Dana Gioia: Why Poetry Matters | How I Write
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This is the deepest conversation I've ever had about writing. Dana Joy is going to walk us through not just the tactics of what it takes to write well, first drafts and editing and how to read well, but also the life that you got to live to be world class. What's the sacrifice, the dedication? What does the work ethic look like? That's what this conversation is about.

You've discovered that for you, first drafts are a quasi-mystical process. Well, 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 I feel it in my throat. And

It is beyond words. It's, you know, it's in a different medium. But there's a one line or an image or whatever that's the transitional point from whatever this invisible thing is to the page. And if I'm going, I write in a kind of frenzy.

And then 30 minutes, 45 minutes later, it just vanishes. And then I'm left with what I have on the page, which is always a mess. And part of what I need to do is look at that and to find the poem that's hidden. But it's even that way for prose. I mean, I'll be wanting to write about a certain subject and I just don't have the entry. And then suddenly it comes from nowhere.

and I've got to get it down then or I'll lose it. So what happens if you're at dinner or you're asleep? 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 I'll 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 sort of dance a duet. Has this changed throughout your career? 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 sort of sit down and I can 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. And I had all these things and they never came together until now, but it surprises me. You know, 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 know, 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. Astonished is a good word. I just finished writing an opera for kids. And, you know, they said, what's the message and this, that and the other. And I said, no, what I want is to create a sense of wonder.

And I think that that's one of the primary things that literary writing does is to give you a sense of wonder, of joy, often from things that you see every day that you've never seen in quite the same way. And, you know, if you don't have that, I think the writing, to me at least, feels impoverished. So give me an example. I want to hear from a poem.

of 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 turn that into the first draft. I'll have a poem and I'll work on it. And it'll come in a couple of lines, then I'll develop it into maybe

15, 20 lines. And then I'll just stop sometimes because, you know, 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. And it's a really nice poem. And I finished it. I said, but it's not enough. And I waited a couple of months. And then suddenly I realized there's a turn at the end. The last...

You know, maybe eight lines of it twelve lines of it is about the guy remembering this twenty years later You know and 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

And this is good. But when you join them up like that, they both double in their energy. Sure. And so I'll start saying something and I'll say it with all the power that I can have. And I'm at the point where you're about to say, stop it, stop it. And then suddenly I'll say almost the opposite. Oh,

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. And when you do this, it has a kind of energy and it's the energy that comes from debate, from argumentation. And 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, uh,

we make politics. Out of arguments with ourselves, we make poetry. And so I realized early on that most of the poems that I read, the new poems that I've read will be, 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. And I'm much more interested where you have one emotional thing that takes you up. And as you

are raised by it or depressed by it, suddenly you realize that the opposite is true or something happens that triggers this. I call it a turn. And I like to have turns in my writing. I did it, first of all, in my poetry, but then I realized in my prose, it's actually sometimes even more powerful because you don't lose anybody in prose. You know, sometimes in a poem, if you're not in the right mood, you can't quite follow it. 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 that my poetry 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. And once I did this, I really became a much, much better prose writer. You know, 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. And I take a very different strategy for both of them. So I'm the least marketable writer you could possibly imagine. I mean, people 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. There's a real stubbornness about you and also your brother in that way. Well, you know, I'm stubborn, but I'm not as stubborn as Ted. But it's the same thing. I mean, 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 newspaper. 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.

And it actually brings us back to the origins of religion.

literature, the origins of human consciousness. And that's not a bad time for a poet to be alive because poetry is a technology that's older than writing. And so actually as a poet, especially the kind of poet I am, which I use form, meter, rhyme, and things like that, the culture is closer to what poetry is about than it is what a novel is about or what a print book is about.

But anyway, I wrote an article, which I think is one of the best things I've ever written, called Disappearing Ink, Poetry at the End of Print Culture. Louis Lapham of Harper's bought it. He said, oh, this is a great essay. It's really, really important. So he paid me a nice advance. And he says, well, but Dana, I want you to begin on the East Village where you're going to a poetry slam and people are doing this, that, and the other. And I thought about it.

