Poetry as Enchantment

From the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.

Hello everyone. Welcome to the Library of Congress this afternoon. My name is Rob Casper. I'm the Head of the Poetry and Literature Center here at the Library, and I would like to welcome you to today's lecture, Poetry as Enchantment, with Dana Gioia.

Before we begin, let me ask you to turn off your cell phones and any other electronic devices that you have that might interfere with our event. It does pick up on the RF frequencies, so it's good to have those off. Second, please note that, as you can see from the back, this program is being video recorded, and by participating in the question and answer period, you give the Library of Congress permission for future use of this recording.

Let me tell you also a little bit about the Poetry and Literature Center here at the Library of Congress. We are home to the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. Our 20th Poet Laureate is Charles Wright. And, in addition to supporting the Laureate, we put on readings, lectures, and panels of all sorts throughout the year, both in the afternoon and also in the evening. To find out more about events like this and to help our Poet Laureate and the Library champion poetry and literature, you can visit our website, which is www.loc.gov/poetry. You can also pick up our featured events handout and sign our signup sheet, which is out in the foyer.

Now, on to the event this afternoon. For approximately 45 minutes, Mr. Gioia will discuss the relationship between poetry and music and explore the ways in which poetry achieves its special expressive power. We will leave time afterwards for your questions. And following the event, Mr. Gioa will be happy to sign books. You can find copies of his latest poetry collection, *Pity the Beautiful*, and his influential book of essays, *Can Poetry Matter?*, also out in the foyer for sale. And hopefully, by the end of the event, the credit card machine will be working so you can buy with credit cards.

You can learn more about our featured speaker in our print program, which should be on your seats, or if you didn't get one, there's one next to you. But let me tell you that there are a few, if any, poets I would trust completely to give a brilliant, accessible, and necessary lecture on poetry as I do Dana Gioia. As an acclaimed practitioner, an influential commentator, a translator, and editor, Gioia has been a tireless advocate for the art. As Chairman for the NEA, he brought this dedication to all our arts on a national level. His lecture today will surely show how our creative expression in words and in song can continue to deepen our lives. Please join me in welcoming Dana.

Good afternoon. Although for me, it's good morning because I'm still on West Coast time. It's always a special occasion for an American poet or writer to speak at the Library of Congress. Not simply because it is the largest library in the world, which is in itself a cause for awe and wonder, but also because this institution dates back to the early days of the Republic, the early, endangered days of the Republic, and it symbolized from the beginning the importance of language and learning in a free society. Poets love a symbol, and it seems to me that the Library of Congress is a symbol worth loving.

Everyone here today shares something of great significance, though a few of you may be too well-armored in irony to admit it. We have all dedicated at least some part of our lives to the indispensable importance of language and literature in shaping, expanding, and refining human consciousness. We believe in the transformative power of language and literature, the transformative power of reading in shaping the lives of individuals and in communities. And we hold these beliefs in a period of cultural crisis when the society around us, including government officials and academic administrators who fund and supervise libraries, universities, and cultural centers, no longer necessarily share our convictions.

Now, I mentioned this disjunction between our values and those of the larger society not to complain about the situation. We all know that if we wanted money and celebrity, it was probably a bad idea to dedicate ourselves to language and literature. I refuse to be cynical about our calling, whether it be as writers, teachers, librarians, or simply serious readers. We enjoy the rare privilege of doing work we love and value and playing a part in the continuity of that great, mysterious enterprise known as literature.

Today, I will talk about a central part of that vast imaginative enterprise, namely the art of poetry. I want to take a deliberately broad perspective on the subject so that we can puzzle out one of the oddest but most essential aspects of poetry, something that is mostly overlooked today, namely the mystery of its emotional and magic and imaginative power that grew out of a deep historical connection between poetry and music and magic. But first, to remind us of the actual phenomenon that we will be discussing, necessarily in abstract terms, let's listen to a poem to understand that music and magic. This is a poem by Robert Frost called "Acquainted with the Night."

I have been one acquainted with the night.

I have walked out in rain and back in rain.

I have out walked the farthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.

I have passed by the watchman on his beat

And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet

When far away an interrupted cry

Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say goodbye.

And further still at an earthly height

One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.

I have been one acquainted with the night.

It's intimidating to say that with Robert Frost's granddaughter in the room. I am not a scholar. I am a poet, a critic, a former civil servant, and for half of each year now, a professor. A kind of pathetic resume, don't you think, if it came across your desk? I had just enough early training in scholarship at Stanford and Harvard that under pressure, I can successfully imitate a scholar for about an hour. But today, I don't want to speak in the lofty and remote dialect of contemporary literary criticism. I'm going to speak in a public idiom, the sort of English, to quote the poet Randall Jarrell, that dogs and cats can understand. So I speak to you not simply as a poet, but above all as a fellow reader and fellow lover of poetry, an amateur in the root meaning of that wonderful word.

