.
I think that for me as a poet, doing that was where I took my work to the next level.
Finding personality in writing
David Perell: Not solving the mystery, keeping things out.
Dana Gioia: Putting into the poem just what it needed and no more.
David Perell: There's a lot of writing advice that basically is obsessed with condensing your writing, using simple words, and almost making it so accessible that it becomes elementary. That's probably not a fair way to put it, but that's how it came out. When is that true? And when do you just reject that?
Dana Gioia: What you're describing is more or less the mandatory house style for much new fiction. You look at these new novels, and all the paragraphs are like one or two sentences long, or they're all dialogue. They have this fear of having too many words, having it be, dare I say, too literary.
I don't think books like that will survive. In fact, I don't even think books like that make much of an impression, because what people really long for is personality.
When you read Raymond Chandler, you're looking for the plot, you're looking for the characters, but what you're given is this fantastic sense of style and sensibility. He's in this film noir Los Angeles. I mean, he created what we think of as film noir as much as any filmmaker did. Once again, he has these great sentences that embody it. He goes, "She was the kind of woman that would make an archbishop kick through a stained glass window," or, "His desk was not as big as Napoleon's tomb." These kinds of ironic or sardonic sentences.
That's why he remains popular. He had interesting plots, but the plots have holes in them. You have the pleasure of narrative, but the primary pleasure is the sensibility.
I think you should write as simply as possible. I think you should have no unnecessary words, but there are also necessary words. And your writing should have a flavor. If everything is diet vanilla, it's not going to be a meal that you return to.
Finding your own voice
Dana Gioia: The real challenge for a beginning writer is to say, "Well, I have to write for myself from my own experience," and to find out how to do that.
Philip Larkin is a wonderful example of a poet. He took the most boring life possible and he became the greatest British poet of his generation, because he found the poetry of tedium, of boredom, of the frustrated life of the guy that doesn't get the job, the girl, or the cash. And he turns it into poetry.
My advice to a writer is to think about your own life and find the language, the stories, the character, the tone to make it work.
There's a certain moment for you as a writer when you've developed a way of talking or a way of writing, where you find a subject matter that's just the right subject matter for you, a tone that's just the one. Suddenly the voice goes from feeling artificial to natural.
I was raised in a very urban, very ugly, unmemorable, second-rate urban landscape. I didn't realize that around the corner from my high school, one of the great literary movements of the modern age would happen, which is rap. They found a way of taking their crummy neighborhood and turning it into a kind of poetry. It's not my kind of poetry, but it's an interesting kind of poetry.
It took me about 20 years to figure out how to write about my own experience. I really wished that I could write about the birch woods of Robert Frost, or the ocean of Joseph Conrad or something like this, but that wasn't my world.
Finding Your Voice (43:47)
David Perell: When people are talking about not having their voice and they're frustrated, I think that there's a few things going on. One is that they don't feel a sense of confidence in their authentic self or their authentic story. Either they don't think that there's an interest in it, or they just think that their life is completely trite and boring.
The other thing—the analogy that I like to think about—is you can imagine an instrument. You're just trying all these different instruments, and what is the one that you play? You're just playing naturally, and somehow it feels like it has the potential to be perfectly tuned if only you give it work, but then also other people like that sound.
The challenge is that before you found that, it feels like this very mysterious thing that maybe you'll never find. My sense is that once you find it, you realize it was kind of just there the whole time. Something like that.
Dana Gioia: Everyone's life is trite and boring, seen from some angle. The problem some people have is they don't really want to admit anything that's embarrassing or shameful.
David Perell: Right.
Dana Gioia: They want to look good from every angle, and that's going to make rather boring writing. People will identify with you, especially insofar as you share the weaknesses that they perceive in themselves, which then allows them to believe in your strengths.
When you do finally hit the right note, you realize, "I was thinking of that for years." That's something I've thought about or I've felt for years, but I didn't know how to get into it. My very best poem is sort of like saying, "I was composing that in my mind for the last 10 years, but I didn't recognize it as a poem."
I didn't take this part and this part and put them together. Elizabeth Bishop says a poem is all sorts of things coming together suddenly, and I think that's very true. You've written all the parts; you just haven't connected them.
It's like there will be two chemical elements that are quite stable. You put them together and they start to foam or heat or things like this. I think that's how poetry operates.
But prose is interesting, because I think a lot of people today want to write what is very personal nonfiction. Not so much political history or these impersonal kinds of fiction.
The questions that you're facing are very much the same as that you would as a poet, which is, how do you take personal material? How do you take a personal tone? How do you take the fabric of your life and make it into something that's more than just an anecdote?
I don't know how you do that except through compression and style.
The drama of inner life (00:51:00)
David Perell: If people don't feel like they have a style or a sense of voice, they end up living these crazy lives. But you seem to have lived a fairly healthy, put-together life—at least relative to people who are doing drugs and alcohol.
Dana Gioia: First of all, it's a dangerous game to try to turn your life itself into a work of art. That never interested me because the people I knew that did this were self-destructive. I come from a family which is full of failure, full of people that ended badly, who didn't achieve what they wanted or ended up in jail or dead.
I have enough drama going on in my heart and mind without needing to borrow any from the outside world. I have tremendous swings of mood. It'll be midnight and I'll realize everything I've ever written is worthless. I remember once mid-Thursday, everything I'd written was on the floor because it was a failure. It was a waste of my life. But I got over it.
You've got to be in touch with your darker emotions, I think, to be a good writer. But I've led my life in a particular way. Why did I take a job in business? Well, I needed a job because I had no money. I needed a good job because I had a family, siblings, and my parents that I needed to help support.
But if I was making this Faustian bargain, which is what it was, I had to be careful that I wasn't going to have the Faustian consequences. My professors at Harvard, they thought I was making a terrible mistake.
Now, if I told them I was going to law school, they would say, "Well, okay, there's a certain respectability." But to go to business school was like saying, "I'm going to be the janitor in a bordello." In their mind, it was just an unacceptable thing.
And I said, "Don't worry, I'm going to still write." They just felt that it was a complete delusion. You would never write.
But I did that so that I could spend three or four hours every day reading and writing in a disciplined way. So I made this bargain that I would do this so that I could write. Now, I would say that there's overwhelmingly long odds that I would fail because life just takes you in different directions.
If I was at all sane about a year into this, I'd say, "This is the stupidest possible way." I'm a young man. I fell in love with this girl that I married. We're in New York City. Why am I locking myself up in the basement every night? I mean, it's foolish. But I understood I was working for something else.
A sense of calling
David Perell: Was it a dream? Was it a compulsion that you had to create? Was it a dream that you would become somebody someday? Was it some inspiration that you had and you said, "Oh my goodness, I want to follow that and feel what that's like." What was the thing that was driving you?
Dana Gioia: It's all those things. I think through most of your life, what gives you meaning, what gives you pleasure, is your sense of yourself in the future. You're working toward the future.
Now, I'm 74. If I spend too much time thinking about my future, I'm going to get depressed because it's finite. But I'm still pretty positive, actually. I'm happier as an older man than I was as a young man.
I was very temperamental and tempestuous as a young man, but I had this intense moment in Vienna of my vocation, and it came out of nowhere. I did not go there thinking I'd be a poet, but I realized that the life that was going to be given to me was to be a poet.
That was the work that destiny, or God, or the muse—it was not given by me, it was given to me.
David Perell: So you almost surrendered to it.
Dana Gioia: Yeah. Seneca says, "If you follow your destiny, it guides you. If you resist it, it drags you behind it."
I think most people that are aspiring writers run the risk of having a life of regret in which destiny drags them behind it. And I just know this, that so many gifted people have unhappy or unfulfilled lives, and they compensate in a very sane and sensible way with other pleasures. But there's a sense of the unlived life.
Some people have it for romance, but I think most people, you find somebody who's right for you eventually, and you make a family, and that's really good. But it's not enough for somebody of large appetites, large ambitions.
So this was the bargain that I was making with fate. And so, you know, I did it, and it took a price. You don't get anything for free.
Order in life, originality in work
David Perell: We were talking earlier about the life that you've chosen to live, and I want to give you this quote and hear if you resonate with it. And you're like, "Yes, that's me," or "No." And if the answer is no, I want to hear why no. Gustave Flaubert said, "You want to be regular and orderly in your life so that you can be violent and original in your work."
Dana Gioia: Absolutely. The point I should have been making is that I took myself out of the marketplace.
But let me back up for a second. If you're a young writer, and you're with other young writers, and they ask, "Dana, what are you publishing?" And I say, "Well, I'm not really publishing right now," they assume that everything you've written has been refused. They feel sort of sorry for you. For six or seven years, I had to be pitiful in the eyes of my friends who were doing this, that, or the other.
I took myself out of the marketplace so I could discover who I was as a poet: What did I sound like? What did I want to write about? I was very slow in getting at this.
I stopped sending work out because I would send poems out, and the ones they would accept were the ones that sounded like other poets. I realized I wasn't strong enough to write, to have a business career, and to discover who I really was.
Then when I began publishing, I sent a bunch of poems, and the Hudson Review accepted, I think, seven. Rather than wait two years, they just led the next issue with them. Then the editor of the New Yorker called me up and asked why I had not sent those poems to him.
I wouldn't give the New Yorker any poems because I was afraid people at my office read the New Yorker, and I didn't have anybody that I worked with know that I was a poet. I kept it entirely private. But I went from not publishing at all to publishing in the best magazines in the United States.
Developing self-criticism
David Perell: How did you know if you were improving? Because implicit in what you're saying is an objective mirror that you can hold to your own work, which I think is rare.
Dana Gioia: I don't think it's rare among really good writers. I think it's rare among writers because they think everything... I mean, I get poetry sent to me every day, and that's fine. It's good for them. But they're usually terrible, these poems.
They have the enthusiasm, they have the subjectivity to create it, but they don't have the objectivity to make it better. But it's something you cultivate.
I'm also a well-known critic. Part of what a poet critic does is to bring the critical faculties to their own work, but you have to do it in a way which doesn't paralyze the work.
David Perell: How do you do that?
Dana Gioia: Schizophrenia.
David Perell: So you're just able to switch between both modes?
Dana Gioia: You alternate between the madness of invention. It's like I write this thing and it's great. Then I look at it the next morning, and I just see what's wrong with it.
Then you throw yourself back into it and you just forget all the critical things. You just make it this, that. And then you see what's wrong. And you just keep doing it by degree, by degree, by degree.
I have some poems that I've taken into a hundred drafts. And you say, well, that's clearly mad. And I won't argue with you. That's insane, to take a poem that will make you no money and take it into 100 drafts.
Except for the pleasure of getting it right, of having described that experience or conveyed that experience exactly as well as you should. I think also that comes from the fact that I would come at night, and I only have about 90 minutes to work, and I would just burnish it and burnish it.
Sometimes I'll finish a poem, and the same thing with prose. I'll just go through it and I'll say, what's the worst line in this poem? Let's just cross it out. Where does the energy peak? Where does it fall off?
And you start to see this shape of your work. You know you're doing this, and you build up to a kind of a climax, and you pull back, and you build to another climax. I do it all the time when I'm writing for the stage.
And then you come up and you say, okay, this is a dead patch. Cut it out. Now, a stage work, you have the advantage of actually seeing it in rehearsal or something like that. But you have to do that for a prose piece.
And so I'll look at a longer prose piece that I've written, and I'll put it in kind of shapes of experience. So just, you know, just when you're getting to this one thing, then I'll pull the rug out from underneath you and just keep you reading. That's why the interesting thing about this book here is people say they've read it in one sitting. It was a matter of getting the pacing and the balancing of it right, and that makes me feel really good, because that's what I intended: was to create something that was so intriguing and entertaining to them that they didn't want to stop.
Channeling dark emotions (57:01)
David Perell: There was something you said earlier about negative emotions and feeling these difficult emotions. How have you cultivated that over the course of your career?
Dana Gioia: I didn't have to cultivate it. The negative emotions came. The dark forces came. What I had to do was control it.
Maybe one of the reasons that poetry called me to it was that at some deep level, I'm all screwed up, that I've got all these irreconcilable things going on on the side of my head. What poetry becomes is a way of channeling that energy and to create something that is beautiful.