And I said, no, I don't want to do that. And so I sent him back his check and I took it and I published it in the Hudson Review. So rather than publish it in a magazine with a quarter of a million readers or whatever Harper's had, I published it in a magazine with 2,500 readers. And the article did not have anywhere near the impact of

uh, that it would have, but I had it the way I wanted it to be. And, uh, I paid for it. You know, I paid for my, uh, uh, my duh, duh, duh. I don't know what you call it, integrity, but I don't regret that. Uh, you know, because I feel that if I write really well,

my pieces last. And now people read this and they go, how did you know this in the 1990s? Everything you say has come true. So I get a kind of posthumous fame, I guess. In the same way, I gave this lecture at the New York Public Library and a couple of editors wanted it. And one was from the Atlantic. And so I said, yeah, I'd love to do it. And this is what

became really the most famous piece I've ever written called "Can Poetry Matter?" Of course. It's probably the most best known essay on poetry for the last 30, 40 years. I sent it to them the next morning. Bill Whitworth, the head editor of The Atlantic called up and said, "Dana, this is terrific. We're going to publish it." And I said, "No, let's not publish it." He says, "What?" And I said, "Well, you know, I reread it last night and

and I don't think it's done. And he says, what do you mean it's not done? It's perfectly ready to go. And I said, no, no. And I started talking about what I thought was wrong with it. And then about two months later, I gave it to him and it had, the beginning was the same, the end was the same, but I added a section in the middle, which I think made it a much, much better piece. And I gave it to him and he says,

He says, you're right. It's much, much better. I was smart enough not to say, thank God the Atlantic wants me, the New Yorker wants me, to maintain a certain distance. And that piece ended up generating more mail than any article in the entire history of the Atlantic Monthly. 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.

Oh, 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. But writing is like everything else in life. You know, with somebody you go, oh, they're so funny. Then 20 minutes later, they're so annoying. You have these swings. And so that's what I say with my writing. You throw yourself into it and you have this big thing and it looks really good. And the next morning you read it and you go, it's all you see are the faults.

I just published a book on opera called Weep, Shudder, Die. And I began it about 20 years ago. I wrote this piece. I'd written an opera and people wanted to ask me about what was it like to write the words and the lyrics of an opera. So I wrote this little piece and I never reprinted it because I said, you know, it's not as good as it could be. Then it got to be a little bit longer. And finally I was bringing a book of essays out and, uh,

It was just too long. And so I just told the publisher, I'm going to just take it out. And I began working on it. He said, well, why don't you just...

You know, we'll use it as a little medium piece and you can publish the scripts of your operas, the libretti. And so it's a good idea. 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 be, you know, personally, it needed to grow into its form. But in the last...

three months when I was working on it. I'd write a chapter. It would look good. The next morning, I think it was terrible. I'd tear it apart and I did it again and again and again. And I just said to myself, this is a book I'm not going to make any money off of. My publisher is just publishing it because he's intrigued by the idea. So, you know, it came out in December, which is the worst time for a book to come out. I don't know why my publisher wanted to do that, but I was so grateful for him to be the one that sort of

make the thing happen that I didn't complain. And people have told me that I've had one, one reviewer said this and several of my friends said this, they started to read it and they read it in one sitting. They couldn't put it down. And that's what I was trying to get. I'm trying with my literary writing to write a book that will last longer than I do. What actually lasts and doesn't get swept away by the current of culture? When I'm writing literature,

uh, for the, I'm writing for now and thereafter. I don't, it's not like I'm saying, no one will understand my book for 30 years. No, no, no. If they don't, if it isn't, if it isn't good the day that 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? And see, this is the funny thing is that

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

you know, chain of references and citations and everything else. And so what I try to do is imagine two or three readers that are at very different stages of their life, kind of a bright teenager that doesn't know much, you know, a fellow writer who knows probably too much and a person who's sort of in between who's kind of, you know, you know, reads poetry or reads about music and say,

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 the other one, I'm going to get an angle that will surprise him or her. And so I really do think about what to put in and what not to put in. But I will spend...

a whole day working on a paragraph that has a couple of examples. My brother does this too, a history of jazz. What songs do you mention? What poems do you mention? What operas do you mention? And I'll go through there and I'll make, okay, from this angle, how does that work? From this angle, how does that work? From this angle, how does that 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 it's going to be around in 20 years. Or if it isn't, that I explain that somebody else will get. So that's why it's very important for me

to have one of my imaginary readers, a younger person who doesn't know very much, bright, curious, alert, but doesn't have a lot of background. So if I'm going to give them a fact, I got to explain why I'm giving it to them. And so, you know, it's a balancing act, but I'm the worst possible example for a young writer.

Because, you know, I walk away from things that most people would run toward. I say no to kind invitations. And it's because I know what I'm doing is very difficult. And it has to be done just right. There's some wisdom that people always offer, you know. Well, if you're going to write, you know, you've got to write from the heart. You've got to write from the innermost portion of yourself.

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 as a social concept.

construction. Sure. I mean, which is that, you know, we have ways of saying things or not saying things. And so 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, you know, once said, you can never read bad books too little. You can never read good books too much.