But first, let me begin with three crucial observations about the art of poetry. First, poetry is the oldest form of literature. Indeed, it is the primal form of all literature. Poetry predates history itself because it not only existed but flourished before the invention of writing as an oral, performative art. In fact, before writing, poetry, or if you wanted to be technical, you could say verse, stood at the very center of culture as the most powerful way of remembering, preserving, and recreating the identity and stories of a tribe, a culture, a nation. Verse was humanity's first broadcast technology, a technology that was performed by the human body. Poetry was also, to use Robert Frost's astute formulation, a way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget. Frost's definition is ponderable: a way of remembering, which is to say a mnemonic technology to preserve human experience. What it would impoverish us, which is to say that poetry enriches human consciousness, or at least protects it from some sort of depredation, to forget. In here, Frost acknowledges the very center of the art: the natural forces of time, mortality, and oblivion against which humanity finds its meaning. As Frost said elsewhere, one of the essential tasks of poetry is to give us a clarification of life, a momentary stay against confusion.

My second observation is that poetry is a universal art. Despite the theories of cultural relativism propounded by postmodernists that there are no cultural human universals, there is a massive and compelling body of empirical data collected and documented by anthropologists, linguists, archaeologists, and more recently by cognitive scientists that demonstrate there is no human society, however isolated, that has not developed and employed poetry as a cultural practice. We are talking, of course, mostly about oral poetry. Many of these cultures never developed writing, and it is a demonstrable fact, not an opinion, that poetry is a universal human enterprise. That in every society, they have developed a special class of speech shaped by apprehensible patterns of sound, which is to say poetry. In fact, cognitive science now suggests that humans are hardwired to respond to the sort of patterned speech that poetry represents, like the songs of birds, the dances of bees, but on a higher level of complexity. Poetry reflects part of the unique cognitive capacity of the human mind and body. Now, why humanity universally needs poetry as a special class of speech is another question entirely, which I'll explore in a few moments.

Third and finally, poetry began as an auditory, performing art, linked to music and dance, and through those features, to civic ceremony, religious ritual, and magic. Most aboriginal cultures do not distinguish poetry from song or even from dance. Nor did the classical Greek and Chinese cultures two or three millennia ago differentiate poetry and song. For them, it was the same art. Poetry was performative, either chanted rhythmically or sung, sometimes, as in the Greeks, sung and danced in chorus. Purely verbal forms of poetry only emerged gradually, poetry written on and for the page. But even then, there was a reluctance among poets to sever the connection between singer and poet. We hear the poet-singer evoked continuously through Western literature: Virgil's "Of arms and the man I sing," John Milton's "Sing, heavenly muse," W.B. Yeats's "Irish poets, learn your trade, sing whatever is well made." Even when Walt Whitman published the central work of American free verse in a book produced by mechanical typography, he did not title it *Book of Myself*; he called it *Song of Myself*. Whitman wanted to evoke the physical proximity of singer and audience. "I sing the body electric. The armies of those I love, I I engirth me, and I engerth them." Just as Ezra Pound later called the modernist epic *The Cantos*. His form was fundamentally visual and typographic, but he named it *Cantos*, the Italian word for song or chant. We might even take this notion to a metaphysical level, as Rainer Maria Rilke did in his *Sonnets to Orpheus*. *Gesang ist Sein* – "Singing is being." Some of you may recognize this German phrase, since in another context, Lady Gaga has it tattooed onto her arm. Poets understand the power of song, both real and metaphorical, in its physical and emotional connection to the listener. As Italian critics said about opera and song: "Prima la musica, et dopo le parole" – first the music, then the words. That hurts me as a librettist, but it's true. Even to this day, poetry speaks most effectively and inclusively, whether in free or formal verse, when it recognizes its connection, without apology, to its musical and ritualistic origins.

The musical nature of poetry is one reason why, to quote T.S. Eliot's observation about Dante, "genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood." I would like to have that written over the arches of English departments. Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood, just as music and dance can communicate in ways that are physical and sensory rather than conceptual.

Now, there was a wonderful study done about 20 years ago to try to determine which poems in the English language have been reprinted most frequently. And most people were astonished to discover the most widely anthologized poem in the English language is William Blake's "The Tyger."

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,

In the forests of the night;

What immortal hand or eye,

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.