Beauty is being able to see the form, the shape underneath reality, and to understand why it is right, even when it is destructive or terrifying or humiliating or whatever. Maritain said it is the secret shape of things radiating into the intelligence. The most powerful kind of beauty, I think, is to be able to discover the secret shape and rightness of things that are terrifying.
I have very passionate impulses in me that need to be channeled. I wonder in some cases if the reason I write poetry was not because I had a religious vocation which I did not choose to follow. I always wanted a family. I like girls. I didn't want to become a priest.
But on the other hand, I understand the beauty of a life that's dedicated to a cause larger than yourself. So, I have all these impulses, and I'm very self-critical. I feel my own failings passionately.
I mean, I will not be able to bear to watch this film, because the only thing I'll notice is the mistakes I make, which I'm sure are legion. I think that I've had to balance those things in my life. That's why it was very good for me during my younger and most tempestuous young adulthood to be anchored in a job that I had to go to every day.
Loss and human connection
Dana Gioia: When my son died, I went through with the funeral, and it was right before Christmas. So I came back to California with my parents for a week. But then I went and I went to work every day. I was dead inside, but I went to work every day.
The job saved me in some ways because I... It gave an order to me. Usually two or three nights a week or after work or on the weekend, I would go over to the cemetery, which was an old working-class cemetery that was always messed up and dirty. And I'd clean it up.
You find ways of channeling that energy, and writing is one of them, and reading is one of them. To write a very small, calm poem requires years of suffering and years of joy. Everything you've suffered, everything you've experienced will not be wasted if it creates the way of seeing the world that comes into your work.
David Perell: What did experiencing the outer depths of grief... How did that change your writing?
Dana Gioia: My wife and I lost our first son. He died at four months of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. He'd never been sick a day in his life.
We had waited a long time to have kids because we felt like kids were kind of a burden, or our lives were so busy. But as soon as we had a child, our life was suffused with joy. We realized we were just stupid to have delayed it that long. So, we had him, and then suddenly, it was abruptly, about a week before Christmas. So it was a terrible, terrible thing.
When you're given a great grief, most people try to repress it or deny it. I had worked with a couple of men who had lost sons, and they were kind of old-fashioned American men, so after a little period of mourning, they just repressed it. What I saw them do was, in a sense, shut off a significant portion of their own humanity to be able to cope with their life. I understood why they were doing it, but I didn't want that to happen. So I made the decision that I would go wherever the grief led me.
One of the places it led me was to the graveyard. I'm a working-class guy. I'm not a sophisticated person in that way. So I would clean it up, because it's all I could do. It would just give me a little chore. I mean, I'm not going to sit and weep by the graveside, but I wanted to be in the presence of my son.
But then something strange began to happen. I would see other people there, usually older women, and they would come over and they would say, "Is this your boy?" And I'd say, "Yes." And I'd say, "You must have lost a child." And they'd say, "Yes." And then we would sit on the tombstones, and they would tell me about the son or the daughter they lost.
This happened a couple of times. So here am I, a Stanford, Harvard-educated MBA executive, who's doing yard work, talking to an old immigrant woman. And we were equal. We were equal in our grief. We had both been drafted into a -- excuse me, I have a tear in my eye -- into this club nobody wants to get to join, and nobody can leave. It taught me about the weight of our common humanity.
And then something would happen again and again. I'd give a poetry reading, and I would always read a poem about my son. And afterwards, when people would come up, there would always be somebody hanging back a little bit. And after a while, I would just sort of say, "Hi, did you lose a child, too?" And they always had.
I developed a sixth sense for this grief. The experience taught me humility. It taught me sympathy. It brought me back into the center of my humanity, and those are good things.
I wish I hadn't had to pay the price that I did for that, but it was good. My writing changed because I simplified my writing. It's really funny: people say, "Well, how has your writing changed?" And I say, "Well, to a certain degree, my writing has not changed a lot between my first book and my current books, except in two senses. My work has become simpler and more emotionally direct, and it's more musical."
So what I'm really saying is that I kind of knew what I should be doing there, and I've gradually developed the ways of doing it in a way that I think invites more people into the work. So, you know, it was an experience I do not recommend to anybody.
I hate to say this, but most people in the course of their life will have something absolutely appalling and calamitous happen to them. You've got to make a choice of how you deal with it, and I don't think you do it by denying it. You take that as part of what it means to be human. Another thing is, it made me a better parent for my next two sons. They're probably both a little bit spoiled.
Embracing mystery in writing
David Perell: When you talk about being more emotionally direct in your writing since then, what do you mean by that?
Dana Gioia: Let me explain this. My work became simpler, more emotionally direct, but in some cases, more mysterious.
I realized I don't have to explain things; I have to give you an experience. If I leave things that are kind of puzzling and mysterious to you, that's not a problem. People like that in poetry. People want to have something that isn't a humdrum experience in a poem; they want to participate.
If you think of it, when we say the word "mystery," it could mean, on the one hand, puzzlement, but it also could mean the secrets of existence.
David Perell: I was thinking of wonderment.
Dana Gioia: Yeah. And so my work, I mean, I allowed that mystery to come in, but I didn't curate it so narrowly as I did in some of my early work. And I always knew this, but you have to have a tune. Even if you're writing free verse, you have to have a tune: the shape of the words.
A poem is made up of great phrases, of great sentences, of great sounds, of sequences of emotions. These things are all independent of it saying, "Well, this is a poem which gives you a response to this..." The intellectual content of a poem is real, but it's not the major reason that we read poetry. We're reading poetry to have an intensity and authenticity of feeling.
Poetry should be visceral, but plus, a poem is a kind of holistic language. In the professions, as we learn to be lawyers or doctors or businessmen, they teach us not to use holistic language. You use very precise analytical language, very precise -- if you're a psychologist -- interpersonal language.
But a poet just gives you raw language, which is to say, when I speak to you, I speak to you as a person who thinks, who feels, who has physical senses, who has memory, has intuition, and has imagination, without asking you to divide those capacities. Let's say I'll talk to somebody, and I'll walk away, and what do I think of that person? I haven't really thought it through. If I'm walking down the road a mile later, I say, "Well, that guy's pretty funny," you figure it out.
But poetry is that pre-analytical language. It's all on the level of intuition, and intuition is precisely what academic education tries to get you to get rid of. Your intuition is probably smarter than your intellect, frankly, because you can feel things and intuit things before you understand them.
In great poems, you feel before you understand. And I think that's the way it is when you're a musician. You played a lot of the stuff by memory, or by just knowing the chords, and you're playing it, and somebody is taking the poem in a direction that you're not used to playing. But you're going along, and suddenly you're learning this song is different than the song you thought you were going to play.
Poetry, like music, is sound moving through time, where print is fixed and visual. If you have a print-age education, you don't hear as well as you see.
Learning from non-literary people
David Perell: Well, it's funny because whenever I read scripture, I read the Old Testament proverbs and the New Testament quietly, but I always read the Psalms out loud. I find the Psalms, read silently, you just miss something fundamental about their essence.
Dana Gioia: They're trying to be songs.
The same is true with the prophetic books. You read them, and they have this cumulative impact when you're hearing them aloud that you miss slightly on the page. There's a reason why one-third of Scripture is written as poetry: because poetry communicates differently.
You'll have a book that's just all the laws. But now they're saying, "No, I'm going to show you what's beyond reason. We're going to participate in the divine."
David Perell: You don't need to read Leviticus out loud.
Dana Gioia: Exactly. You want a checklist?
Well, they did. One of the prophets sits the people of Israel down and reads them the entire Mosaic Law for days. I forget who it is, Malachi or somebody like that. The poor Israelites are probably comatose by the end of it.
David Perell: So tell me this: when you were teaching, what were the core lessons that you were trying to impart in your students about the craft?
Dana Gioia: I had two things I was trying to teach my students: one of them was practical, one of them was artistic. I was teaching this class because, in order to lead the lives that you want, you need to understand the power of language.
You need to be able to hear language and know what it means, what it implies, what is not being said, and what is being said. You have to develop your own power of articulation to be able to express what you know and what you want.
I would ask: "How many of you are from immigrant homes?" About 30% or 40% of the class. First generation to come to college? About 40%. "How many of you speak a foreign language at home?" 30-40%. And not the same people, because some people have very educated parents from a foreign country.
So I said, "You are now in English, and you need to understand all of the power of this language that we share in common. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to work with you through poetry to increase your command of language and your ability for self-presentation."
Everyone in my class had to memorize poems, get in front of 215 people, and recite them. They were terrified at first, but by the end of the class, it became part of the class culture. Even the most self-conscious, shy person would come up.
I took them throughout the USC community. I would be invited to talk to the board of trustees, I would walk in with three undergraduates, and everybody would stiffen up. I would have each of them recite a poem. The board loved it because they saw the fruits of the humanities. I would bring them to public events with me because I made them, in a sense, confident of speaking in public, of being themselves and being articulate in public.
At the same time, I was giving them an introduction to an art form that is as old as any human activity. I wanted them to hear how people had shaped sound to capture and convey meaning. I used Robert Frost's line, that poetry is "a way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget."
Teaching poetry through performance
David Perell: Wow, that's a heck of a quote.
Dana Gioia: It is. A way of remembering... Who is the mother of the muses? Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. A way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget. So whatever you're remembering is valuable, and forgetfulness is the human condition: oblivion.
Most of what is around us is going to be wiped out by time, by death, by events. So you have to, in a sense, create what Shakespeare calls "alms for oblivion."
And so I would teach them poetry as a musical, memorable art of language. They were responsible to know every word, every image in the poem. If there was a bird in the poem, I wanted to know what kind of bird it was and describe it. After a while they realized what they were learning. I said it's because you're not just learning about language; this language is a way of seeing the world that actually exists.
I made them work really, really hard because I knew that if they did this, if they memorized and they learned these things, and they immersed themselves in it, something would go on inside of themselves.
Most of my class had a conversion experience. There were always a few people that never had it, in the back, that were forlorn and sad. But I would say 90-95% of the class, by the time we were done, had been converted to the notion that this was one of the vessels of human wisdom in which they could participate. By learning it, by reading it, by memorizing it, they were awakening themselves to their own sense of their own human capacity.
David Perell: When you say "learning it," when I think of school and poetry, honestly, the word that I think of is "boring." And then I think of rhyme schemes and verse schemes and whatever. Here's how it's constructed. I don't even know. I have a podcast called "How I Write," and I don't even remember it that well. But it seems like what you're saying is to "learn it" is something completely different from my experience.
Dana Gioia: My pedagogy, if you'll forgive that word, has nothing whatsoever to do with the way everybody else teaches it. For thousands of years, poetry was at the center of education. It was taught quite badly; as a result, everybody loved it.
Then in about the 1920s and 30s, a group of brilliant Southerners called the New Critics figured out the way to analyze poetry. They were absolutely right; they figured it out. They saw how it worked, and they created this critical school that lasted for half a century.
For the first time in history, poetry was taught right, and it killed the audience because it was a kind of visual analysis of the dead, silent page. How was poetry taught before? You memorized it, you recited it, you recited it in chorus. You used it to teach history; you used it to teach these various subjects. And you didn't really teach poetry as a quintessentially literary art that had to be understood through literary analysis.
My sense of teaching poetry is fairly simple: students experience it, they then perform it, they memorize it. And then once you've done that, you can do some analysis. But analysis is very secondary to what poetry is.
Poetry as physical experience
David Perell: If you made anybody who listened to a pop song analyze the chord sequences... No, you gotta be at the club and be like, "I love this song!" And then you figure out what's going...
Dana Gioia: The proper response to a song is to dance, to tap your foot, is to sing along. I've seen this again and again. If you take a bunch of kids and you allow them to bring all their performative energy into poetry, they love it. Kids that are terrible English students suddenly become the best people in the class.
Tolstoy, at one point was asked, "Should a novel deal with social issues?"
He said, "No, that's not commensurate with those things. What a novel does is to make you feel the joy of being alive in the world."
What art does by igniting all of our human capacity is to make us understand that most of the day, I'm not this alive. Most of the day, I'm just turning this part of me off, and this part of me. And so it excites, it expands, and it refines our complete human intelligence.