And I think it's, you know, that's why you've got to read really good writing and see how it works. 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. 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 the ones, and this is a little bit beyond the scope of your question, is they can show you examples of how writers learn.

lead their lives. You know, we're born into whatever family. I was lucky. My parents were rather poor, but in every other respect, they were just great parents and they put their kids first. And we had a wonderful kind of environment where both Ted and I were taught self-esteem. I mean, we just, you know, we didn't ever had to really struggle for it, but I needed to know

How the heck to lead my life? I just, when I was about 20, I literally woke up one morning and knew that

that I was going to be a poet. It took me almost entirely by surprise. Until then, I thought I was going to be a composer. But when it came, it came with an absolute assurance. And really, for the next 50 years, I haven't changed my mind a bit. But I had no idea what it meant to be a poet. What do poets do with their lives? And so I needed to find writers who became kind of my patron saints, who gave me examples of...

how you get through all the struggles and dramas of life. First did that I thought I was going to do what everybody does, become a professor. But after, you know, going through Stanford, going to Harvard Graduate School, I realized I did not want to be a professor. I realized for a poet,

That was an extremely bad decision. It gave you economic security, but it put you in a kind of hothouse, you know, for your writing. And I did not want to be a poet who you had to go to graduate school to be able to read. I wanted the people I came from who were sort of

bright working class people to be able to respond to my poetry just the way that people with better education could. So I had to go off and figure out what I was going to do for my life. And so two poets became very important to me, T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens. Now it's not because they are great American modernists, it's because T.S. Eliot had a day job in a bank

Wallace Stevens was an insurance lawyer. So I had the example of two great poets who worked, in Eliot's case, five and a half days a week and still found time to not just write, but to be one of the most important writers of the 20th century. I learned from them, first of all, that it was possible. And secondly, I saw how they conducted their lives. So

I think people need role models for their journey through life. And I'll say this, I don't think that you could say there's no connection between your writing and your life. I mean, your writing comes out of your life, the choices you make for your life. So you better make them wisely.

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 realize that I don't really have a sense for that. Let me give you what my day was like at two stages in my life. Cool. I had had a job since I was nine.

I worked during college. I worked during vacation. Even in Easter vacation, I would come back for a week and I'd have a job set up because we had no money. And so 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. And so I managed my business school studies in a very business-like manner. I achieved three things at Stanford. For two years, I was publishing books

at least one piece a week in the Stanford Daily or some magazine in San Francisco. Secondly, I got my MBA. And 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 a.m., I'd gulp down a cup of coffee, and I'd drive through terrible traffic to work, and I would work for 10 hours. And so I was really forced to the fact that I never had work.

a really long period of time to work on anything. So what your life is, think of it as like a wallet full of one hour bills. I'm going to take this hour, this, this hour, that, and you only have 24 hours, you know, to spend every day. And so I said to myself, 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. And if I could do all three of those things, but I couldn't have added a fourth and it worked, but it was, it had to have this real focus. So when I said my business time, almost every hour of every day,

was budgeted. So that's what I looked like in New York. I was totally disciplined. So I quit my job at one point and I just became a literary journalist. I began editing books. I began working with musicians.

And we nearly went bankrupt for about two years. And then basically it all started working. And so 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, you know, kind of without any much of an identity. And so up here, I spent 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, I'll have lunch, I'll 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, you know, and literary work. Here it's physical work and literary work. I learned something

you know, when I came here, which is that I'll be working on something and I'll come to an impasse, you know, 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. And I'll go out and I'll prune a tree for an hour, you know, cut away the dead wood and things like that, or I'll drag the stuff down. And while I'm doing that, my unconscious mind,

works it out. Then I'll come back here and it's solved.

And so 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 kind of work. And I think for a poet or for a literary writer, that's very invaluable. Years ago, when I left Washington, D.C., I needed money. So I took a job at USC University.

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 and he would just go and he would catch it.

And I'd say, well, did I tell you to catch it? And 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. And so I realized that for me as a poet, the more physical intelligence I

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. And you can feel those things. You know, you can feel this. You create things where the sound does the work. Years ago, there's a jazz pianist named Helen Soong.

And Helen wanted to do an album of vocals. And so she asked me if I would write the lyrics. And I said, well, we start talking about what it would be. So now at the same time that that was happening, I found out that this, this girl I dated, uh, in my early twenties, beautiful girl. I mean, she was so beautiful. It was a curse, you know, and she, she had died. She had died, I think at 50. And, uh,

I began thinking about what a cursed beauty was, and 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, the drop-dead gorgeous, the great leading men. Pity the faded, the bloated, the blousy, the paunchy Adonis whose luck's gone lousy. Pity the gods.