Burnt the fire of thine eyes;

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And when thy heart began to beat,

What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil? what dread grasp,

Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

When the stars threw down their spears

And water'd heaven with their tears:

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright,

In the forests of the night:

What immortal hand or eye,

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

A dream vision of God as a blacksmith in the foundry of creation, hammering out a burning predator. This is not a poem that I think anyone in the audience would like to stand up and explain in conceptual terms. I mean, great scholars have riddled out the complex mythology and ideology of the lines, although they're always disagreeing with one another. But these mysterious lines have been loved and cherished by millions of readers who have no idea, in conceptual terms, what they represent. Perhaps it would be better to say that auditors recognize that "The Tyger" is a song of experience, not a philosophy. Experience. The listeners love the poem as a tune, a song, a magic spell that summons up powerful images and awakens deep emotions.

This is not to diminish the value of criticism. My point is rather that part of poetry's power has little connection with conceptual knowledge. It's deeply significant that the Latin word for poetry, *carmen*, is also the Roman word the Romans used for a song, a magic spell, a religious incantation, and a prophecy, all of which are verbal constructions whose auditory power can produce a magical effect on the listener. Even today, the term *carmen* survives in English via Norman French as the word "charm," and it still has the multiple meanings of a magic spell, a spoken poem, and the power to enthrall. You are charming. Looking at the sky this morning, some of you may have already begun the day with a charm: "Rain, rain, go away, come again some other day."

A scholar might dismiss the responses of average readers as something vague and amateurish. The reactions of most readers are certainly undisciplined, haphazard, incoherent, and hopelessly subjective. But speaking today on behalf of the amateur readers of poetry, those who read it for love and not from profession or obligation, I would claim that the deep and genuine response of amateurs, however conceptually incoherent and subjective in conceptual terms, come closer to the power of art, nearer to its truest human purposes than does abstract critical analysis. The scholar's response may be accurate and insightful, but it remains deliberately outside the full experience of the poem, which is physical, emotional, and intuitive, as well as conceptual. It is important for us to remember that literature has many uses, not all of which occur in the classroom, but in all sorts of places and situations. Poetry would not be a universal human practice if it did not serve many large and various human purposes.

Now, in the Western tradition, the purpose of poetry has generally been assumed to delight, instruct, console, and commemorate. And it does all of these things through a particular exhilaration, a heightened sensitivity of pleasure. Poetry is a special category of language, a way of speaking that invites us and rewards us for a special way of listening or reading. The primary purpose of this kind of language is to enchant, just as music enchants, to create a mild trance state in the listener, to heighten attention, to relax emotional defenses, and to rouse our full psyche closer to consciousness so that we hear and respond to language more deeply and intensely than we normally do. To borrow Franz Kafka's more violent metaphor about literature in general, poetry is an axe to break the frozen seas within us. The purpose of poetry, in this sense, is to awaken us to a fuller sense of our own humanity and our own existence.

But poetry is a way of understanding and expressing existence that is fundamentally different from conceptual thought. As the French philosopher Jacques Maritain observed, poetry is not philosophy for the feeble-minded; it is a different mode of knowing and expressing the world. There are many truths about existence that are best expressed as a song or a story. Conceptual language, which is the necessary medium of the critic and scholar, primarily addresses the intellect. It is analytical, which is to say it takes things apart, as the Greek root of the word, *analyein*, to unloosen, suggests. Poetic language, however, is holistic and experiential. Poetry simultaneously addresses our intellect, our physical senses, our emotion, our intuition, and our memory without asking us to divide them. The text may be frozen on the page for easy visual inspection and analysis, but the poetic experience in itself is temporal, individual, and mostly invisible. To quote Wallace Stevens, "Poetry is a pheasant disappearing in the bush." And when we encounter a great poem by Emily Dickinson or William Butler Yeats or T.S. Eliot, we experience a visceral thrill in the physical rhythms of the language and the sensory impact of the images. "When the stars threw down their spears and watered heaven with their tears: Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make these?" The poem is a spell that unlocks a deep response inside us beyond its paraphrasable content. And it's hard to write a term paper about rapture.

I now come to the second part of my argument, which is essentially a consideration of a paradox. If poetry is the most ancient and primal art, if it is also a universal human art, if it uses rhythmic power and the music of music to move us in deep and mysterious ways, if the art is actually a sort of secular magic that awakens a heightened sense of our own humanity, then why is poetry so unpopular? Why is poetry so hard that many instructors acknowledge they are reluctant to teach it? Why is poetry disappearing from our school curriculum at every level? And why has poetry gradually disappeared from public discourse and media? And why has this happened, at least in Europe and North America, despite huge ongoing investment from governmental, academic, and philanthropic institutions to support the teaching, publishing, discussion, promotion, and preservation of poetry?

There are, of course, many reasons, not the least of which is the proliferation of new technologies for information and entertainment, including media that have usurped the basic modes of song and storytelling from reading. But there have also been intellectual and educational trends that have stunted poetry's popularity and appeal. Couldn't perhaps the way that poetry is customarily taught, the manner in which it is being professed, be part of the problem?

