Washington National Cathedral

Sam Lloyd: Good morning, and welcome to the Sunday Forum and our weekly conversation at the crossroads of faith and public life. Christianity, you know, is known as a faith that takes the word very seriously, and today we have with us a man who spends his life with words, both in the halls of government and at his writing desk. Dana Gioia is not only an award-winning poet and critic—he’s the author of the influential volume, Does Poetry Matter—but he’s also the ninth chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, the federal agency charged with promoting the life of the arts across the country.

Business Week has described Dana Gioia’s time in charge there as a period when the man saved the National Endowment for the Arts. So, to the degree you say that, we are delighted you have done that good work.

We’ll get to that in a minute, but I also want to emphasize that, as we have our conversation today, Dana Gioia has combined a remarkable life as a businessman, an administrator, and one of the finest poets around, so we should have rich conversation today. And our guest just told me that he wants to start off by reciting a poem. So I will turn it over to Dana Gioia. Welcome.

Dana Gioia: Glad to be here. I thought on a rainy day like this, it might be nice to start with a little snatch of poetry. This is a poem I’m sure you all know, by A. E. Houseman, and it has a biblical reference in it, which is that man’s, you know, span is to be three score years and ten. And it’s about this time of year in Washington.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my three score years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

(applause)

Lloyd: Thank you.

Gioia: And you can see them actually outside, you know, after the service.

Lloyd: Yeah, thank you. Not so many years ago now, there were members of Congress calling for someone to pull the plug on the Arts Endowment. It was in trouble. Since then, there’s been a big success story under your tenure there. You have come in with a wonderful rich range of experience and stepped in and done some remarkable work. Someone has attributed… George Regal has attributed your success to your faith. We finally have a serious Christian at the helm, he said. Would you say a little bit about what it’s meant for you to come into the National Endowment for the Arts, bringing your life and experience, and what you hope to achieve in doing that.

Gioia: Well, let me start by saying that I didn’t want the job, and I refused even to interview with it first. I had spent fifteen years working in business as a day job, to write, and then I’d finally been able to make a living writing full time and when I left business I made myself a promise that I would never work for a large organization again. And another fellow was chosen—a very fine man named Michael Hammond—and he died after seven days.

And then I was approached again, and it was after 9/11, and it was after also the death of my own father and my dad had been a World War II veteran and I… once again just said, I don’t want the job, but I thought about it and felt that, you know, maybe I was being called to this work, and if my country wanted me to do something that I thought was important, and I felt that I could do it, that it was my duty to do it. And so I came here, and everybody said, go out there and fight, you know, fight for this. But it seemed to me that fighting was the wrong metaphor, and so what I have always looked on my job in Washington is reconciliation.

There was a consensus that was created in this country in the Sixties about the importance of arts and arts education to the nation, and that it was one of the proper duties of the government. That consensus fell apart for some good reasons and some bad reasons, and it wasn’t about saying I’m right, you’re wrong. It was about creating something that we could all share and, it seemed to me, was fairly simple. Everywhere I’d gone in the country as a poet, people wanted arts in their children’s schools, their grandkids’ schools, in their communities, and it seemed to me that what we needed to do was something quite simple—to create an institution that was true to art and true to democracy, that brought the best of arts and arts education to all Americans, no matter where they were, and we began doing this. And I think what really took Washington by surprise was that we were actually naïve, honest, and dedicated idealists. They had no defense against that.

Lloyd: And you started a Shakespeare—

Gioia: Well, what we do is, you know, you have to understand, the NEA was actually eliminated by the House of Representatives, and it came within a couple of votes of that happening in the Senate. And so, when I arrived here, every month, about 125 members of Congress voted to shut the agency down. Usually as a rider to another bill. And no one expected us, or expected me, to come in and a few weeks later announce the largest program in our history.

But it seemed to me that its not a… you can’t really argue these things, you have to embody your values in something that was definite. So we created a program which gave work to actors, funds to theater companies, helped presenters bring work into their communities and what it was, was a tour… the largest tour of Shakespeare in history. We got a number of Shakespeare companies to tour initially a hundred cities across all fifty states. They were mostly small and mid-sized communities.

I’m happy to say that as of this year we’ll have toured 2,300 different municipalities. We’ve given work to two thousand actors, 77 theater companies, around 2,400 different presenters, we will have visited 3,600 schools. We’ve brought about 1.3 million kids in to a free performance of Shakespeare, so that these kids, who have never seen a play for the most part—seventy percent of them have never seen any play—can actually see the Shakespeare play that they’re studying.