That is why very intellectual poetry is deadening, because it doesn't speak to us as a complete human being. You've got to go back to this primal notion of civilization when there was an art that they called poetry or song, but it was singing, poetry, and dancing all at once.
And so in dance, even if people aren't singing, there's always this sense that people are about to break forth in song. When people are singing, they're moving their bodies. The audience is moving their bodies.
When people are writing a really good poem, you should feel it physically.
Tiger, tiger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
As Blake would pronounce it. And you've got to feel this, which is the meter that you use for magic spells.
David Perell: When you're writing, in order to cultivate that, do you stand? Do you walk? Do you kind of move your body? Or is it a pretty solitary, still process and somehow you just feel it?
Dana Gioia: If I'm writing poetry, I've got to be moving.
David Perell: So do you walk around with a notebook?
Dana Gioia: What I'll do is sit at my desk here and do something, and then I'll just walk. This studio is designed so I can walk in a circle. I walk in a circle, muttering like a madman, and I just recite it until I change it enough, then I'll feel the lines get right.
You know how I'll know if the lines are right? I'll feel it in my body. It's not in my mind. I don't hear intellectual things. Oh, that's right, is I feel it.
It's intuition, and it's physical intelligence. Most of us, most of the time, go through our life half awake. The cultural technology of art, used properly, is to awaken us to just experience and feel our situation.
Creating a literary environment
David Perell: How do you choose what you consume? You're obviously so intentional about it, not just with reading books, but with movies, but with plays, whatever it is. How do you think about this is what I'm going to do next?
Dana Gioia: It's all impulse. Sometimes I plan to read certain books, but in general, it's just... I mean, look at the environment I created for myself. It's full of books.
I've read most of these books, or parts of them many times. I've got images of paintings and drawings and things that I think are beautiful, and it's there to keep me alive.
David Perell: But these aren't the kinds of books that I would find in Barnes & Noble.
Dana Gioia: Not for the most part.
David Perell: These are completely different.
Dana Gioia: I've got about four or 5,000 books in this room, and I've probably got about 20,000 books in my house and various places.
David Perell: What do you see as the unifying thread amongst these books?
Dana Gioia: What I have here is a collection of poetry, poetry criticism, and literary writing. I'll be writing something and it'll remind me of something, and I'll go over and I'll read that.
Then I'll go back and I'll work it again, and I'll go back and read it. I'm playing off my memory and my experience.
Do I waste time? Well, yeah. But sometimes by wasting time, you come across something you didn't intend. The great danger is the internet.
David Perell: Do you have internet in here?
Dana Gioia: Yeah, I do, but I turn it off most of the time. I listen to YouTube while I'm shaving and things like that, stuff that I can't read.
Every day, I try to read something that's really intelligent, that I've read before, or that I should have read. I stopped writing prose this year because I have to get back to poetry. There's a book-length poem that I started 10 years ago. What I've done is really good, but I haven't really written hardly anything for a couple of years.
I've only got one prose piece that I've agreed to write, which is on T.S. Eliot. And so I get these books of Eliot, and I just go and I'll read 20 pages of Eliot, and it's wonderful. Then I'll just put it down.
David Perell: Do you take notes as you do that? So what's on the notes?
Dana Gioia: I'm just reading, in this case, Rene Wellek, this great Czech critic. I'm thinking about him talking about types of criticism. Then I go to Eliot and DeValliere.
I began to think about the types of critics. Now, this has nothing that is directly translatable into the little piece that I've agreed to write on Eliot, but it puts me in a kind of frame of mind, thinking about, why do people write criticism? You know, why do we read criticism?
What'll happen is that I'll do this, and I'll think about these things, and then suddenly I'll get an entry into the thing I want to write about from an angle I hadn't thought about.
Patient meditation in writing (1:23:15)
I think one thing that a good writer needs, and this is just the opposite of most of the people you talk to because they give you very good advice, which is if you want to write, sit down and write. If you want to write, be patient.
I would say think about things. Wallace Stevens said people talk about writing, they never really talk about the meditation that precedes writing. I'm very big on this because if I have to write a piece, I can sit down and write a piece. But if I want to write a piece that really surprises me, it's involuntary. It happens because I put myself in a space where these kinds of things happen.
I don't date with the muse via a dating site. I just go to places the muse might hang around, and if she shows up, it'll be great. If not, she'll show up eventually. Patience and fortitude, I think, are two old-fashioned words I think are important.
I have this sheet of paper, which is the first thing I see when I come into my studio. It's a little thing in Latin: Nulla Dies Sine Linea, which was said by Pliny the Elder. What this means is not a day without writing a line. A line is not much to write, a sentence is not much to write. But if you can write a good sentence, then you'll write another good sentence after it. If you write a good line and it'll either now or future will sort of cultivate.
Writing every day
David Perell: So in a month, how many days out of that month do you write a line?
Dana Gioia: I try to write every day. If I don't, I feel guilty. It happens, and you can't stop it. I mean, otherwise I would just be working on it every day around the clock because eventually, it will come. I like that. It's kind of a mania.
But I think to have a really good mania, you have to have that meditation. So what I do, if I can't write a poem, is I revise the lyrics of one of the songs for the operas that I'm writing about. I do a lot of work with composers, and that's very good because they have their deadlines.
I'll be revising something or other. Now, it's not the big project that I want to be working on, but it keeps me in touch with these things. Or they'll send me something and I'll revise it. So every day, I'm doing writing.
Usually, there's a big project, or two big projects, that I want to work on. I think there's a certain practicality of delaying, of pushing it aside until you can no longer prevent it. The meaning of it is too strong, the inspiration. And then you can't do anything but write, and it breaks.
That sounds very counterproductive. It sounds like a way of making excuses for not writing. But I think the inspiration should be overpowering.
The art of improvement
David Perell: So tell me this. We talked earlier about how you deliberately improved your poetry. How have you done the same thing with prose? How is the process of improvement and deconstruction different?
Dana Gioia: I divide my prose into two pieces. I wrote at least a million words in these textbooks where I'd write a biography. I'd make sure that if I had an author's biography that was two pages, it was interesting.
People said, "God, these biographies are interesting." Because it wasn't just "born so-and-so." I'd say, "Guy de Maupassant was born in a rented castle in Normandy." The first sentence would get you. This is writing where I know where it's going. I know it's going to end up where Guy de Maupassant dies, and critics say this about his work.
I've got a book review here. I know it's going to be 1200 words because that's what the Wall Street Journal is asking me for, or it's going to be 2,000 words. And I know the books that are about this, that, and the other.
But then there's the kind of writing where I don't know where it's going to end. I know what it's going to be about, and I let it go. I get into it, and then I sort of say, "I see where I'm going, but I don't feel anything in this paragraph."
So I'll take the same ideas and I'll rework it. Sometimes I'll just change this sentence, and the next day I'll change that sentence. But then a week later, suddenly this paragraph is full of emotion. It's got this little image or two that triggers other things.
If you ask me what I call it, I call it layering. In my poetry, I began doing something that playwrights do: I have a text, and I have a subtext. There are certain things that I don't put in the poem that I want you to feel.
I realized that an essay should have a certain subtext, too. You're doing certain things that evoke a lot of other stuff that you're not really getting into. But part of it is just making it as interesting as possible.
I wrote an essay about a little-known poet, and it was a very good essay. But I looked at the thing and I said, "You know, why would anybody want to read this when they don't know the work?"
I put a few more quotations in, and it worked a little bit better, but it still didn't. So then I just realized I needed to describe the guy. I wrote two paragraphs that evoke this weird guy in a way that's both touching and funny.
Creating vivid descriptions
David Perell: How, when you're thinking about describing him and you have that challenge, do you describe somebody well?
Dana Gioia: People will describe someone and pull from this. I think it's always a mistake to describe people that way. You should take a particular situation and recreate that person in that one moment of time as a little story, as a little piece of drama.
Everything you want to do will happen. I'd say this guy that anybody who had gone to poetry readings in New York at the end of the 20th century would have seen Samuel Menashe, whether they knew him or not.
A tall man is always sitting in the corner of the room with beautiful Hebraic looks. He could have played a prophet or a magician in a silent film. And when you addressed him, he spoke one octave lower than anyone else in the room.
I'm at the beginning of my New York life. I don't know that many people, but I know who he is. So I come up to him and I say, "Samuel, how are you?" To which he responds, "How am I? I am a pariah."
He seemed both depressed and delighted by his situation. I just evoke this strange guy that has chosen his whole identity to be an outsider, to be a pariah. And so I just create a little narrative. It's two paragraphs long. It's very funny and it's very touching.
And then suddenly, you go, I go into the thing about this neglected poet. And you have a sense of a real man in a real situation who is standing in the corner because he's literally painted himself into a corner in New York literary life.
David Perell: What do most people get wrong when they try to describe? I'm sure that there's a thousand things, but fundamentally, when you're reading something and the description just falls flat, what's happening?
Dana Gioia: Almost everything that you do should tell a story. I don't mean a complicated part of a story, but you should begin in a real place and go to a real place.
If I write a poem that's just images, there should be a story implicit in those images. So when you're describing a person, people will often say, "Well, so-and-so did this," and they'll take all these details from different times and places and make an abstract portrait of that person.
If you're going to do it in words, the words have got to move in a narrative way. So I think that what you do is you create a scene in which that person is at the center. Otherwise, I think it's just a list of details.
I can't tell you how often when I'm reading a novel, they'll describe the character and it doesn't mean anything to me. But if they can show how the person moves with their body and depict the size of the body, it doesn't have to be elaborate. It just has to be beginning, middle, end. It can be three sentences.
So I tried to keep myself out of my prose in the early days. I tried to make it abstract, very reasonable, very rational, very intellectual, and it was very successful. It was very good academic prose. It was very good journalistic prose because the old-fashioned journalists kept themselves out of the story.
But the older I got, the more I understood that first of all, if you put yourself not at the center of a story, but on the edge of a story, of an edge of an argument, the person can come with you. They know then where to position themselves.
Secondly, sometimes things that you know can best be expressed by telling your personal anecdote, by telling a story with you in it, so that they learn whatever it is, or hear whatever it is, happen the way it happened to you.
David Perell: Break that down for me.
Dana Gioia: I was the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts for six and a half years. I can tell you a story of one day in Pittsburgh at a national arts conference. I had to give, each hour, a speech to a different art form.
I came in at 8:00 a.m. into the Chorus America meeting and addressed it. They're all singing, and they're all friends because they're all part of choruses. They sing in harmony, and they sing at things, and they say, "Let's all sing 'America the Beautiful'." They sing it, and they're full of joy and everything else.
Then I go to the League of American Symphony Orchestras. There's a room full of all these tables, and each table is the board of a different symphony, and there's the board chairman. You could be among bankers because they've got big halls, and they've got to fill 3,000 seats for every performance, and they've got to get subscriptions. It's like a banking sort of thing.
You can convey these things as a narrative, as it happened to you. In my case, literally all in one day. If you can create a story, people like to come along with it. It's a very easy way of making complicated points, which is to say, in this case, that every art form has a remarkably different personality that's reflected in the artists and in the organizations themselves.
Breaking Down Great Writers (01:34:34)
David Perell: Did you break down other people's prose in the way that you did for poetry?
Dana Gioia: When I really started to try to improve my work, I went to the people I thought were the best to see how they operated on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph basis.
David Perell: So you went to them as in you picked up their work, or you went to go speak to them?
Dana Gioia: No, these are, for the most part, dead people I've never met. I've never met George Orwell. I've never met Randall Jarrell.
There are certain people I think are really good. Randall Jarrell was a great prose writer. I exchanged a couple of letters with Clive James, who most people know from television because he hosted a show on the Great Cities of the World for the BBC. But I know him as a poetry critic, and he's just terrific.
What Clive James did: he was an Australian who came to England and conquered. Everything he did, he did really well. He had this ability to create a paragraph, and he would just have this knockout sentence that would rivet you.
Randall Jarrell would sort of weave himself in and out of it. Orwell had a tonic note that he would go around. There's a real sense of controlling his voice, his tone, his idiom. It's an amazing amount of control. He was highly moralistic but never boring.