Poetry has always played a significant part in education. It has been used for millennia at every level of instruction. In many cases, poetry served as the central subject matter of the curriculum, as, for example, in the schools attended by Du Fu in China or William Shakespeare in England. But until about 1920, poetry was taught rather badly. It was used to teach grammar, to teach elocution, to teach rhetoric, to teach history, even to instill patriotic and religious morality. It was chanted in chorus by young ladies in female academies. It was copied to teach cursive handwriting and calligraphy. It was memorized as a punishment for wayward schoolboys, and it was recited by children at public gatherings and family parties. Yes, for thousands of years, poetry was taught badly, and consequently, it was immensely popular. People loved it. Poets such as Byron, Longfellow, Tennyson, and Kipling became international figures who outsold their prose competitors. But poetry's existence on the pages of collected editions or even bestselling books represented only a tiny fraction of its real cultural presence. Poetry was read in newspapers, magazines, almanacs, textbooks, and popular anthologies. A poet could become famous by the publication of a single poem across the world, as in the case of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" or Edward Markham's now-forgotten "The Man with the Hoe," published in 1899 about the oppression of labor, that was reprinted in 10,000 magazines and newspapers across the world and made him one of the leaders of the labor movement. Poetry permeated culture at all levels, and people of all classes loved poetry. Now, they may not have loved the same poems that Dana Gioia or Harold Bloom loved, but they loved the medium.

What happened? I think one of the problems was that poetry became well taught. As the 20th century progressed, some of the most brilliant minds in the history of English language letters began to wrestle with the early modernist classics. They noticed some of the ways poetic language operated, especially the compressed and elusively challenging texts of works such as T.S. Eliot's *The Waste Land* or Ezra Pound's *The Cantos*, and they developed interpretive methods as strong as the texts they analyzed. They also disliked certain aspects of their own education, especially the sentimentality and moralizing of their Victorian era instructors. These critics strove to create a more objective, rational, and coherent way to understand poetry. In the United States, this intellectual vanguard included critics like R.P. Blackmur, Allen Tate, Kenneth Burke, Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, and Ivor Winters. These writers essentially developed brilliant methods of analyzing poetry as poetry, according to its intrinsic nature, and they stripped all the extrinsic factors away. They brought an analytical rigor, a theoretical organization, and a philosophical detachment to what had been previously mostly an amateurish field. Their techniques differed so radically from traditional pedagogy that they were called the New Critics. And the best of these critics are among my intellectual heroes.

Yet, the immense success these estimable thinkers enjoyed had a long-term negative impact on the popularity of poetry, at least in the United States. The impact, I think, was felt mostly in two ways. First, the New Critics and their many successors changed the way poetry was taught in classrooms, first at a university level and then gradually at lower levels of education. The emphasis on classroom instruction came to focus on teaching specific critical methods of analysis, increasingly to students with limited first-hand experience of the medium itself. Classroom work became more narrowly focused on critical analysis, specifically visual, conceptual scrutiny of printed texts. Needless to say, this process represented a radical departure from the pedagogy of half a century earlier, which had been eclectic, performative, and mostly untheoretical.

The second impact was on the profession itself. The success of the New Critics, all of whom were poet-professors, inspired three generations of American scholars to focus on espousing critical methods as their primary means of professional advancement. Each decade brought a new wave of critical schools and methods, and eventually a mostly theoretical approach to teaching literature. Each new method, however brilliant, usually became more remote from the actual, holistic, intuitive, musical, magical experience of the art itself. Criticism in theory itself became a mandatory part of the curriculum, which reduced the classes students actually took on literature itself. Trained in this system, students developed sophisticated strategies for an art which increasingly had little connection to the experience of that art.

Now, please understand, I am not making an argument against New Criticism, critical method, or even literary theory as intellectual disciplines. My argument is about what happened to several generations of students whose classroom experience of poetry consisted mostly of visual and conceptual technical analysis of poetry without being supplemented by other approaches to the art. No one, of course, intended this unfortunate situation. Like most environmental messes, it happened by accident, byproducts of an otherwise positive project. The rise of analytical criticism seemed at the time to be an entirely reasonable development. But as Oscar Wilde once remarked, there are two ways of disliking art: one is to dislike it, the other is to like it rationally. Although art can elicit rich and meaningful intellectual response, it is important to remember that the experience of art is not primarily intellectual or conceptual; it is holistic and experiential. Two words critics hate because they're hard to pin down. Poetry, like all the arts, is a form of communication, and academia teaches the art as a conceptual discourse, like philosophy or literary theory. This seems like a very practical method. The trouble with this practical method is that most people, nearly all of the time, perceive the world and their existence not as concepts or abstractions, but as totalities. Poetry, like all of the arts, addresses people as incarnate beings with both bodies and minds. Poetry is a way of communication to which people naturally respond because it's actually closer to the way they experience their own lives, which is holistically. They appropriate poetry as a form of musical enchantment which simultaneously addresses all of their human faculties without asking them to subdivide them. We are not disembodied spirits; we are heavy, hungry, hairy human beings, and we experience the richness and complexity of our existence more naturally as stories and songs than as syllogisms.