And I think, most importantly, we’ve gladdened the hearts of overworked English teachers across the country who actually, you know, can show the children the magic of what they’re studying, and as a result, we have kept Shakespeare from being eliminated from American high schools. So I think that’s the Lord’s work.

Lloyd: That’s an achievement, yeah. Your passion for getting arts out to every nook and cranny of America seems to emerge at least a little out of your own particular story. You didn’t sail into a rich arts experience all prepared for it. You had to discover it for yourself. Tell us a little bit about your beginnings.

Gioia: Well, I mean, actually, you know, one of the main reasons I agreed to take this job was that I had seen from my own life the transformative power of art. I’m a working-class Catholic kid from L.A. My dad is a Sicilian. He was a cab driver. My mom was Mexican. She was phone operator. I was raised in a Mexican neighborhood in a little enclave of Sicilian-speaking immigrants, and we had no access to any arts. To this day, when I try to give a congressional grant to the neighborhood I’m from, there are no arts organizations.

I’m happy to say that we did have political corruption, and it took the form of creating an enormous library, fat beyond the needs of my neighborhood. I don’t know what cut the mayor got, but I’m sure it was considerable. But God bless him, and it gave me… it opened up worlds to me, and then I had piano lessons from Sister Camille Cecile who, you know, was of the old school, who believed that piano could not really be properly taught without corporal punishment, which was probably the only way that I would ever have learned the piano. And so for I think it was $2.00 a week, I got an individual lesson and a theory lesson.

Within two years, she had us playing Mozart and Bartok, and it opened up this whole world to me, and I don’t think I would’ve gone to college. I don’t think I would have certainly gone to Stanford or Harvard, you know, without this thing, because what the arts do, especially to a child, is, they open up possibilities of imagination that open up possibilities of life.

You know, we don’t… if I told you two things that happened to me this week, you know, one it was great relief, one was a great shock. I accept both with joy. You can never predict what’s going to happen to you in life and the purpose… the role of going on living is to constantly re-invent your life and to change and adapt the story of your life. And what the arts did for me was to open up possibilities of my life story that would not have been told to me by my grandfather, who had been, you know, these Mexican and Sicilian peasants that I was raised around. They were the salt of the earth, but they only knew what their own life experience had given them, and what I’d like to do is to be able to provide that kind of awakening, enhancement, enlargement to every child in the United States, no matter where their from, no matter what their parents do. I worry that we live in country in which the arts and arts education have become a function of your parents’ income.

Lloyd: Your parent’s—

Gioia: The pupil’s parents’ income. I mean if you’re poor, you have no access to this, and I think that’s unworthy of a democracy.

Lloyd: From a working-class kid to an accomplished poet to an accomplished businessman, can you make those leaps for us? How you found your way to being a poet, and then how a poet decided to become full-time high-powered businessman.

Gioia: Well, I became a poet by accident, really. My working-class mother loved poetry, and she knew dozens of poems by heart in the way that ordinary people used to. You know, obviously she has that kind of esthetic leanings, though she never approved of artists, especially in my brother and me. And, you know, so for no reason she would recite these things, you know,

It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee.
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child
In this kingdom by the sea:
And we loved with a love that was more than a love—
I and my Annabel Lee,
Oh loved the wingèd seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.

And my mother would say these things, and I was bewitched. And so, from earliest memories, poetry was part of them, and not poetry as an elitist art, but poetry as a way of filling the everyday, what’s everyday existence, with grace, with imagination. I thought I would be a musician, but when I actually went off to Vienna to study music, and that’s when I met really good musicians, and I realized I didn’t have the talent for it but I also began to see… I found myself writing poems. And so, without really intending to, when I was about twenty, I realized I wanted to be a poet.

My parents, however, although they were good people, had neglected to give me the private income I so richly deserve, and so I had to figure out how to make a living. And so first I thought I would be a professor, and I went off to Harvard graduate school, because poets are supposed to be writers… be teachers, and loved graduate… I’m one of those really weird people that loved graduate school. You know, I loved spending my days in a library, but I realized after a couple of years that I wasn’t being trained to be a writer, I was being trained to be a literary theorist, and to speak this arcane kind of professional language that maybe seven, eight hundred people in America understand.

But, most important, and I don’t think every poet feels this way, but I feel this way very passionately. I was being trained to write and to speak about literature in ways that the very people I came from could not understand, and that seemed to me a diminishment rather than a refinement, and I thought what the best writers—you know, the Shakespeares, the Wordsworths, the Frosts—have found, a way to speak which is inclusive rather than exclusive.