Analyzing great writing
David Perell: So as you're reading somebody like Orwell, and you admire him, is that a process of just reading more of his books? Is that a copy work?
Dana Gioia: At some time, you've got to sit down, and you've just got to look at a paragraph that you think is a great paragraph and figure out why the hell you think it's a great paragraph. I'll tell you what I learned again and again and again. You see something that you think is just tremendous, and you've got like a thousand ideas coming from this paragraph. Then you go back and look at it. It's much simpler. It's much shorter than you remember.
It's the same thing with poems. You'll have a poem, and you'll remember all these things. And that's when you learn something about writing, which is you put this much, but once again, you leave things out. You have radiant details, you have these things, and suddenly it creates all kinds of associations and reflections. It's this battery, and when you link into it, it electrifies your consciousness.
That's the thing that I really like about Orwell. I like it about Jarrell. Clive James does it. Auden does it. Eliot does it a different way. Eliot is very sly and intellectual, and stuff comes in sideways. But you know, there's D.H. Lawrence. I mean, when he's not crazy, he's magnificent. Sometimes he's both at once.
What I urge people to do is you've got to read. You can't be a writer unless you read a lot. You've got to make judgments. You say, "Well, who are the people you think are really the best?" Just say, "What do I like about them?" and find a paragraph, find a page, and just look at what they do.
You'll be surprised at what they do. It's always going to be a little different from what you remember, and you'll probably be astounded at how compact and how simple it is once you analyze it.
There's another writer I love, somewhat forgotten: Cyril Connolly. The way his book The Unquiet Grave begins is wonderful. This is a book about why he never wrote a great book, and it begins: "The more books we read, the sooner we perceive that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task has any consequence. Obvious though this should be, how few writers will admit it, or having made the admission, will be prepared to lay aside the piece of iridescent mediocrity on which they have embarked."
I love the phrase, "iridescent mediocrity." He's saying that the only thing you can do is write a masterpiece. Nothing else is of any consequence, and if you're a writer and you do this, you should just abandon what you've written.
His first book was called Enemies of Promise, in which each chapter shows you a different way that you'll go wrong as a writer.
David Perell: Oh, that's cool.
Dana Gioia: It's like no matter what you do, you're going to end up unsuccessful.
David Perell: That's great. If you were given that prompt, what are three chapters that you would write for ways that people go wrong as writers?
Dana Gioia: They get a job at the university. They live as a freelancer, where they've got to crank out things every week. Thirdly, they just decide they're going to write a kind of quick and easy book to get an advance because the next book they write will be a masterpiece.
I think that each of those things is a trap. You've got to find a way of distancing yourself from the short-term market to make your writing a long-term investment.
There's a young woman I know right now that's going through exactly this dilemma, and she asked my advice. She's written a lot of pieces, but she finally wrote a big piece, a big article, and it just got a lot of attention. An editor from a major house called up and wants to do it as a book.
You can say, "Yeah," because you've got a big publisher, and you know exactly the book it is you want to write, and he's going to give you an advance. Or you can say, "No," because you're not ready for a book yet. This article is probably perfect in itself. If you try to turn it into a book, it's going to become a typical nonfiction book.
Most of the books that I read have a wonderful first chapter, a kind of mediocre second chapter, and then it's just padding.
David Perell: Well, this is a major question then. How do you know that you're ready for a book?
Dana Gioia: You don't. Everything is a venture. Everything is a gamble.
Let me tell you the story of my first book, because this is how bad my advice is for people. One publisher came up to me and said, "I like your work. Would you give me a book?"
And I said, "No, I'm not ready for a book."
Then about a year later, another publisher came up to me and asked for one. I said, "No, no, no."
I'd done a book with this little press--there were only two people then--called Graywolf Press. It's now a major literary press, but then it was just two people, and he wanted the book. I said, "Well, not really, but when I get it done, I'll send it to you."
I sent it off to a literary contest, which is the only contest I've ever entered. I knew I wouldn't win, and I knew who would win. Then I sent it to Graywolf, and he wanted it.
But I'd also sent it to Alfred A. Knopf, which was arguably the best place for a new poet to appear. Graywolf said they wanted it, but the next day Knopf called me up, and they wanted to publish it.
I knew that the reason the Knopf editor wanted to publish it was that I had just published a piece in The New Yorker that was very celebrated. I figured that she probably hadn't even read it. She just saw, "Oh, he's a hot writer."
So, I told Alfred A. Knopf I did not want my book to come out with them. I went with this two-person operation called Graywolf Press.
Now, nobody would tell me that, you know, no rational person would say that was the thing to do. This guy who was really quite--his name was Scott Walker, who founded Graywolf--was quite different from me in a lot of ways, but I really respected his integrity. I said, "That's the kind of guy that I can work with."
It's now 42 years later. I'm still with Graywolf.
Saying no to opportunities
David Perell: How about that?
Dana Gioia: Every one of my books with Graywolf--well, every one of my poetry books--is still in print. With Knopf, I probably would have gotten a little bit more initial sales, but my book would have been out of print two years later.
So I did it out of intuition, maybe a little bit out of stubbornness and disapproval. But it was the right decision to make.
Much of my career has been about saying no to things. I was offered the poetry editorship of The New Yorker. I said, "No, I don't think I want to do that."
Not because I didn't think it was a great job; I didn't think it was an interesting magazine. I couldn't have done a lot of good, but I felt that the job would have owned me.
In the same way, when I went to become chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, I just said, "I will have to stop writing for six years," which was a great sacrifice for me. My writing was official writing. I knew that was the price that I would have to pay.
Now, I probably could have written a lot of crappy stuff, and everybody would have published everything. But I just said that I had to separate my public career from my literary career.
David Perell: So, if I came to you and I said, "Dana, I'm thinking of writing my very first book," and then we began to have a conversation about, is it the time to do that? How do you counsel me or any young writer on thinking about this?
Dana Gioia: I would say, "Well, what is your book? Tell me about the book you want to write. Have you done any portions of it?"
And look at it, because you only get one debut. Your first book will get a certain kind of attention because it is a first book; you're a new voice coming onto the marketplace. So, the question is, do you want to squander that, or do you want to maximize that?
I don't think you should wait till you're 85 to publish your first book, but I think you should be deliberate about that, and come into the world like Minerva from the skull of Jupiter, fully armed.
Part of it is just talking with somebody: what is the book, and this, that, and the other.
A lot of times people will have an article that they're turning into a book, and then they're just cranking out the previous chapters. There's a person I know who did what ended up being a very successful book.
The person was very excited about it, and sent me this. This is a person I had kind of mentored a little bit. I just said, "This is just badly written."
So I went over and I took about the first 30 pages, and I was merciless about it. And to the person's credit, they then rewrote it. I said, "Now you've got to do the whole manuscript."
I said, "Do the manuscript and do 200 changes."
They called back triumphantly a couple of days later. They had spent all their time, they had 200 changes. I said, "Print it out again. Now go through and do another 200 changes."
They asked "Why can't I..." I said, "Do it."
And they did it. The book got better and better, but their editor was saying, "You don't need any more, it's perfectly ready to go. They want to get it out. My editor's yelling at me."
I said, "Don't listen to your editor. Your editor just wants..." You know, it's like if you do a favor for somebody, as soon as you do it, they need the next favor.
And they did it, and the book was very successful. That being said, I think it could have gone through another round of changes too. But the book was not ready to be published.
But the commercial aspect of this was making that person had to have this by this date, to the copy editor on this date.
So I think what I would say is: what is the book you want to write? Talk about it. Have you brought the thing to where it should be, book-length, which means that chapter two, chapter three, chapter four--something different has got to happen than what's in chapter one.
Most people, when they start going through that, say, "I better wait, or I better do a little bit more work." Because what the agent wants to do is to sign the deal and the contract to get their commission.
What the editor wants to do is, okay, they've signed you, and they've got to get you in the system on these dates and put you through. So their interests, their legitimate interests--I don't criticize them for wanting those things--but that's not the same as your interest in producing the best book possible.
So you've got to be your own editor, your own agent, in terms of marshaling your talent.
Revision as creative activity
David Perell: You seem to have such an interest in the art of revision and looking at work in progress. It seems to just be something that you love. And you've said, basically, that's where the work happens. It is in the revision where it happens.
But you've really looked at people revising and editing and studied. What have you learned?
Dana Gioia: Any real writer has to go to revision with the same openness to experience that they bring to creating the first draft. Revision is a creative activity.
You see, again and again, things which don't work in their first draft becoming magnificent in their final draft, because the material has been reconsidered and reconsidered.
So, I love revision, and I've also seen how powerful it is in terms of making something work.
David Perell: My sense is that you ask your peers a lot for editing feedback. Is that true? And if so, how do you ask for that feedback?
Dana Gioia: Yes, I do. At the beginning of my career, I was always very dependent on one or two people for their feedback. For almost seven years, I worked in isolation. I would go to the office during the day, come back, and write at night.
I had my life with my wife, but I was not leading a literary life in the conventional, social sense. What I would do is send my poems to usually one or two people at any given moment, and just ask them, "Tell me what's wrong with it. What do you think of this?"
If they said, "Oh, that's wonderful," it was not helpful. I liked the people that circled things, saying, "I like this line," or this, that, and the other. Over the course of my whole career, there have been about half a dozen people like this, not all at the same time. It's very, very important to me.
The problem is, you get to a point like where I am now, and I send it to somebody and they go, "It's terrific. Don't change a word." And no. I said, "No, no, tell me the words I should change." But during those early stages, it was all important, and they were, for the most part, my fellow poets.
Finding the right feedback
David Perell: And what do you look for in good collaborators?
Dana Gioia: I look for candor. The hard part of writing a poem -- because, think about this, in prose you're making a kind of public argument in a public idiom -- but in poetry, you're trying to evoke things. You're trying to imply things. You're trying to enchant with the music.
You send it to somebody and just see if they feel the enchantment. Where does the poem go wrong? At that stage of my writing career, I assure you, in every one of my poems, something went wrong.
If you have two people and they both say this line is a stinker, or they say, "What do you mean by this?" or whatever, you learn to revise around it. A lot of times they'll say they don't get this line. The temptation is to cut the line out, but sometimes you change the context so that line becomes more powerful.
A young writer should find other writers, more or less on the same level, whose intelligence and honesty you respect, and exchange manuscripts. You need to give them all your intelligence and candor and imagination, so that you have an honest transaction with them. What I've seen is when you're doing this, both of you will get better.
David Perell: Feedback is a heck of a way to improve, giving other people feedback.
Dana Gioia: One thing I noticed, when I read about literary history, very rarely does a single poet just emerge out of nowhere. It's often little groups of poets, friendships of poets. Find someone who has a catalytic effect on you, and you'll make both of your writing better.
I very consciously sought to create a community to which I could belong. At first, it was just a couple of people, but when I got into the full swing of my career, I created a whole community at Westchester, for this annual conference on form and narrative. It ended up being the largest poetry conference in the United States. We did that without budget, without staff, or anything else, because we had the right idea, and we created the right frame for it.
Nowadays, I've got this conference on the Catholic literary imagination. We had 1300 people. You create a community, and if you create a healthy community, writers are looking for that.
Recopying to continue writing
David Perell: Sometimes you'll copy the work that you've already done to get into the state in order to start writing. Why do you do that?
Dana Gioia: When I was working in business, I would come down to this table late at night, about 9:00. I had an hour, maybe 90 minutes, to write. At that point, all I really wanted to do was veg out. I wanted to open up another beer. I wanted to watch TV.
I wanted to do the normal things that normal people do. But I had made the abnormal decision to be a poet while having a ten-hour-a-day job. I had to find a way of getting from this world to that world.
The way I did it was that I would take the paragraph that I had written the night before -- I was writing prose -- and I'd recopy it. As I recopied it, I'd say, "Well, you know, this word could be a little different." I'd begin to revise it.
By the time I finished recopying that paragraph, which might be 20 minutes, I was suddenly back in the inspiration. I picked up the continuity, and then I would write again. It was a way of re-entering my inspiration, re-entering my frame of thought, my argument, my emotional tone at that point.