Now let me illustrate this argument with four brief personal anecdotes. First, my childhood in Los Angeles. I was raised among working-class people, none of whom had any higher education, and most of whom were born speaking Spanish or Italian, not English. Yet, almost all of them liked poetry, not exclusively or excessively, but they considered it one of life's pleasures, and they knew poems by heart that they would quote unself-consciously. And they also loved hearing poetry recited in English, Spanish, or Italian. These were generally people who were otherwise suspicious of intellectual things, but they quoted these poems, all of which they had learned in school, or most of which they had learned in school, with obvious pleasure and pride because they had been introduced to poetry as a musical and performative art, a form of enchantment.

My second anecdote is about my own education. By the time I entered high school, we were taught poetry mostly as a close reading of a text on a printed page. We never read poems aloud as a whole. We read and analyzed them line by line, word by word, as clusters of meaning on the page. The act of reading a poem, at least in class, was to paraphrase and then comment on these small clusters. A few years later, at Stanford, I saw close reading and other critical methods applied with fundamentalist zeal. If a student dared make a personal remark about a poem, he or she was immediately corrected. Such subjective comments were considered embarrassing blunders.

My third anecdote occurred 20 years later, when I first began teaching. I led a graduate seminar in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College, an elite private institution outside of New York. I had 15 graduate students, all from good colleges, all of whom hoped to have academic careers in poetry. A few weeks into the course, we arrived at the sonnet, and I asked each of my students to memorize one of Shakespeare's sonnets. The assignment was met with resistance and anxiety. Not one of them, it turned out, had ever been required at any point in their education to memorize any poem. They also did not understand why it made sense for a student, a student of poetry, to memorize a poem. But I'm mean, and I insisted they do the assignment. The next week, when they recited their poems, their awkward utterances hardly sounded like spoken English. "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate." I realized that they had memorized poetry on the wrong side of their brain, as a visual text. When they recited, they were actually reading some internal visual text aloud. But I had one student who was a terrible student. She had been in classes with the other ones, and they treated her really as damaged goods. When it came time for her, she said that she had not memorized any of the sonnets. I asked her why. She said, "They're not any good." This prompted a conversation. I said, "Well, did you memorize anything?" And she said, "Well, I noticed that when Romeo and Juliet meet, they speak a sonnet to each other. Did you memorize it?" Well, she said, "Yes." And I don't know if you know the scene. This is where Romeo touches Juliet's hand. He asks if this is okay. She kind of likes it, so it's okay. And then he tries to get her to kiss him. He compares her to the statue of a saint and himself to a pilgrim. You know, like the women in Shakespeare, they're usually slightly smarter than the men. She picks up on the metaphor, and they play for it back and forth. And so, after hearing these sort of things, I heard her reach, and she said:

"If I profane with my unworthiest hand

This holy shrine, my gentle sin is this:

My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand

To smooth the rough touch with a tender kiss."

"Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,

Which mannerly devotion shows in this,

For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,

And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss."

"Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?

Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer."

"O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do,

They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair."

"Grant me my prayer, though I must not move so."

"Then move not, while my prayers effect I take."

And I was enchanted. The entire class was enchanted. Then we went to the next person. "Let me not to the marriage of true minds..." And so, at the very end of the class, I just wanted to get the other stuff out of my head. "Would you do it again?" And she did it even more beautifully. From that moment, the entire dynamic of the class changed. My problem student became my best student, and everyone else there realized that she understood something at the center of the art that the other students didn't.

My fourth and final anecdote is, I think, very positive. When I became Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington D.C. in 2003, I wanted to make arts education a primary objective, to give students an opportunity to experience the arts as a natural part of their education. As you can imagine, this was an immensely complicated and expensive goal, fraught with legislative, bureaucratic, operational, and financial challenges. But we decided to start with a program that we could do quickly, without much approval, on a large scale, without much investment. Poetry is the cheapest art. What we conceived was a national poetry recitation contest for high school students that would begin at a class level, then move on to schools, local, regional, state, and national competitions. We successfully tested the idea in poetry with the Poetry Foundation in Chicago and here in Washington D.C. But when we tried to expand it, the arts educational officials in 50 states initially refused to adopt it. They maintained that one, students hated poetry; two, that memorization was repressive; and finally, that it was insulting to introduce competition into an arts program. There should be no winners or losers in art; everyone should share, and everyone should win. As my best kids say, "Kill me now." There was a general feeling among educators that poetry was too intellectual for the average student. It took a great deal of politicking, but eventually, we got all 50 states, reluctantly, to try the program for one year. We call the program "Poetry Out Loud," and we agreed that if we failed, we would give the money to the states to do other things.