No longer divine, pity the night, the stars lose their shine. Whether that's a good poem or a bad poem, I can't be the one to judge. But I do know that I can read that to 13-year-old girls or 80-year-old men and everybody gets it. It's so easy. Yeah. And everybody feels the beat.

And when you take a phrase like drop dead gorgeous, everybody feels that as something they can wrap their lips around. And the 10 out of 10s feel so colloquial. Yeah. It's exactly what I'd say to my friends. Yeah. And on the other hand, I could show it to a professor of classics and they would say, well, yeah, that's the kind of poem that a Roman would have written during the reign of Augustus. Catullus could have written that poem. And I like that. It's a poem that's

Unpretentious, but it's rooted in almost any angle that you look at it. You talk about coming here to work and doing two to three working sessions a day.

And how do you think about production versus consumption? Because you're so well-read, but you've also produced so much. And how do you balance those things? I've written so much, people think that writing is easy for me. And it isn't. But it's because I work all the time. I'm happiest working. If you are lucky enough to do the work you love, you know, 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 Pennsylvania

you know, 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, you know, like yourself, who's an expert on writers would say, Dana, you're impossible. This is, you have the stupidest kind of schedule possible. You know, 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. But I wanted to show you something because I don't think people, uh,

Very early on, I would come across a piece of poetry and I would say, God, that's beautiful. How do they do it? And I have a whole book here.

of poems, you know, that I love. And, you know, 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, I have the rhyme scheme, I have where the metrical stresses fall, where the speech stresses fall.

And so it gives me a sense of how these people created sound. So I've got books like this. How do you make time for that? Because that seems in the important but not urgent category. And you showed me your office of all the projects that you're currently working on.

So what you're thinking about, to go back to the very beginning of our conversation, is you're thinking about how do I block out my weeks and how do I really use my time well? How do you think about cultivating the space in order to build this compounding knowledge? Most people waste most of their time. Your time...

is your life. You know, 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 write, I'll be writing something and I'll just, it's just not working. I'll go and I'll just take an author I really like. I'll take George Orwell and I'll read two or three pages of Orwell

And I'll say, God damn it, he writes. It gets me mad that he's writing so well. So, you know, I'll show George Orwell. So I go back there and I write it. And I'll look at my piece and I'll just say, look at this crap that I was writing. And I'll just start, you know, covering it through. I mean, much of my writing process is to look at what I'm writing and say, it's not good enough enough.

for the vision that I have inside of my head of it. And so, I mean, if you look at where I work, I mean, this is, you know, I'll have a chapter and I'll go through it and I'll just tear it apart and I'll write it again. And if you look at that, 24 hours later, you know, I'm writing it yet again. You know, I'm going through every page. I'll just take a paragraph, I'll cut it out. I'll say that there needs to be another paragraph and 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. And what happens is it comes to a point where suddenly I get it and it's radiating more energy than I can possibly put into it.

And I know it's not. Why do you use those words? Well, I like the notion of atomic energy. You take some potentially radiant element and you apply energy and 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 or

you know, and participate in it or they can't. I mean, 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. And there's this strange, primitive transaction that happens in opera that I wanted to capture in words. So tell me this, is then 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. This book has the advantage of the fact that I, you know, have 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. Because, you know, you create a poem, you've got all these scaffoldings in your building. Most people leave the scaffolds.

There's this one poet, you know, that I remember in his poem, and he introduces the poem to reading. He goes, well, you know, I was in Cleveland and it was raining and I had just broken up with Trudy and I was heartbroken and I was walking down McClellan Avenue in the rain and I had a copy of Garcia Lorca. You know, 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 pollens—

You picture those things from your own life. The beautiful girl in the audience 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. And my argument is really quite simple, which is that opera is the most powerful form of

of poetic drama. It's the most intense form of theater that exists. 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. You know, just talking about the nature of song, how you can feel the meaning of a song even though you don't know the words. But 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

You know, I'm not giving a doorway into it for people that don't have a pre-existing interest. I'm not creating a doorway for people who don't know about classical music or don't know about at least 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. You know, 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 had nothing to do with opera. And so I gave these people who, you know, don't really have any pre, you know, pre-existing 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

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. And so 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 really can't.

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. So she comes up and she says, I want to show you something. And she has a framed copy of my poem. And then she takes the frame and she turns it around and there's a picture of

of an older man who is her father. And she says, "This poem just explained my dad to me because he has Alzheimer's and this is how he must feel." You know, 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. And she goes, "It was so important when I read this poem because it helped me understand my dad. And 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. And I think that that for me as a poet, doing that,

was where I took my work to the next level. Not solving the mystery. Keeping things out. Putting into the poem just what it needed and no more. 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?