I think if I'd said, "Well, that's done, I'm going to write from scratch," it would've been more difficult. The same thing when I was writing a poem: I would just recopy what I had up to that point. As I recopied it, I'd start to hear it again. I might play with a couple of words, and then by the time I was down to where I had to write something new, I was in the poem. I had the swing of the music and everything.
It worked for me, so I could do it night after night after night. Otherwise, you would just stare at the empty page and feel despair.
David Perell: You said you stopped after 90 minutes. Did you follow a Hemingway stop mid-sentence? Or how do you think about ending your writing?
Dana Gioia: No, I wasn't like that. But I would look at the clock and it's, you know, quarter of 11. I have to get up early the next morning. If you are really writing well and you go to bed, you're sitting there still writing in your head.
You had to just cut it off when you just sort of said, "Okay, it's about time. It's about time to end," and not feel that was a defeat. Part of what you're trying to do as a writer, and this doesn't matter if you have a job or not, is to manage your mood swings.
Writers tend to be moody people, and if they aren't already people with normal emotional swings, the task of writing and looking at your stuff, and sinking into this thing, will accentuate and aggravate your mood swings. You have to find some mechanism for doing this, and not everybody has the same mechanisms, but it's the same problem that you're dealing with.
Readwise's Reader app
David Perell: I want to tell you about the only app that I use to read articles, and it's called Reader. Tell me if this sounds familiar: you read something brilliant, like an amazing quote, the perfect article, but then one day you go back, you're looking to find it, and it's just gone.
You can't find the thing. That used to drive me crazy. But then I found this app called Reader, and it's become the backup system for my brain. Here's how it works.
Whenever I'm on my phone or my computer, I'll come across a new article, and I just toss it into Reader. And then, whenever I'm ready to read, I can find all the articles pre-downloaded with no ads and no clutter. But here's the kicker: every time I highlight something, Reader automatically saves it for me.
If I'm writing and I need that perfect quote, that perfect example, it's just right there waiting for me. Because of that, I don't have to dig through old notes or endless browser tabs anymore. That means that I can focus on writing. Reader is the sponsor of today's episode.
I have to love a product in order to promote it, and I can tell you that I use Reader every single day. I called up the CEO and I said, "Yo, will you give How I Write listeners 60 days free?" And he said, "Sure. They have to sign up, though, at readwise.io/davidperell." There's a link in the description below. All right, back to the episode.
Poetry as a religious impulse
Dana Gioia: I'd like to show you how one of my poems began. It's a relatively simple poem. One night after midnight, I came to my house and there was a gigantic moth across my door. Now this is a moth I see about once every two years. It's a kind of luna moth.
It's as big as my hand, and it has a protective coloration, so in their wings are things that look like two owl eyes. A predator coming down on it would be frightened and would go away.
I was moved by the beauty of it, the fragility of it, and the fact that I see it only a few times, always late at night when no one else is around on a foggy evening. I began to write a poem, so I jotted down seven lines. Only the first two words, "pardon me," appear in the final poem.
This is November 13th. A week later, I finally had a moment's peace, and I began to write this. It goes, "Pardon me, moth, I had to learn your name."
One of the things that struck me is I couldn't remember the technical name of the moth, but I'd seen it before. I was stumbling on somebody whose name you didn't remember. So I have this conversation with a moth.
It's still disorganized. It's lines. I went through 10 pages.
David Perell: Is this all in the same night?
Dana Gioia: The first three pages are the next day, and then the following day I write another page. I start to get the tune of the poem, and I realized that it is going to rhyme. Here's what the opening of the final poem sounds like:
"Pardon me, pilgrim, I forgot your name when you arrived last night at our front door. A baneful vagrant from the stormy skies, your bright broad wings marked with two ferocious eyes, but your fierce gaze proved beauty in disguise, a dusty sweetness under thick devise. Giant of your fragile race, you came by gusty happenstance and nothing more, yet still I wondered what had brought you here so late. When I, too, wandered aimlessly, but mute with wonder, how could I inquire the secrets of your lunar embassy?"
It's a moment of wonder at night when I see the beauty of something, and I realize it's big but fragile. It reminds me of myself. I go through all these things that I'm trying to do, and I'm working with the rhyme scheme.
David Perell: What's interesting is you only realized around draft four that you're going to do a rhyme scheme. Did I hear you right?
Dana Gioia: I knew that I had a kind of thing. What I try to do is write the language and ask myself, "What does this poem want to sound like? What do the words that are coming to me want to sound like?"
I go through ten of these handwritten drafts. Then I gradually say, "Okay, I kind of know what the poem sounds like and looks like." Two months later, I take it and bring it to the computer.
That's a very big moment, and I think people cheat themselves that don't do this. Suddenly, as soon as you put it on the computer, you realize it looks and sounds differently from what you thought. It gives you this moment of objectivity.
I begin doing it, and then it happens fairly rapidly within the next week. I take it through another ten drafts, and I keep playing with the rhyme scheme. Gradually, a week later, I have what is almost this finished poem.
I'm calling it "Apology to a Luna Moth" because it's a luna moth. Terrible title. The poem is an apology. I'm talking to an animal which can't talk back, and so it's a kind of fictive conversation.
Usually, a good title is a version of its first line, so it becomes "Pardon me, Pilgrim." It's a pretty odd way to begin a poem when you're talking to an insect. The title does it. Then you hear it again in the first line.
The idea that this mysterious nocturnal animal was a pilgrim becomes established. By then, pretty much every word, every line is rhymed. I've got some lines rhymed four times. It's a very intensely rhymed poem, and it's finished. So, "Pardon me, Pilgrim to a Luna Moth."
The power of rhyme
David Perell: When you're trying to do the rhyme scheme, are you sitting next to a thesaurus? Is that something that you do, or is your bank of language large enough that you don't really need to do that?
Dana Gioia: I occasionally use a thesaurus. What I do is say the lines aloud. I like the music of this, which is like: "A baneful vagrant from the stormy skies, your broad wings marked with two ferocious eyes, but your fierce gaze proved beauty in disguise, a dusty sweetness under fictive eyes."
I mean, it's the same rhyme four times in a row. I like the effect of that. You're lost in the rhymes because it's a kind of a lyric moment. It's 12:30 at night in the fog outside, and I'm staring at a moth.
When that happens, when you're transfixed by a moment in your own life, that's what art is all about. No one in my family has ever seen this moth but me. I've lived here 30 years, and I've probably seen it nine or ten times.
I felt I was given this momentary vision. The next morning it was gone. That's the relationship with the world that I treasure.
There's certain beauties that I see every day. The sunset up here is beautiful, the sunrise is beautiful, the fog comes in in the morning. These are predictable beauties. But every now and then, something transfixing happens, just for a moment, and I feel as if the world has revealed one of its secrets to me. I'm grateful.
If I have any advice at all to people that want to be real writers, I would say try to be grateful for being alive, just to be suffused with gratitude at what is given you. Instead, I see a culture which is angry, entitled, envious. I don't think these are, for the most part, emotions which develop into powerful and meaningful art.
Seeing the miraculous in the mundane
David Perell: There's a real theme over the time we've spent together of seeing the miraculous in the mundane. You're really in tune with where you live and the rhythms and the seasons and the animals, just looking a little bit deeper than most people would.
Dana Gioia: Everything I'm saying will be bad advice for most writers. But for me, my experience of my daily life, almost always in the country, but even in the city, is metaphysical, which is to say I experience two worlds at once.
I experience the world in front of me, of the immediate senses, but I almost always have a sense of something underneath that. There's so much of reality which is invisible. It's not just because I'm religious. It is a fundamental belief for anyone who's religious that there's the temporal, the eternal, the physical, the spiritual. I think it's a kind of alertness.
After having lost my son, I realized something that you don't realize as a child, adolescent, or young adult: most people go through life bearing terrible sorrows, terrible losses. To everyone's credit, they get on with their lives, but there are always these things just underneath the surface, and every now and then, they break through.
I had this weird experience that happened so many times after my son was lost. People that I'd known for years, that I'd worked with for years, would come into my office. They would begin by saying, "I'm so sorry to hear what happened," and then they would tell their own story.
America does not want to hear people's sob stories. In individual and social reactions, for very good reasons, we maintain our calm. We get on with our lives. But for these people, my son's death created strange moments of intimacy in which they talked about things that they could not have shared with me under normal circumstances.
I've learned that I'll be in a group, and I'll look around people, and I'll be able to see people who are survivors of the tragedies or the hardships of their own life. There is something sad about that, but there's also something very noble about it. My attitude towards life is to not only enjoy and be appreciative of what is visible, but to be conscious of those things which I can only intuit underneath the surface.
What business taught about writing
David Perell: That's a good answer. You talked about people walking into your office. What did the business world teach you about writing? How is that kind of writing different from the poetry that you aspire to?
Dana Gioia: When writers ask me about the fact that I spent 15 years in the corporate world, working 10 hours a day and traveling all the time, they assume that must have been terrible. In retrospect, I realize it was very good for me to be with non-literary people, people who really didn't care about any of the things I studied. They were smart, but they were not intellectual.
I spent 15 years talking to people and listening to how they spoke and told stories, seeing what they found interesting and what they didn't. It gave me a really good sense of the American language and the American character. I think that that was much better for my poetry than if I had spent those 15 years at an Ivy League university teaching excellent students about the latest trends in literary study. It made my work more direct, more grounded, and more democratic. When I write in rhyme and meter, I'm actually being democratic because the average person knows how to hear a metrical poem.
David Perell: I guess I'm educated enough to do these podcasts, and I think of poems as being rhymes and meter. I don't really know how else to read a poem. When I think of a poem, I think of rhyme schemes.
Dana Gioia: That's a prejudice that you share with the great mass of humanity. I wrote a poem called "Cruising with the Beach Boys." It's just about being in a car, hearing an old Beach Boys song, and thinking about when I first heard it. It was immediately popular, but it was immediately attacked for all these reasons.
I think the reason it was attacked by so many people is that it just bothered them that I was writing this poem in rhyme about popular music. But what person in my generation was not partially formed by listening to AM radio, by listening to the rock music of the 60s? It would be ridiculous for me not to write about that.
It seems to be the most natural thing to write about songs that rhyme and have a beat, with words that rhyme and have a beat.
Poetry that lives in the body
David Perell: That's what's great about rap music is you can hear it. If you're out somewhere or somebody drives up next to you, turn on the radio, and all of a sudden you can start bobbing your head, tapping your feet to the rhythm. It's pre-intellectual. It just hits your soul. It hits your body. And you're like, "I like this." A lot of the poetry that I read, which isn't much because I don't really like it, feels more academic. I don't feel that at all. I actually feel nothing. The only thing that gets activated is my brain.
Dana Gioia: Poetry should be heard, not read silently. You read silently after you've heard it as a way of refreshing the musical memory.
When I was at Harvard, which was a wonderful school with brilliant professors, I was being taught three or four assumptions about poetry. One is that poetry had now become so difficult and innovative because of modernism that it could never go back. It would only become more and more complicated in the future, and only smart, trained, elite people like you and me could understand it. We were part of this intellectual Marine Corps that was tough enough to read poetry.
Secondly, the average person would never go back to reading poetry. It was gone; it was democratic.
Thirdly, it was now impossible ever to use rhyme and meter in serious poetry again, because the organic forms of late modernism were the directions to go.
The fourth one was really quite interesting, and this was honestly dogma, that African American writers would never use rhyme and meter again because it was European and they had been liberated from the manacles of this European art form.
Now, 10 years later, you got Kool Herc in South Bronx, and nobody told him he's not supposed to use rhyme and meter. He invents, or he first publicizes, hip hop, and rap within 10 years is the most popular form of recorded sound everywhere in the world.
What it just shows you is the people who are the experts are terrible about predicting the future. You know, I was born at the height of print culture. What I mean by print culture is a society in which all important information is published in print, is preserved in print, and is organized to be found in print encyclopedias, dictionaries, reference works, as well as just all of the books and magazines. And that was, to me, culture. So it was book culture, it was magazine culture, and I, as a writer, worked in that.