What happened, of course, was that the program was a huge success. Even though the Poetry Out Loud was poorly funded and not fully available in most states, we soon had nearly 400,000 teenagers memorizing and reciting poems in competition at a local, state, and national level. At these competitions, the students not only performed their poems, but they also heard the poems recited by others. They, and the rest of the audience, which was large audiences including parents, teachers, and public officials, were literally saturated with poetry. No one was more surprised by its success than the teachers and the arts consultants. Students actually liked poetry once we took it off the page. The educators were also surprised that the best performers were not usually their best academic students. They were the problem kids, the class clown, the southern athlete, the previously silent outsider. And the teachers noted that the energy of competition spilled over into the rest of the coursework as students developed an increasing comfort and command with great language through the medium of poetry.

At the national finals, I noticed another surprising thing year after year: about half of the winners were first-generation Americans, kids from immigrant families who had been raised speaking another language until they entered school: Chinese, Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi, Farsi, Creole, Russian. These were exactly the students for whom literature classes were most difficult. But memorizing and reciting poems provided them with a powerful means of assimilating and mastering English, just as for thousands of years poetry was used to teach grammar, elocution, and spoken rhetoric. This experience confirmed my conviction that there is still a widespread appetite for poetry if the art can be made attractive and apprehensible.

I've covered a great deal of territory, so let me close by summarizing my perspective in two modest suggestions. My first suggestion is that the best way to improve the teaching of poetry is not to eliminate critical analysis, but to augment it with experiential and performative forms of knowledge. You learn something by speaking a poem in public from memory. These additional approaches should include memorization and recitation, as well as creative forms of engagement, such as writing imitations, responses, parodies, or even setting poems to music. Reading poetry silently on the page year after year is an incomplete introduction to the art, rather like viewing the masterpieces of Cézanne or Van Gogh only in black and white reproductions. One sees wonderful things on the page, but one also misses something essential.

Second, critics, teachers, scholars, and even librarians need to acknowledge and respect non-conceptual forms of knowledge, which are fundamental to all literature, but overwhelmingly so in poetry. There are physical and sensory forms of knowledge embedded in the rhythms, image, and verbal texture of poetry, as well as emotional and intuitive movements in the structure of the art. These are often difficult elements to summarize in abstract terms, but if we ignore or marginalize them, we lose precisely the magic that makes poetry valuable. We limit the appeal of the art. As teachers, writers, librarians, we share a responsibility to create the next generation of readers. We need to create and cultivate a dialectic of intellect and intuition, of mental attention and sensory engagement in poetry. Intellectuality without physicality is dull and barren, just as intuition untethered by intellect quickly becomes sloppy and subjective. We need to augment methodology with magic. "What the hand dare seize the fire?" Our hands, we've touched the fire of the imagination, art, and language. We need to pass that fire onto the future. Why should we settle for a vision of literature, of poetry and education, that does any less?

Thank you. Let me read a poem of my own, and then we'll take some questions. I thought we need a little poetic moment. I was raised in a really rough neighborhood in Los Angeles, and I never really saw nature until I was an adult. And this is a poem about actually the first time I ever understood what spring was. I went to Northern California, actually Sonoma County, where I now live most of the year, and walked into an apple orchard. And I was with a girl that I thought I was in love with. This is a poem called "The Apple Orchard."

You won't remember it.

The apple orchard we wandered through one April afternoon,

Climbing the hill behind the empty farm.

A city boy, I'd never seen a grove burst in full flower,

Or breathe the bittersweet perfume of blossoms mingled with the dust.

A quarter mile of trees in fragrant rows arching above us,

We walked the aisle alone in spring's ephemeral cathedral.

We had the luck, if you can call it that, of having been in love

But never lovers. The bright flame burning, fed by pure desire,

Nothing consumed. Such secrets brought to light.

There was a moment when I stood behind you, reached out to spin you toward me,

But I stopped. What more could I have wanted from that day?

Everything, of course. Perhaps that was the point:

To learn that what we do not grasp is lost.

Thank you. Um, so, any questions? I've reduced you all to silence. Oh, good. I'll give the speech again. Oh, here's one. You had mentioned about the students who had recited those poems but never meant to memorize one. It seems, would you say that we have an overall problem with the sort of a distance between the written word and...