I think the arts should be inclusive rather than exclusive. That doesn’t mean you dumb them down. It doesn’t mean that you lower your standards, but there should be something that touches a common chord of humanity. Maybe not in everyone, but in everyone who’s alert and curious, and so I left graduate school and I had to make a living, and so, having had almost every lousy job that you could imagine, I figured I would go to business school, and so I found myself in the business world and, you know, tried to do an honest day’s work, and they kept promoting me until I found myself as the vice president of marketing at General Foods.

Lloyd: And you still found time to write.

Gioia: Well, when I left graduate school, I made myself a promise that I would spend three hours every day reading and writing. And so, no matter where I was, I would do this, and I think reading is as important as writing, because reading nourishes your soul, your imagination. So I never stopped, and by the time I’d been in business a number of years, you know, I was quite famous as a writer and eventually… I mean, I find myself on the Charlie Rose Show at night, and back in the office in the morning, and then some things happened in my life that made me reconsider what I should be doing, and so I left business.

Lloyd: You wrote… maybe one of the reasons you were on the Charlie Rose Show was your essay Can Poetry Matter? Which was a very provocative challenge along the themes you’re talking about, saying poetry has made itself irrelevant by retreating to a coterie of academics and fellow poets seeming to write for each other, and yours has been a call for publicly accessible poetry.

Gioia: Yeah, or, you know, once again, I agree, but I have to emphasize, when I talk about accessible poetry, I think T. S. Eliot is accessible. That doesn’t mean that you’re going to understand everything that Eliot is saying, but you can feel Eliot’s meaning, even as you don’t understand it. In fact, I think art in general, we feel the meaning before we ever understand it. There are poems that I knew by heart before I understood, and that’s how poetry works, that’s how art works. Art, poetry does not speak primarily to your intelligence. It speaks to you as a complete human being, which means your intelligence, your emotions, your imagination, your memory, your physical senses, you know, your body. The rhythm of a poem, the physicality of a poem, you know—

‘O where are you going?’ said reader to rider,
That valley is fatal where furnaces burn,
Yonder’s the midden whose odours will madden,
That gap is the grave where the tall return.’

You know, there’s a kind of meaning of the physical sound of a poem, and when you start having professors writing for one another, its very interesting to professors, but it retreats from the real purpose of art, you know, which I think is a kind of expansion and celebration of the fullness of our human potential.

Lloyd: Your fellow poet, Wallace Stevens… fellow businessman, Wallace Stevens, would be an example of a rather difficult poet, but was writing for public… the general public out there.

Gioia: Well, it’s interesting. I mean if you look at… There’s a great many American poets who were businessmen—T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stephens among them, and for the most part businessmen poets tend to write more difficult poetry than the Bohemians do. So, you know, whatever freedom it gave them, it gave them also a kind of freedom to be extravagant. I think Stephens is reported to say, “a poem should be magnificent or it is nothing.” I tend to agree with that. There should be an element of magnificence even if it’s the magnificence of homespun cloth.

Lloyd: We want to make sure we hear a couple of your poems. Would you read “The Litany” to us? That was one you—

Gioia: Well, this was one… You know, a lot of poems I write have a kind of narrative line that you could follow along. This is a poem that does not. This is a poem in which I’m trying to talk to you sideways. The meaning comes in through the associations. It is a litany and, you know, a litany is a kind of liturgy in which we celebrate the attributes of the deity or, in the case of Catholic liturgy, of the Virgin or the Holy Spirit, without naming the deity itself.

Lloyd: I’m going to urge you to read loud and clear. The sound is a little challenging here.

Gioia: Okay. So relax. Don’t try to understand it. This is simply part of life’s ongoing pageant.

“The Litany”

This is a litany of lost things,
a canon of possessions dispossessed,
a photograph, an old address, a key.
It is a list of words to memorize
and to forget—of amo, amas, amat,
the conjugations of a dead tongue
in which the final sentence has been spoken.

This is the liturgy of rain,
falling on mountain, field, and ocean—
indifferent, anonymous, complete—
of water infinitesimally slow,
sifting through rock, pooling in darkness,
gathering in springs, then rising again without our agency,
only to dissolve in mist or cloud or dew.