The end of print culture
Dana Gioia: But what was already happening was the technology that was being invented was making us realize that what we thought was reality was actually a very historically bound era. It went between not even Gutenberg, but the beginning in the 18th century of mechanical printing and the end of the 20th century.
Suddenly, long-distance phone rates becoming affordable. People don't write letters so much anymore. You have radio stations that were not just three radio stations, but 100 radio stations. Then suddenly you have this thing called the Internet, which is first just print, but then suddenly, you have a thing where an average person can afford a camera, can afford recording equipment, soon has a little cell phone in which they can talk to people, record things, post things on all of these sites. And by the beginning of the 21st century, print culture is over.
As a poet, I'm this guy of print culture. How do most people come to my work? In poetry readings, in broadcasts, in TV shows, where I'm actually operating the same way that Homer did 3,000 years ago, where he's giving poetry before there's even writing.
So I saw that happening. The books are not going to go away, but what a book is for is going to be very different. I find myself now, in the beginning of my old age, in a culture where, as a writer, the technology that I perfected, which is how to make a printed page sing, is a slightly antiquated, even archaic kind of technology.
Now, luckily, one of my sons was a filmmaker. So he began to say, look, Dad, you actually are best off when you're lecturing. Your poetry is most powerful when it's read aloud.
So I began, not because I wanted to, but because I had a son who dragged me. He began filming me reciting poems. Whenever he got new equipment, he would just film me to see how things work and he would try editing things.
He began to say, these lectures that you gave are really interesting. Can we film some of those and we bring them into the new medium? But I said, I don't really want to just be a talking head. Let's integrate visuals into it, integrate these other things.
So I now have a significant presence on YouTube, doing work which I would like to say is very good looked at from the old perspective and very good looked at from the new perspective. So I'm lucky enough because I have got a son who specializes in these things to be able, in a sense, to speak to the younger generation.
Writers as Renaissance people (2:16:40)
David Perell: Now, for writers who do want to thrive in the digital culture, how should they be thinking about the strategy of their work differently?
Dana Gioia: Anybody who wants to be a serious writer now has to be polymathic. If you go back to the Renaissance, you look at Michelangelo. He did architecture, he did sculpture, he did paintings, he developed machines. And I think that's how we need to be today.
A 21st-century writer has to be a Renaissance man or woman, which means you have to be able to write for the page, write for broadcast, and be able to embody your work as a speaker of your work, as a performer of your work. Your generation has a name for this: multiple platforms.
But if you have multiple platforms that are unrelated to each other, you don't acquire a brand. You don't acquire an identity.
Earlier, when you asked about what a writer should do, I said the first thing you need to do is to look into yourself and ask, why you write? What are you trying to do as a writer? Who are you? And out of who you are, how will you talk to the rest of the world?
And I think that's much more crucial in a multi-platform culture, because the identity you have in each medium needs to be interrelated. People who are extremely influential, I mean, I'll give you an example, Jordan Peterson. Jordan Peterson did not imagine that he would occupy the cultural position he did. Jordan Peterson was a clinical psychologist, which meant that he wrote these specialized academic papers and he taught in a classroom.
But what that led him to do was to be able to communicate things. He finds himself in the middle of a great international public debate, and he steps forward, in a sense, to be the representative speaker of a certain cultural viewpoint. He does that in live appearances. He does that in very focused filmed appearances. He does that in the pages of books, and he does that in dialogues and things like this. He even does that in terms of training people who are working with him to carry on this instruction and this debate.
That is a template for the modern writer. If you listen to the recordings of great modernist poets, they have no idea how to talk to the public. Robert Frost can do it, and T.S. Eliot can sort of more or less do it, but the other ones, it never occurred to them that they would be speaking to a live audience.
The return of rhetoric
David Perell: When I think of the old poets, right, if we go back to the Greeks, I think of Homer with poetry, but then the other word that comes to mind is rhetoric. So does this mean that there's going to be a return of rhetoric? And rhetoric is something to study because our ears are going to be so much more activated relative to our eyes.
Dana Gioia: Rhetoric was taught as the art of public speaking to persuade listeners, or the art of writing to persuade the reader. I think that is extremely important.
One of the things used in rhetoric was poetry. They would have you memorize and recite poems so that you understood how to speak to an audience, and not only convey words, but convey emotions.
We live in a rhetorical universe because we are actually much more like the Greeks and Romans. We have writing, but most of the persuasion is done through speech. Every day I listen to three or four people on YouTube who have relatively highly specialized broadcasts on classical music, theology, politics, and literature. The people who are good have a kind of rhetorical position, and they persuade me to listen and accept their point of view.
Those people would not have been writing an essay every day. They've embodied their personality, their message, and their expertise on a subject matter.
I think that old-fashioned expertise, which is to say clear and persuasive speaking, is the sine qua non of success. Now you cannot be anything but a functionary unless you can do that.
I was in Washington D.C. for 10 years. I was the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts for six and a half years, and I worked for the Aspen Institute. Much of what I did, in addition to management, was to come into a busy senator or congressman's office and speak to them very briefly, persuading them to listen to an agency which, in many cases, they disapproved of. I would explain what we were doing, why it was good, and why they should support us.
You get to be pretty good at that rhetoric, or you perish in that kind of environment. But it's true of business, it's true of literature, it's true of politics. You have to be able to persuasively speak, and if you're really lucky, persuasively write.
Developing persuasive rhetoric
David Perell: And how do you do that? How do you frame and structure those arguments so that they are persuasive, using rhetoric?
Dana Gioia: Well, it's like the old joke. There's a tourist walking on the streets of Manhattan, and he's got these two concert tickets, and he's lost. He comes up to this person that says, "How do I get to Carnegie Hall?"
And the person says, "Practice, practice, practice."
There is no substitute in life for hard work. If you want to have a ripped physique, you have to work out. If you want to play an instrument, you have to practice.
If you want to be a good writer or a good speaker, you have to read, write, and rewrite. You have to do all of those things in a social context.
You have to write so that people understand you, which means you have to be in a feedback loop with your audience. Your first audience may just be your friends or a very small readership, but you develop that.
It's like a boxer. You're boxing in the gym, and then you may have, in a successful career, only 20 professional matches. But you've been practicing for those 20 professional matches with 10,000 hours of practice.
It's the same thing as a writer. How many books will you publish in your life? You may only publish a couple of books. Harper Lee only published one book while she was alive, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Truman Capote probably rewrote it for her. But it was successful enough that she could live the rest of her life off the fame and the royalties of that book.
Usually, writing is like an iceberg. Most of what goes into writing is not visible; it's just whatever the peak is coming out of that.
I would tell people, if you want to be a writer, just do something as simple as every time you write an email, revise it. Make sure it's as good as you can possibly do. Get to yourself that it's instinctive for you that every time you write a sentence, you look at it and say, "How can I make that sharper? How can I make it funnier? How can I make it more concise?"
Make that a way that you work. If you're writing a note to your wife or your husband, make it witty. So actually work on it, so your whole relationship to language is mastery.
Poetry as enchantment
David Perell: We've talked a lot about grief and sorrow, but I want to swing to the other side of the pendulum and talk about love poems and communicating love and that sort of emotion. Have you written a lot of love poems?
Dana Gioia: I have.
David Perell: And what have you learned about how to convey that? Because it seems like as much as any kind of writing, any genre, it's so easy to get watered down and cliche.
Dana Gioia: Poetry is related to magic. If you go back to the ancient world, like in Latin, the word for poem is carmen. Carmen means a poem, a magic spell, a prophecy, and a song.
So you go back to the ancient world, and there's this sense that a poem is a magic spell which enchants the listener. And this is actually the title essay of my most recent book called Poetry as Enchantment.
We experience this in the rock world, in popular music. Madonna or Lady Gaga comes out, and they enchant the audience. They get the audience into this emotional loop, and you know the audience is there when the audience begins to move with the music, tap their feet, and sing along. People pay $200 for a ticket to be enchanted by the spell of an artist.
What a poem does is to create an enchantment, a kind of verbal, magical spell. A magical spell is words that, as they are chanted, change reality.
So what is a love poem? A love poem is a magic spell that you chant. You want the target of it to fall in love with you, or if that's too much, at least to feel sorry for you.
Love poetry, more than any kind of poetry, needs a tune. I've always written love poems, and I just try to create a spell where they can feel what I feel.
David Perell: Who's done a good job of this, who you admire?
Dana Gioia: My favorite love poet in the language is probably John Donne. He really wanted to be one of the people that ruled England, but he was kind of badly behaved. He eventually became the head of St. Paul's and became the most famous preacher in England, which is sort of like being the number one Hollywood star today. People would crowd into St Paul's to hear these sermons, and the sermons are tremendous.
He invented a kind of love poem that I adore. He understood that the best way to charm a girl is often to be funny. He would create this wildly comic argument that he would pursue with absolute logic.
There's a very famous one people study called "The Flea." He's saying, "Why do you give to the flea what you won't give to me?" The flea bites you and you mingle your blood. He really wants to have sex with the girl, but the flea has already bit him and bit her, so their bloods are mingled, so they're as good as married. Why can't they enjoy, as it were, the fruits of marriage?
I love the notion of a love poem that has a salacious desire but is expressed through kind of comic logic. I love Tennyson's love poems, which tend to be unhappy and melancholy, and I was always an unhappy and melancholy lover. "Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean. Tears from the depth of some divine despair rise in the heart and gather in the eyes, when looking on the happy autumn fields and thinking of the days that are no more."
It's just this wonderful sonorous thing. Tennyson is just writing with, saying, "I'm going to make the music of my words be so sensuous that you fall in love with it." I love W.H. Auden, who deals with love's paradox.
Robert Graves is another one who I find good. But it seems to me that you go all the way back to the ancient world, and you have this notion of these love poems. I courted my own wife by reciting poems by myself and others, by writing her poems.
Faith in writing (02:39:36)
David Perell: Well, have you written a love poem that you're proud of?
Dana Gioia: Yes, and I hope my pride is justified. I was putting together my selected poems -- this is called 99 Poems, and it's 40 years of work. When I was putting the book together, it seemed to me that I should end it with a love poem to my wife.
So, I wrote a poem to end the book because I thought it was a tribute to this woman I'd shared my life with. I've tried to keep my marriage and my kids out of my work, except the elegies from my son who died. And so, I wrote this, and I think it's a nice poem because we do not have enough poems about happy marriages, about the joy of finding a person with whom you can share your life.
David Perell: Your decision to be a Catholic writer, and how the style of an almost biblical style has infused into your work. I went back and I read "Prayer at Winter Solstice."
Dana Gioia: Yes.
David Perell: And the end goes like this: "Blessed are the saint and the sinner who redeem each other. Blessed are the dead, calm in their perfection. Blessed is the pain that humbles us. Blessed is the distance that bars our joy. Blessed is the shortest day that makes us long for light. Blessed is the love that in losing we discover." And the language there is very biblical.
Dana Gioia: That poem is probably not understandable to people who are not Christian or Catholic, because it's based on something that I did not believe when I was a kid. Everything given to you in life — every suffering, every pain, every loss — if you can accept it, eventually becomes a kind of blessing.
My son's death transformed me into a kinder, more patient, and empathetic person. When I was young, I was successful at everything I did. I didn't appreciate the sorrows and the difficulties that most people had. I thought they just needed to work harder. If they did this, they'd succeed. It humbled me.
That poem is about how the cold, the distance, the loneliness, the loss — these are all things which develop our spiritual strength if they are accepted and properly dealt with.
I have been a Catholic all my life. I didn't really write overtly as a Catholic through much of my career, because I was participating in the mainstream literary world. My Catholicism was there under the surface; my values were there.
Creating a Catholic counterculture
Dana Gioia: But about 15, maybe almost 20 years ago, I realized that the literary, academic, and intellectual culture had become more and more anti-Christian and anti-Catholic. I would just see these consistent attacks across certain publications, every issue. And I said, "Well, if this is what I believe, I have to step forward."
I knew that would alienate me among many people who were literary gatekeepers, but they were already mad at me, because I did things such as give bad reviews to powerful people. I was not playing the rules of the New York literary game.
So I began to write poems that I wouldn't have written otherwise. Then I wrote an essay called "The Catholic Writer Today" that essentially became a kind of international statement. People all over the world began to respond to it.