I think that I think it is true. And, you know, I would generally avoid teaching for most of my life because teaching draws the same energy that you use as a writer. But for the last four years, I've taught in the fall semesters at USC in Los Angeles, and I do think if you, that my students have two experiences with language: one is their spoken language, and the other is this language they've learned mostly in school. And for a great many of them, you don't see that kind of mutual enrichment of these. And I think it's because we, you know, we haven't brought their speech energy, their physical energy, their intuitive energy into their study of literature. And, you know, the people that are the best, interestingly, have a lot of music students. Music students know how to do it because they're going to listen. The acting students do it. And, you know, and then some, you know, then people, I should have had a number of people that are in this, I have this huge poetry class, it's the largest undergraduate humanities class at USC, that we're actually in Poetry Out Loud. And these guys, a lot of these guys are athletes, and somehow they got involved in it. They like poetry and they want to take another class in it. But I do think it's, there's something about the way we teach language which segments, you know, our experience of different sorts of language.

She: Yes. When it takes the roof of my head off, then I know it's poetry. It's exactly what I'm talking about. It's this, there's a feeling. That's why I tout the blank poem because the blank poem, nobody has fully adequately explained with that poem it means. I mean, there's parts of it. And what, what this happens is that you have this, this rush. It's physical, it's imaginative, it's emotional, and it's more than you can possibly assimilate. But it's this enlargement of your senses, enlargement of your understanding. And that's what she's talking about. What Housman says, that when, you know, when he's shaving and a line of poetry comes into his his head, he'll cut himself because his beard bristles. These are these are physically, you know, Dickinson, Housman are explaining physical reactions, you know, in some ways, physical, sensory reactions.

Yes, sorry to embarrass you, Leslie. One of the things I wanted to explain a little bit is when you talk about the music about poetry, and then you don't distinguish it from the music of music otherwise. The way I look at the music is, see, most poets, or maybe I mean, I'm wrong about this, don't like to have their forms put to music. It's fine for other people's poems, but not for your own, because it becomes something else. It becomes a piece of, maybe a beautiful piece of music, including Mozart or whatever, but it's not the point, because it's a different kind of music. And I don't think for the points you're trying to make, maybe it doesn't make any difference.

Well, you're asking two questions. I'll answer the second one first because it's easier. I thought, I actually have an opera premiering on Friday, so I'm experienced right now, that I wrote the libretto for, and I've worked with a lot of composers. When you hear them do the song, I've learned the first time, all you can think of is, "Oh my God, what were they thinking?" But the reason is because what happens is they take your text, they remove your subtext and everything else, and they make it their own. And, you know, after I've heard it six or seven times, I know if it's good or not. But my first reaction is always like that. It's almost nothing to do. Actually, the reason I read "Apple Orchard" today was because it was set to music very nicely by Laurie Lateman, for whom I'm writing this opera. But the point I was making, because I could bore everyone, you know, in epic ways, with just the technical discussion of poetry, the point I wanted to make was that poetry and song were the same art. They separated, and it depends on what culture you're talking about, either recently or a long time ago. But that they're actually at a root related, you know, in a sense, to the same sensory part of your brain. Now, in poetry, you tend to create the music through rhythm, through meter, through rhyme, through assonance, through alliteration. You also, the imagery is a way, as the modernists understood, which you bypass a lot of the conscious mind, and you have very strong impacts. But, but I think the experience is very, very similar. If you hear Russian poets read their work, they don't recite their poems, they chant them. The rhythm is physical. If you listen to some of the older recordings, the very earliest recordings that were made of poets reading, the people that were in the Victorian age, they chanted their poems, and it was, they're announcing right away that this is not ordinary talk, this is a special class of musical speech. But of course, most of the techniques that a composer uses, a songwriter uses, don't work with purely verbal constructions, you know. But, I mean, that's one thing that makes Frost so interesting is that, you know, he's trying to say how do you take conversational American English and tweak it in in subtle ways that you make it music without people quite realizing immediately. It's another one of these.

Yes, sir. How do you feel poetry videos?

Well, I think the medium is natural. You know, the, I mean, the most important thing that's happened in American poetry, and I have to qualify this statement because people misunderstand it, in the last 30 years has been hip-hop. It is we have seen in our own time the reinvention of oral, performative, quasi-improvised poetry, which is, I think, the ur-form of poetry. Now, that does not mean that I think that Snoop Dogg is Shakespeare. It doesn't even mean that I like most of the hip-hop. But what I see there is a phenomenon. We took poetry away from people, and they reinvented themselves. They reinvented themselves out of their own experience, their own language, and guess what? People like it. You know, it became within about 10 years the most widely purchased and listened to category of recorded sound in the world. There's Mongolian, Finnish, Urdu. I think people understood, and they reinvented it because the academic poetry became too remote. This is also seen, if you wanted to say in Marxist terms, disenfranchised Western agrarian workers, cowboys. Cowboy poetry went from one thing to 200 festivals. Little, little background music for the cowboys. And, you know, and you see this, and it's basically people, poetry slam poetry videos. Is it people that are in a sense outside of the official poetry establishment have reinvented these forms? Now, that being said, as a, you know, a snooty reader of poetry, I don't like most of what I hear. But, you know, the energy, the authenticity, the cultural power of this stuff is unmistakable. And then every now and then, you'll see a poetry video that's simply astonishing. I mean, people, you know, people are always sending me links, and I look at them, most, you know, and I see some things, I go, "Wow." You know.