This is a prayer to unbelief,
to candles guttering and darkness undivided,
to incense drifting into emptiness.
It is the smile of a stone Madonna
and the silent fury of the consecrated wine,
a benediction on the death of a young god,
brave and beautiful, rotting on a tree.

This is a litany to earth and ashes,
to the dust of roads and vacant rooms,
to the fine silt circling in a shaft of sun,
settling indifferently on books and beds.
This is a prayer to praise what we become,
“Dust thou art, to dust shalt thou return.”
Savor its taste—the bitterness of dust, of ashes.

This is a prayer, inchoate and unfinished,
for you, my love, my loss, my lesion,
a rosary of words to count out time’s
illusions, all the minutes, hours, days
the calendar compounds as if the past
existed somewhere—like an inheritance
still waiting to be claimed.

Until at last it is our litany, mon vieux,
my reader, my voyeur, as if the mist
steaming from the gorge, this pure paradox,
the shattered river rising as it falls—
splintering the light, swirling it skyward,
neither transparent nor opaque but luminous,
even as it vanishes—were not our life.

(applause)

Lloyd: Where does a poem come from? Where did that poem come from? How does it emerge?

Gioia: Well, a poem, you know, comes from something happening in your imagination. From my experience, when a poem usually originates is, there’s something you’ve noticed about life, and there’s something else you’ve always noticed or felt, and then suddenly you realize the two are intrinsically connected. And that kind of creates this excitement of meaning, but that doesn’t take you anywhere unless you get a kind of tune in your head. So now it’s embodied in language, and so you get this impulse, you get a line, or you might even just get the sound of a line, and you start writing it. And a really good poem, you don’t quite know where it’s going to go until its finished.

This is a poem that took me years to figure out the tune of it. And, you know, it came out an experience in my life. In this case, what it came out of was the death of my first son, but it’s… the poem is not necessarily about the death of my first son. It’s about whatever it is were share that this thing evokes and speaks about, and I really believe that, the older I get, the surer I am that poetry is not about the poet. That a poem is something that the reader, the audience, completes, because every one of you bring your entire life to a book. You bring your entire life to a poem, and unless you can fit you life into that poem, it’s not good enough.

And so what I try to do is to take my life and my skill and build a room that both of us can inhabit together, and we’ll notice some of the same things, but there will be things that you feel and that you notice that are invisible to me, and there will be reasons that I’m there that are unknowable to you, and that’s the mystery of art.

Lloyd: You create a space where reader and writer meet, but with a sense of mystery about the dimensions of that.

Gioia: And you know right away if you’re in a room which is phony. If you’re in a room that’s not big enough to hold you, or, more common in contemporary poetry, you’re in a room where they don’t want you. This is my room, get out of here. You can look in from the window and admire me.

Lloyd: A lot of poems seem that way, we find in magazines—they don’t want me inside.

Gioia: And I think that’s the major defect of contemporary poetry is that it’s narcissistic in some ways.

Lloyd: You’re serious about your faith. Does that make its way intentionally into the poetry you write? Is it something in the background that informs in some way how you see the world? How would you describe the relationship between Dana Gioia, the faithful Catholic and the poet?

Gioia: I think it should be refaced as Dana Gioia, the pilgrim in the center. You know, because my faith is very much based on a deep sense of my own imperfection and, you know, one of my favorite stanzas in all of poetry is W. H. Auden, he says,

O stand, stand by the window
As the tears scald and start;
You must love your crooked neighbor
With your crooked heart.

You know, and it’s that last line that’s the truth. You know, you don’t love your fellow man from a sense of superiority. It’s of this shared imperfection and that you love them because you recognize yourself in them.

It took a long… it’s sort of funny, my whole reputation as a poet was made outside of the community of Christianity and the arts, but since I’m not writing poems about the Virgin Mary, you know, or Sunday school, or topics that are overtly religious, it took a long time, I think, for people to understand how deeply Christian my poetry is. Which is to say every line of my poem, every one of my poems, comes from this set of assumptions, which are the assumptions of a Christian, which is that we live in a fallen world, that we are given undeserved the gift of grace, we live in time but we have a sense of eternity. And that in this everyday world that we have, in which we are beset by any number of sufferings, we get these glimpses of something else, and it is those glimpses that is at the mystery of our own existence, you know, which is the joy of life unraveling that and experiencing that. And so, you know, that’s where my Catholicism comes in, and my poems are about the moments of grace or the moments when grace does not come. The moments of insight or the moments of longing for that insight.