What happens is interesting, because if you take something that's forbidden or under attack, and you articulate why you think that's wrong, it gives other people the courage to step forward.
One of the things that I did was create a Catholic Writers Conference. I invited only people who were writers of the highest quality, good people of fine character, who were persuasive public speakers. I put together a kind of dream roster, and I said, "You could come for free, and I'll feed you." Because I thought that was a Christian thing to do. You welcome them in. You don't charge a fee.
People thought it was nuts. They said I had to charge a fee. And I said, "If it's the right idea, people will step forward and pay for it for us." And indeed they did.
Suddenly they're in this group, and they realize, "I'm not crazy. There's all these smart, intelligent people that share my beliefs." This community was created.
One of the foundational books for me in my life is St. Augustine's City of God. It's a long, complicated book, but at the core of this, Augustine is writing after the Vandals have destroyed Rome. They've looted it, stripped it, and burned part of it down. People are going, "Oh my God, the world is ending because Rome has fallen."
Augustine says there are two cities that exist. There's the City of Man, which is ruled by wealth and power and all the laws of man. But there's another city that is there as well, that is eternal and is invisible, which is the City of God, in which all of those who have elected to live by the rules of God inhabit.
This struck me years ago as a way of organizing my social activities. If I'm going to do a conference, it's got to be in the City of God, not in the City of Man. People have got to walk in and understand the rules by which the outer world is regulated are not in effect here. Here, we treat each other as equals. We respect each other. We're dedicated to truth. We're dedicated to those things which call forth our best self.
Immediately doing it at USC with these people, people said, "I want to do this at my campus." So we've done it at Fordham, we've done it at Loyola Chicago, we've done it at University of Dallas. This last fall, we did it at Notre Dame. Each one is bigger than the one before. We had 1300 registered people at Notre Dame.
You see a movement. These people begin to create reading groups, magazines, and presses. They create the infrastructure.
What I think we have to do in the United States is we have to create a counterculture. The culture we have is broken, but a culture is a very complicated thing. It has all these ecological niches and all of these parts of this machinery of culture.
So we've got to create the schools, the journals, the websites, the podcasts, the publishers, the social things, all of which give a more positive, productive view of what the arts and what culture are doing. I've tried to do that for Catholic literary culture, which is only one part of the larger thing. But every healthy, productive community you create contributes to the health of the whole.
I'm an old man now. I'm 74. The two things that I want to accomplish most is I want to finish my career as a poet. I want to continue to write the best poems possible. And I want to help foster a serious Catholic artistic culture in the United States, to restore it. It's actually more than restoration because we've never had an entirely healthy one here. I will not be alive to enjoy the fruits of this, so the form that takes is me working with young writers, young publishers, young artists, young musicians, and trying to help them create a context in which to lead their lives.
The reverence of biblical language (02:37:37)
David Perell: I feel this on an intuitive level, but I don't have the language to describe what's going on. What is it about biblical language and the way that it's developed that gives it a sense of awe and grandeur? How does that apply to infusing poetry with a sense of emotion?
Dana Gioia: As a poet, the two greatest books in the English language are the works of Shakespeare and the King James Bible. We had the incredible blessing in English, which other languages don't have. If you ask a Frenchman or an Italian about biblical language, they don't really have it so much, because they were using Latin more than the vernacular.
But we had this incredible event in the Protestant Reformation. They decided, at the period where English was most magnificently written — Shakespeare's era — to translate the Bible again into English. So you have this extraordinary translation of the Bible.
I know some Christians say it's too formal, but it doesn't matter because you can have many versions of the Bible. If you're lucky, you can read it in the original. But we have a foundational translation in English, which for several hundred years, most people heard many times a day. It began to form the whole way that people heard English as an elevated language.
Structure in poetry
David Perell: One of the things that I've noticed from a few of the poems that you've read is that you'll start a little bit more concrete and approachable, and then you'll end with something more cosmic. It almost feels like a gradient in order to get there.
Dana Gioia: I like to write as I like to start something that interests you. Then I like to take a turn that surprises you. If the poem is long, I'll do it again.
You have to earn your right to talk about things that are vast. If you start off by saying these abstractions, they're unconvincing. They feel borrowed.
David Perell: Can you tell me about your commonplace book?
Dana Gioia: Yes. A commonplace book, which is a term that many people don't understand, is a book in which you copy things you want to remember, usually things from your reading. I filled three or four of them in my life.
This one just says, "Begun May 1978, New York. Finished August 1984, Hastings on Hudson, New York." All that means is I started it there and I filled it up with passages of books that I read.
I go back, and it's really quite interesting because I remember the books that I read. Here's a thing I wrote by Pascal: "If you do not possess the strength to follow me, at least do not hold me back."
Philip Larkin, this poet I like, and this is a wonderful poem, "Most things are never meant," which is to say the things that happen are often unintended consequences. But I filled it up, and I filled another one up.
This one goes from 1986 in New York to 2016 in Los Angeles. It's just probably a thousand little quotations. And here's the one I'm working on now.
I look back and I just see, on this page, I've got Chekhov, Stendhal, Nietzsche, Shakespeare. It's a wonderful thing by the extraordinarily wise George Balanchine. He goes, "God creates, I assemble." Wow.
I think that's a profound notion of art: artists don't create. There's creation, and we respond and we imitate creation. We take elements of creation and we assemble them.
That's why the work resonates, because what do we share? We all share reality. Our artist works with the things of reality to create something that can communicate, but Balanchine said that in four words: "God creates, I assemble."
He takes the human body. He takes motions, the laws of gravity and thermodynamics, and out of that, he created the New York City Ballet. Really the best choreography ever done.
Preserving wisdom in a commonplace book
David Perell: Is that Commonplace Book just a list of good quotes?
Dana Gioia: This is a way of me preserving things that I find insightful and wise. You could say they're good quotes, but they're things that struck me. When I read that comment by Balanchine, I said, "I have to write that down," because it's a way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget.
To quote Frost's definition of poetry again, Augustine says, "I had become to myself a place of unhappiness in which I could not bear to be, but I could not escape from myself."
I read that, and Augustine is describing what my life was like. At a certain point of my life, I was unhappy, but I couldn't escape from my own unhappiness because I was defining my world as myself.
I think those of us who are Christian understand that we surrender to a power greater than ourselves. This is very Catholic to say, but the happiness of Christianity, even when things are going bad, is that you try to make everything you do meaningful in the eyes of eternity. The smallest action in your life done well has consequence.
There's nothing in your life that's meaningless. There's nothing in your life that cannot be used productively. Once you get into that rhythm, it's joyful, because it puts your sorrows in perspective. It puts your pleasures in perspective, and every moment of your life has meaning.
Memory as a creative resource
David Perell: So that's what the Commonplace Book is. It is, in one sense, just a collection of quotes, but on the other sense, it is a pool that you can dive into, where there's this whole tapestry. You can read a quote and have that whole chain of thought from presumably most of the quotes that are in there.
Dana Gioia: If you read a lot, if you live a lot, you just forget a lot of things. You should choose what you want to remember.
One of the beauties of great language is I can give you a sentence that's just full of electricity. There are two kinds of communicating meaning. You can have an intellectual meaning that's a laser: it cuts right to the point. Or you can radiate meanings in different directions.
As a poet, I'm trying to radiate. As a prose writer, I'm trying to be laser-focused. Those are two different kinds of writing, but they're both based on light, on illumination, on reaching people.
David Perell: I want to try something, and we'll see how this works. What I want to do is I want to just throw different genres and writers at you and ask you to give me a quick response on something that you've learned from them or a lesson that we can glean.
Dana Gioia: Okay.
Quick takes on writers: Baudelaire, McLuhan, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Martin Luther King, Country Music, John Steinbeck
David Perell: Baudelaire.
Dana Gioia: Baudelaire is the greatest poet of having fucked up your life. A lot of people love Baudelaire because he's about evil. Some people hate him because he's about evil.
But all of us fail. All of us have this notion of just heading downhill and you can't stop it at times. Baudelaire turns that into the subject of his poetry. It's the great song of failure.
David Perell: Marshall McLuhan.
Dana Gioia: Marshall McLuhan was this religious visionary who thought he was a technological expert. He understood before anybody else did that the media that we use have spiritual dimensions that we experience but we don't explain.
He was very famous, then for 20 or 30 years, everybody simply mocked Marshall McLuhan. Nobody read him. Then suddenly we find ourselves at the beginning of the 21st century, and this is exactly what McLuhan told us was going to happen.
I think he's a visionary technologist, probably in American history, the greatest one that ever lived. He was never selling you a product except for Marshall McLuhan. I think most of his wacky notions proved to be true.
David Perell: Bob Dylan.
Dana Gioia: I love Bob Dylan. When Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize, writers went nuts because somehow he was poaching on their territory. The Swedes, I'm sure, chose Bob Dylan for all the wrong reasons, and he humiliated them.
David Perell: But.
Dana Gioia: But he's a poet. When you listen to Dylan, he's borrowed all the tunes. It's the lyrics that are there.
Bob Dylan changed the nature of pop music. He changed the nature of American folk song, of the American rock song. He gave us the images to understand the kind of weird, industrial urban environment that we find ourselves.
David Perell: How about the Beatles?
Dana Gioia: I love the Beatles. I wouldn't make great intellectual defense of the Beatles, but I love their songs. It's interesting that they were never as good separately as they were together.
The Beatles remind us of just the power of artistic collaboration, how sometimes you put a couple of people together, and they're greater than they are individually.
David Perell: The speeches of Martin Luther King.
Dana Gioia: Martin Luther King may have been the last great political speaker in the United States. I think it's because he anchored his talks in the Bible, in his Christian vision, in a way that's rhetorically magnificent and morally irrefutable.
You get beyond him and people become partisan; they become quibbling. Martin Luther King calls us all to a kind of common Christian decency.
David Perell: Country music.
Dana Gioia: I'm not a big fan of country music, but I do love a lot of individual songs. Rock is the music of mating. Country music is the music of having a job and having a marriage. So it's a different set of sorrows.
It's something I listen to on the radio, but I don't buy albums.
David Perell: John Steinbeck.
Dana Gioia: Steinbeck is a magnificent and imperfect writer. He's maybe the greatest novelist to come out of California. His only competition there really is probably Jack London.
If you read The Grapes of Wrath, for all of its imperfections, he has written one of the greatest American novels because he's done something that we forget, which is he's shown us the dignity of the poor, the dignity of the outcasts.
I think part of the problem we have in the United States is that even the poor have forgotten their dignity, even the outcasts have forgotten their dignity. Steinbeck, in a sense, has created the epic of the outcast poor.
Evocative writing
David Perell: John Cheever.
Dana Gioia: I love John Cheever, who gets so little respect. For people who don't know him, Cheever published more stories in The New Yorker than anyone else. They tend to be little stories of middle-class life, either in Manhattan or the suburbs.
When I was in high school, I read John Cheever, and I had no idea that there was any place in the United States where people took a train to work or these things. I just thought they were fables that he made up. I loved them because they were wonderful parables, usually of moral falling and moral redemption.
Then I moved to New York, where I lived for 20 years, and I lived in Cheever country. All these people were living lives exactly out of a John Cheever story. I realized more than ever he wasn't a realist; he was a fabulist. He has written some of the most beautiful paragraphs I've ever read. I've taken his paragraphs and looked at them word by word to see how he does it all in 20 lines.
David Perell: What did you learn by doing that?
Dana Gioia: I've learned the importance of the evocative detail, how you can take something and then have a single sentence that is just overwhelming.
There's a story of his he used to read called "The Death of Justina." It's a John Cheever New Yorker story because it's about Aunt Justina coming to your house and dying, but because of zoning difficulties, you can't get anybody to pick up the body. Every night, Aunt Justina is still there. Nobody will get the body. His wife can't take it. She moves away, takes the kids, and he's trying to deal with this.
So it's this comic social satire of suburban regulations, but wrapped around it is essentially this parable of facing death. It's amazing to me you could bring it off because it's low comedy, social comedy, and religious vision.
