As chair of the National Endowment for the Arts (2003–2009), he created the largest programs in the endowment’s history, several of which, including the Big Read, Operation Homecoming, and Poetry Out Loud, continue as major presences in American cultural life. For many years, Gioia served on Image’s editorial advisory board, and he has been a guest lecturer for the Seattle Pacific University MFA program in creative writing. In 2010 he won the prestigious Laetare Medal from Notre Dame. Last year, he was appointed the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California—his first regular teaching post.What he says about music:
Image: I once heard you say that if you could only have one art form, it would be music. Why?Do I go with music? Can't say, but obviously I'm sympathetic.
Dana Gioia: I could give you reasons, but that would suggest that my response is rational. It isn’t. My choice of music is simply a deep emotional preference. I like the physicality of music. It is a strange art—not only profoundly beautiful, but also communal, portable, invisible, and repeatable. Its most common form is song, a universal human art that also includes poetry.
Image: As a young man, you intended to be a composer. What led to your discovery of poetry as your vocation?
DG: I started taking piano lessons at six, and I eventually also learned to play the clarinet and saxophone. During my teenage years, music was my ruling passion. At nineteen I went to Vienna to study music and German. But living abroad for the first time, I changed direction. I reluctantly realized that I lacked the passion to be a truly fine composer. I was also out of sympathy with the dull and academic twelve-tone aesthetic then still dominant. Meanwhile, I became fascinated with poetry. I found myself spending most of my time reading and writing. Poetry chose me. I couldn’t resist it.
Image: What does it mean to be a poet in a post-literate world? Or to be a librettist in an age where opera is a struggling art form?
DG: It doesn’t bother me much. I wasn’t drawn to poetry or opera because of their popularity. It was their beauty and excitement that drew me. Of course, I would like these arts to have larger audiences, but the value of an art isn’t in the size of its audience. It’s in the truth and splendor of its existence.
All that being said, let me observe that a post-print world is not a bad place for poetry. Poetry is an art that predates writing. It’s essentially an auditory art. A poet today has the potential to speak directly to an audience—through public readings, radio broadcasts, recordings, and the internet. Most people may not want to read poetry, but they do like to hear good poems recited well. I’ve always written mostly for the ear, and I find large and responsive audiences all over the country. The current cultural situation is tough on novelists and critics, but it isn’t all that bad for poets.
Image: Duke Ellington objected to his music being labeled jazz, since he just considered it music. This led me to wonder if you are bothered by the term “New Formalism” being applied to your poetry.
DG: I have never liked the term “New Formalism.” It was coined in the 1980s as a criticism of the new poetry being written by younger poets that employed rhyme, meter, and narrative. I understand the necessity of labels in a crowded and complex culture, but labels always entail an element of simplification, especially when the terms offer an easy dichotomy.
I have always written both in form and free verse. It seems self-evident to me that a poet should be free to use whatever techniques the poem demands. My work falls almost evenly into thirds—one third of it is written in free verse, one third in rhyme and meter, and one third in meter without rhyme. I do believe that all good art is in some sense formal. Every element in a work of art should contribute to its overall expressive effect. That is what form means. Whether the form is regular or irregular, symmetrical or asymmetrical is merely a means of achieving the necessary integrity of the work.
H/t Tyler Cowen.