Lloyd: One more question then we’re going to open up the floor to the audience, so we can get the microphone out and move it around. You gave a commencement address at Stanford University, I guess it was last year, and expressed your concern about something like the dumbing down of American culture. Would you say a little bit about what was on your mind?

Gioia: Well first of all, I mean, the most terrifying experience you can have is to give a commencement address, because, you know, in this case I was speaking to 27,000 people in a football stadium, two-thirds of whom were hung over and none of whom had come to hear me, and so, you know, you’re really this necessary evil to get through. But if asked to do something like this, one tries to do it seriously, and so what I wanted to talk about was the fact that we lived in a country which did not recognize and value the arts and our culture had been dumbed down and commercialized.

Everybody’s trying to sell us something. You know, every space, as it were, of the public sector. You know, the airwaves, the streets, even the schools now are full of advertisements, and in a sense they’re distracting us—now, once again, there’s nothing wrong with ads in theory, but we have to have a society in which there’s room for other kinds of things.

The marketplace is wonderful. It makes us more prosperous. But not everything is best understood by its price. There are some things, and this seems to me the role of culture, that are beyond price. And I felt that we are in a society in a moment in history where we’ve lost this. We no longer feel we have the right to insist that there are things of enormous great importance that must exist in our society, in the media, in our school system, and that one of them is the arts. It’s arts education, and to have arts education systematically taken out of American schools means that the sixty million kids in America are not being properly educated.

We live in a society in which one out of every three teenagers drops out of high school. Not only does that mean that they’re not going to make a good living, that they’re not going to be able to do what they want in their life, they will live six to seven years fewer than somebody who graduates from high school. It’s a matter of culture, of education, of economy, and even public health, you know, and I feel that the arts and what the arts represent, you know, is one of the ways that we keep kids in school, and one of the ways in which we engage them with their own futures, and somebody needed to talk about this. You know, I’m happy to say that, to my surprise, the commencement has been reprinted thousands of times, really, and it’s actually become a part of some of the presidential platforms.

Lloyd: Thank you. Question.

Davis: We’ll start from the back please. Oh, well, that’s fine. Let’s take one right here, please.

Question 1: Please help us out. We have full-time jobs, we do our volunteer work, there are soccer leagues and all the rest. Thousands of poems are published each year. How is it possible to connect with the best-quality poetry in contemporary life?

Gioia: I think it’s hard, and I’ll tell you why I think it’s hard is that this really what I talk about in Can Poetry Matter? We used to have a system by which people seriously read and engaged with new poetry, and it got filtered down and filtered down in a relatively responsible way.

That whole system has broken down, and it’s because everybody’s in the same business. So you know you really can’t give somebody a bad review, because they’re a colleague. They’re creative writing teachers. You know, it’s professional courtesy, and so what you really do need I think is to work on the recommendation of other people who you trust, you know.

I can give you the names of a couple of poets that I think are awfully fine, I mean, there’s a poet who if you don’t know, Philip Larkin, probably the best English poet of the last fifty or sixty years. You know, he died a number of years ago. There’s a woman named Kay Ryan, who I think is probably one of the two or three best living American poets. My colleague, Paula Terry from the NEA, is in the audience today. A woman who I think actually exemplarily lives her Christian faith by the work she does at the endowment, doing our accessibility office, and there’s a poet that she and I both adore, named Samuel Menashe, writes tiny poems of great wisdom. But Philip Larkin, Kay Ryan, Samuel Menashe, just for starters.

Davis: Go to mike two, please.

Question 2: Hi. My question concerns the program of bringing Shakespeare to the communities. Has the NEA considered bringing the literature either of the African American community or Spanish community, such as Lope de Vega, into the communities?

Gioia: Well, we have a program which dwarfs Shakespeare in American Communities which is called the Big Read, which is the largest, you know, which we began without a cent, because we felt that we had to get communities more passionately behind the literacy. And this is now the largest literary program in the history of the federal government. We have many cosponsors for it, we have about thirty thousand organizations, and in that we have chosen, we make available materials on 23 books. Much of our material is bilingual, but they include novels from like Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, to Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Ernest Gaines’ A Lesson Before Dying, Rudolfo Anay’s Bless Me Ultima.

We are about to begin partnership with Mexico in which we bring a historic anthology of Mexican literature into this. Naguib Mahfouz from Egypt we’ve adopted. So what we’re trying to do is to adopt the best books, most accessible, exciting books from all over the cultural, regional traditions of American literature. Now for Shakespeare, one of the reasons we have Shakespeare is, he is the only playwright who is still taught in American high schools and so, although we’re sponsoring a production of Lope de Vega, it’s not part of this program, because the question is what high schools would be teaching him?