He has this dream. It starts off with saying, "On Sunday, I gave up tobacco and alcohol. Bereft of these small pleasures, I watched the sunrise with the horror that the earliest people must have felt of darkness descending on the world from which you would never recover." He goes through these things, and it's a little detail about the house, and it's this cosmic thing. It's this kind of manipulation.
But like the fact that he has this dream where you're in a supermarket where everything is white and unwrapped, you only have these shapes that you can vaguely discern. It's this wonderful kind of Twilight Zone detail, and then to have them unwrapped in front of you by people that mock you. He creates these things, and he does it in a page. A novelist would make these things 30 pages long, but he does it in a paragraph.
Art and morality
David Perell: All right, I got more for you. This is great. Tarantino.
Dana Gioia: Quentin Tarantino is morally repulsive, cinematically arresting, and he's a kind of LA low-cost Baudelaire. He puts his face into the muck and shows you how to make you interested in it. He does things which are cinematically fascinating but morally unacceptable.
Although, I do think Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a great film. I think he actually recovers himself in this, and I think he ends up with a film that's a wonderful film.
David Perell: Tolkien.
Dana Gioia: Tolkien is an amazing writer because, in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, he takes what is a kind of second-class genre, the "ye olde fantasy" thing, and he turns it into literature.
I think The Lord of the Rings is the greatest novel in English written about the First World War. It's about a decent fellow who is dragged into a war which he doesn't want to fight, but he conducts himself honorably, going through great pain and great loss. Interestingly, he comes out of it morally strengthened and aware in a way that he wasn't.
It is the English version of War and Peace. Frodo is Pierre.
David Perell: Well, now you got me thinking about Russian literature. Dostoevsky.
Dana Gioia: Dostoevsky is a great, kind of crazy novelist. In Russia, you've got Tolstoy and you've got Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky is a religious visionary. Tolstoy, who is equally religious, is a kind of social-psychological visionary.
If I was asked my top ten great novels, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky would both be on it. I think Anna Karenina is the greatest novel ever written. I think The Brothers Karamazov is one of the three or four greatest novels ever written. Crime and Punishment is a tremendous novel.
But then you get into novels like The Idiot or The Possessed, which I think have great moments, but they're kind of sprawling books, which he doesn't reign in sufficiently. But he's one of the great writers of the Western tradition, period.
Reading with purpose
David Perell: I just listed a lot of people. So I got to ask, when you're reading, are you writing down thoughts in the moment? What sort of interpretation are you doing? How are you reading? Or are you just plopping your head on the couch and just flipping page by page like most people?
Dana Gioia: When I read, I don't take notes. I hate to take notes when I'm reading because it interrupts the flow of the book, but I'm a serious reader.
There are a few things that I haven't read, but I've spent my life reading, trying to read as many of the great novels as possible, and then I try to reread them. When you reread them, since it's been 20 or 30 years since you first read them, it's a different book.
The novel, to me, is the literary form that I'm most immersed in. I read novels as a kid, and I continue to read them. It's the form that disappoints me the most because I don't think we have many great novelists right now.
David Perell: I think what isn't being taught or
Dana Gioia: I understood. I'll buy a book, and it'll just be about a little group of people in a little subculture doing what they do. It never gets out of this. Well, this takes place in a creative writing department, this takes place in this, that and the other.
But look at Anna Karenina. It's really about Russian society. There's people from all these different levels that are interacting. There's the tragic story of an unhappy marriage, the not-without-difficulty story of a happy marriage. And you come out of that and you feel like, "Wow, I've looked into the center of life."
I mean, Crime and Punishment, which is about this student who feels he's entitled, because he's of superior mind, to kill a nasty old pawnbroker. You go through that, and there's another character, Stavrogin, who's actually the most interesting character. He's this kind of seductor who's doing all of these things.
But you come out of there, and you feel like you've descended into the way that people rationalize doing bad things, and you've just barely come out alive. That's the thing about Dostoevsky; he scares you.
Confronting darkness in literature
Dana Gioia: I think that's what Tarantino is trying to do. I think he's trying to scare you, but Tarantino doesn't really have any higher moral vision that redeems you. There's certain knowledge only darkness knows, and you have to descend into evil. You have to descend into darkness. You have to descend into hell to learn this knowledge.
She goes, "It is easy to descend into hell, but coming out again into the light in vengeance and violence and sadism and things like this."
I translated a play by Seneca called Hercules Furens, the madness of Hercules. Hercules goes into the underworld, and when he comes out, he's been contaminated by it. He goes mad, and he kills his family.
I think there's a real wisdom that Euripides, who wrote the first version, and Seneca, who wrote the Latin version of this, had, which is that you cannot spend time in evil and in darkness without running tremendous moral danger.
That's Baudelaire's theme. Baudelaire says, "I'm never getting out of this."
David Perell: Is this the story of the knowledge of the tree of good and evil? That there's certain kinds of knowledge that are basically a deal with the devil, that yes, you get knowledge, but it's not...not the way.
Dana Gioia: I had not thought of that in terms of even the apple, but they are, in a sense...they're promised power from this knowledge. Obviously, they can't deal with the knowledge. I mean, God is kicking them out. But there's...what's the first thing that happens when they get this knowledge? They become ashamed of their bodies.
David Perell: Right.
Dana Gioia: They put the fig leaves on. I think implicitly, they realize that sex goes from this joyful, natural function to something they realize they can misuse.
David Perell: Well, what's the connection here with Odysseus and wisdom? Because when he goes past the Muses, he puts the wax in his ears, and that's one of the things that they entice him with.
Dana Gioia: In order for Aeneas to do this, he has to have the golden bough, which becomes the title of this great mythological work that Sir James Frazer wrote looking at universal mythology. But he has to have, as it were, divine protection.
The violation that Hercules does is his last labor. He's going to hell, because he has to bring up Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guards the underworld. When he brings this unholy being into the light, he violates the primal taboos, that that which is in the darkness must stay in the darkness.
In every mythology, there's a division between the gods above and the gods below, the sky gods and the demons. Each is supposed to stay in their realm. We know you can't really be a Christian without believing in demons, because Christ is dealing with them constantly through the Gospels.
This is what Tolkien is talking about. Where do Tolkien's things take place? On Middle-earth. Hell below, heaven above. This is the realm of mortals, and Middle-earth is a battleground.
Characters in opera (03:01:18)
David Perell: Last question. I want to talk about what you've learned from operas about building great characters. Those are a specific kind of character, but what have you learned?
Dana Gioia: Opera is a very strange medium because it is so intense and compressed. People make fun of operatic plots, because it's not like a novel. They don't say it does this, this, and all the motivations. They just say this happens, this happens, this happens, this happens.
One of the greatest operas ever written, La bohème, is four scenes. In those four scenes, you see two love affairs come together, fall apart, become reunited. You see people dealing with success, with failure, and eventually the death of the leading lady from tuberculosis. Same thing in La traviata.
So what I learned in opera is to have a kind of rapid plot which cuts the connecting tissues out: intense scenes of emotion.
I'm a poet. I was trained to write for the page, and that's why I think I've been able to make a transition to the 21st century. My work is actually more current today than it was 30 years ago, because I was predicting this cultural change.
But writing for opera, I had to learn something else. I had to write something that was simple enough that the composer could take it and add everything the composer needed to do, give them room. If you have it too tightly, the composer can't get through it.
I see really bad libretti this way: they're really intricately written, and the composer doesn't know what to do with it except add background music. It has to be able to come as songs. So that's the first thing, writing for the composer.
Secondly, I've got to write for the audience, because here's the dilemma: people never can understand every word that's being sung. We miss words. It has to be simple enough that if they miss a word, they can still get the gist of it.
Those two are maybe more obvious, but the third thing I learned is I had to write for the singer. I had to give the singer words and a character that the singer could become, so that they would know everything about the character, including things I never write. They know what the character wants, where the character's come from. And so I have to give words that the singer can literally embody.
David Perell: So as far as character's concerned, what makes a good character in opera, and how is that different from a novel?
Dana Gioia: The nature of the novel. Most people don't understand what a novel is, and this was a revolutionary notion in literature. A novel is a story that tells you simultaneously what's happening on the outside of a character and what they're thinking on the inside.
The novel is a perfect form for the modern world, where the outer world we live in may be different from the inner world which we're imagining, remembering, and feeling. The novel is essentially ironic. It has an outer thing and then whatever is going on -- two meanings at once.
Opera works very differently. How do we know the inner life of a singer? They sing it to you, and the music carries you through. You have a plot, but the plot exists maybe five minutes or 10 minutes of scene-setting, and then suddenly there's a laser that comes out of you that goes from her inner life to yours.
That's what people do at the opera. They are riveted by suddenly participating in the inner life of a character in great joy, great pain, and great confusion. There's a kind of hypnotic transference that goes on that is intensive, that is lyrical, and is holistic. When you're writing opera, you're trying to write moments of great emotion in a way which entrances the audience to join.
Novel vs opera: Anna Karenina
David Perell: Walk me through a character from a novel that you really think the author nailed, and show me how there's the difference between the internal and the external.
Dana Gioia: Anna Karenina. Greatest heroine ever. You know, you meet her as a young woman, you see everything that's ever happened to her, you see what she thinks. Then she resolves this, and she changes her mind about that, and she falls into a love affair. 800 pages later, she jumps in front of a train, and you're with her every moment.
La Traviata is about Violetta, who's a courtesan, essentially a kind of high-class prostitute. The first act of La Traviata is maybe 25 minutes long. Within about five or six minutes, you get to know her, and by the end of 25 minutes, you've been inside of her heart, her confusion, and all the dilemmas that she faces. Then she never lets you go. She ends up dying of tuberculosis in the last act.
But there's a sudden transference. You don't have all the careful things. The music has to take you 200 pages into what a novel's text would be. Opera tells a story in the way that Greek tragedy tells a story. Rather than be Homer in 24 books, it takes place in about an hour.
You have to jump into it, and you jump into it by having lyric moment, lyric. So you got this peak, this peak, this peak, with a little bit of connecting tissue. What people go for is not the connective tissue. You love La Traviata because of these moments.
In opera, you do that through melody and through drama. Like all poetic forms, I can take an aria out of the opera and perform it in a concert hall, or I can put it on the radio, and you still feel it because it's a self-contained lyric moment.
You really can't say, "I'm going to read you pages 111 through 117 of Anna Karenina." You'll say, "Well, who's this character? Why is this person there?" You can't make any sense out of it because it's part of a continuity.
Opera, like poetry, is wonderfully excerptible. I can take a line from Shakespeare out of context, and you'll feel the power: "Sweet are the uses of adversity... This our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything."
You don't know who's saying it or why they're saying it. But you say, okay, it's this vision that life is good, that the world is good. In fact, you're doing Anna Karenina a disservice if you take five pages out of context and say this is Anna Karenina. It isn't.
Anna Karenina is this great, extended context, which gives you the most compelling portrait of the inner life of a woman anybody's ever written in history. People ask what to do with opera. It's actually the very people that are on the cover of this.
There's this great production...
David Perell: This is of Weep, Shut or Die.
Dana Gioia: Yeah, of La Boheme by Opera Australia, that was directed by this guy who then became a famous filmmaker, Baz Luhrmann, Moulin Rouge, Romeo and Juliet. I just tell people, "Here's a link. Watch this for 11 minutes." And they all come back, "I gotta have more of this."
Because it's where Mimi, this seamstress, meets Rodolfo, this poet. Within a moment, they fall in love, and it sets the opera in motion.
You can have this brief moment in an opera that sweeps you off your feet. Narrative art and lyric art operate differently. If you're a writer, you damn well better understand the difference, or you're in trouble.
When I read most opera librettos, I just go, "Oy vey!" They're giving you a stage play. They're not lyric. For any writer, understand the way your genre works -- not the rules of your genre, but what is that genre? Why do people come to that genre? What's the experience they want from that genre? Give it to them. It doesn't mean to cheapen it, but to give them the best possible version of that experience.
David Perell: The big lesson I've taken from this interview is just the tremendous amount of study that you've put into that, going all the way back to the beginning of just breaking down the poems. That's going to be one of the big things I take away.
Dana Gioia: And the other thing about how much I talk.
David Perell: That was fun. Thank you.
Dana Gioia: My pleasure.
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