So, sir, did you take the chance?

Well, that's that's very well. My brother, who's the smart Gioia, is a jazz critic and a music critic, and he's written a book, a very laboriously detailed book about healing and music, showing the actual empirical evidence of this works. But, you know, what it is, is that, you know, that poetry was used, chant and things like as healing, and it comes to the physiological thing. I don't, you know, I can't explain beyond this, which is you have certain rhythms in your body, and by slowing down certain rhythms, speeding up certain rhythms, you can help a person in terms of healing. I would not give my medical care over to any poet I know, you know. So I think this remains, yeah, this remains theoretical, you know. But, you know, they, but they do know that, you know, music in hospitals changes people's attitudes. People are very responsive to these things. Now, I don't think we've done much scientific, but there's actually music and healing, rhythm and healing is something that's that's actually undergoing a renaissance right now. But it was, but there's no, there's no two questions about it, it was fundamentally an aspect of healing in oral cultures. We did a lot of, when I was, when I was at the Endowment, which was a while ago, we did fund art and healing. We felt that it was, the question is, how do you take all of this tremendous energy and imagination and richness that exists in American culture, literary culture, musical culture, arts culture, which the majority of people do not participate in, and how do you bring what this group has to what this group needs? And I don't think...

We we have a very good answer for that yet, uh, and I think that that's one of the things that, you know, I mean, it's, I said that poetry has many uses, not all of which are in the classroom, and I think that we, you know, that we need to bring, bring it outside of that. And my, my experience is that people are actually almost always glad, you know, to give it a try.

Yes, um, it's interesting, um, I just hosted a, or, you know, co-hosted a German poet who specializes in this. In Europe, this is a huge movement, although it's very much of kind of the established poets doing it with state funding, significant directors, relatively big budgets, and I've seen some things that are amazing, uh, there. In the United States, it tends to be much more ground up. In fact, I've had a couple movies made out of my poems, you know. I think it's a, it's a really powerful thing, you know, when it's done well. But, you know, movies like opera, it's the, it's the quickest way humanity has ever invented to go bankrupt, you know. And so, you know, you, you know, you, you need to sort of develop it. But I think it's a, it's a fascinating thing. And every now and then, you'll even see a commercial film. About 30 years ago, there was a film called Stevie, starring Glenda Jackson and Trevor Howard, about the British poet Stevie Smith, and it told her life story. But about every five minutes, Trevor Howard would just be there on a black screen and just recite a poem by Stevie Smith, and it was really powerful. And there's been a little of this. Sometimes it's really awfully done because they're trying to wrap it into a commercial plot. There's a movie about the death of, about Keats, you know, Keats' romance, you know, with Fanny Brawn, and it's, it's unwatchable, you know.

I thought, one more question, then we can call it a day. Or, sir, well, there's quite a few. I mean, there is still alive, God bless him, Richard Wilbur. He's, I think, 93, and he seems incapable of writing a line that isn't perfect in some ways. And in his 90s, he's writing some of the finest poems of his lifetime, and they're deeply musical. He's rather like Wallace Stevens in it. His English has got a sort of the echo of French. I think Kay Ryan, who was Poet Laureate here, uh, a few years back, has invented a wonderful new kind of music, and she's, she now has legions, you know, of, of, of followers, uh, in, in England, although I guess, you know, lives in New York. James Fenton, I think, when he actually, on those rare occasions he, you know, he deems to write a poem, it's got a beautiful, beautiful ear for it. But, you know, you see it, you know, you see it in, in dozens and dozens of poems. But, you know, it's, poetry is a, is the Irish Sweepstakes, you know. You buy a ticket, and the odds are against you. But when you win, you know, it's, it's, it's a big thing. So, you know, so. But, you know, those, you know, K. Ryan and Richard Wilbur, if American poetry had nothing but those two people in it today, we would have a rich literature. But luckily, we have dozens and dozens of other poets.

Thank you so much. Thanks so much to Dana and thanks for all of you for coming out. Um, his books for our are for sale in the foyer. Please do buy some. I'm sure he'd be happy to sign some books. And please do check out our calendar for upcoming events. I believe we have an event on Friday, Conversations with African Poets and Writers with Véronique Tajo. So we'd love to see you there. Thank you. This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.