Question 3: Throughout your talk you’ve made a tie between education, arts, and children and said that our society is not really appreciating the arts. Is it not also because we’re not appreciating our children so much? Dr. Phil McGraw commissioned a survey and the response of parents stunned him that forty percent of parents today knowing what they knew about society, etc., wouldn’t have children. And maybe we’re under appreciating arts is also an aspect of under appreciating our children, since arts draw them so much into education in a lot of ways.

Gioia: Yeah, you’ve asked a couple of really big questions. It seems to me that, you know, when you cease to believe in children, you cease to want to bring children in the world, you cease to believe in life. You cease to believe in God’s greatest gift to us. That is a problem, and you can see that especially in Europe.

But more important is that, if you bring children into the world, even if someone else brings children into the world, this is our common future. These children belong to all of us, and we must assure that they succeed, that they learn to lead good and productive lives in a very complicated and very dangerous society. You cannot turn the raising of your children over to the television and video games and the computer. This is disaster.

So, people, I would—(applause)—you know, I’m most concerned about our middle-class people, sometimes dual career couples, who simply let their kids raise themselves on the internet, and so I agree with you. I mean I, you know, but that is, in public life, one of my chief responsibilities. To do what I can in an appropriate way for my agency’s charter, to make a positive difference in the lives of tens of millions of kids.

Lloyd: We’re going to take two more questions.

Question 4: Yes, my name is Lamont Curry, and my question is, how do you feel about spoken word being as a poetry art form? Spoken word, for those that don’t know, is poetry that is like performed almost in a theatrical sense. I was wondering, what was your take on spoken word as a form of poetry?

Gioia: I am a huge fan of it, and I’ll tell you why, and this is actually an argument that I have with the literary establishment. I mean, I began writing about the importance of spoken word, about what was happening in hip-hop culture, it was happening in a lot of these seemingly odd movements like cowboy poetry, poetry slams.

Poetry began as a kind of speech before writing was ever invented. Homer was illiterate. Every culture in the world—now, there are many postmodern fools that say there are no cultural universals. You can list dozens of them, but one cultural universal is poetry. No anthropologist has ever found a group of people who did not invent a special kind of speech to remember and dramatize their own stories, their own aspirations, their own beliefs. You know, at the root of culture is poetry. It begins as speech.

So I cannot believe that, especially as we enter a kind of electronic culture in which speech and sound is becoming more important, that at the center of the literary imagination, of the poetic imagination, isn’t speech raised to its highest sort of degree of meaning and memorability. Now, that being said, most of the spoken, you know, sort of word poetry I hear is not very good. But frankly, most of the poems I read in the New Yorker aren’t very good, so it’s kind of like six of one and half a dozen of the other.

Lloyd: One last question.

Question 5: Thank you for your paean to the arts. My question has the segue from your Stanford talk, but there is a decrease in the amount of government support of teaching, because we’re emphasizing technology and writing and reading and arithmetic rather than appreciation of the arts. And I know that in LA, Rafe Esquith has been teaching Shakespeare to fifth graders for 25 years with incredible support. How can we get support of the arts down and inspire teachers like Esquith?

Gioia: Well, Rafe Esquith, whom we gave the National Medal of Arts a number of years ago, is an exemplary American and exemplary teacher. What he has done is something quite simple. You take kids who don’t know what to do with their lives, many of whom don’t have English as a first language, don’t have positive forms of socialization. Their forms of socialization are called gangs. You create the community that a play creates—fellow actors, crew, putting on a performance—and they have the exhilaration of art, they have the education of mastering language, and, most important, they have this thing that we Christians understand as the blessing of community, a positive community.

How do we get more of those? We get more of those by, in whatever walk of life we’re in, we tell our community leaders, our political leaders, our business leaders, that this is something that matters. It will not happen by itself. But we live in a free society, and one of the benefits of a free society is that if we are serious enough, if we are dedicated enough, we can create the culture we want to live in, and so, you know, we have to be the church militant before we can be the church triumphant.

Lloyd: On that triumphant note, I want to thank you Dana Gioia for this marvelous conversation, invite you all if you’d like to stop by for some coffee in the west end of the Cathedral, where Dana Gioia’s books are on sale, and Mr. Gioia will stop by briefly himself. And then please join us at 11:15 for our service this morning. Please join me in thanking our guest today. (applause)