Well, what you're describing right now 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. And they have this fear of having too many words, you know, having it be, dare I say, too literary. But 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, you know, is for 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. You know, he's in this kind of film noir style,

I mean, he created what we think of as film noir as much as any filmmaker did. And 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 ironic or these sardonic sentences.

And that's why he's, he remains popular. Now he had interesting plots, but the plots have holes in them, but you have the pleasure of narrative, but it's the primary pleasure is the sensibility. So I think you should write as simply as possible. I think you should have no unnecessary words, but there are also necessary words and, and your writing should have a flavor. If everything is, is diet, uh, vanilla, you know, uh,

You know, it's not going to be, you know, that not going to be a meal that you return to. And so the real challenge for a beginning writer is to say, well, I have to write for myself, for my own experience, and to find out how to do that. I mean, Philip Larkin is a wonderful example of a poet. He took the most boring life possible, and he became the greatest poet

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. And suddenly the voice goes from feeling artificial to natural, from artificial to interesting. I was raised in a very urban, very ugly, unmemorable place.

second-rate urban landscape, you know. 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. And 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. And it took me about, you know, 20 years to figure out how to write about my own experience because, you know, I really wished that I could write about the birch forest

you know, woods of Robert Frost or, you know, the ocean of Joseph Conrad or John, you know, something like this. But that wasn't my world. When people are talking about not having their voice and they're frustrated...

I think that there's a few things going on. One of them is 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. And the other thing, sort of the analogy that I like to think about is you can imagine an instrument and you're just trying all these different instruments and what is the one that you play and you're just playing naturally and somehow it feels like it's

has the potential to be perfectly tuned if only you give it work, but then also other people like that sound. And the challenge is that before you found that, it feels like this very mysterious thing that maybe you'll never find. And my sense is that once you find it, you're like, oh, it was kind of just there the whole time, something like that. Yeah. Everyone's life is trite and boring sometimes.

seen from some angle. The problem sometimes people have is they don't really want to admit anything that's embarrassing or shameful. Right. And so they want to, you know, to look good from every angle. 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 allow 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. And I think my very best poem is sort of like saying, I was composing that in my mind

you know, for the last 10 years, but I didn't recognize it as a poem because 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. I think that's very true. You've written all the parts, you just haven't connected them. It's like there'll be two chemical elements that are quite stable. You put them together and they start to, you know, to foam or heat or, you know, things like this. And I think that's how poetry operates. But prose...

Prose is interesting because I think a lot of people today want to write what basically is very personal nonfiction, not so much political history or these impersonal kinds of fiction. And so 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. And I don't know how you do that except through compression and style. Well, I think what a lot of people do if they don't feel like they have a style or a sense of voice is this is how you see a lot of writers who end up living these crazy lives. Yeah. But you seem to have lived a

fairly healthy put together life. I mean, as much as you can, at least relative to people who are doing drugs and alcohol. First of all, it's a dangerous game to try to turn your life itself into a work of art. And that never, never interested me because the people I knew that did this were

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 a

you know, tremendous swings of mood and it'll be midnight and I'll realize everything I've ever written is worthless. You know, I remember once, you know, my mid-Thursday, everything I'd written on the floor because it was a failure. It was a waste of my life. But, you know, 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, which is 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, you know, 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 is like saying, you know, I'm going to be the janitor in a bordello in their mind. It was just an unacceptable thing. And I said, well, don't worry, I'm going to still write. And they just felt that that 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. And 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. I mean, 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'm in love with this girl that I marry. 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. I mean, what was it? 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 I said, oh my goodness, I want to follow that and feel what that's like. What was the thing that was driving you? It's all those things. I mean, 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. So you almost surrendered to it. Yeah. Seneca says, if you follow your destiny, it guides you.

If you resist it, it drags you behind it. And 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 and things like this. But there's a sense of the unlived life. Yes.

I mean, 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. And so this was the bargain that I was making with fate. And so I did it and it took a price. You don't get anything for free. We were talking earlier about the life that you're 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. Absolutely. It's absolutely. And so what I, that's, you know, it's perfectly done for the, you know, with the point I should have been making, which is that what I did was,

was I took myself out of the marketplace. But let me back up a second. Now, if you're a young writer and you're with other young writers and they go, Dana, what are you publishing? And I go, well, I'm not really publishing right now. They assume that you're saying that everything you've written has been refused. They go, they feel sort of sorry for you. So I had, you know, for six or seven years, I had to, you know, to be pitiful.

in the eyes of my friends who were doing this, that, or the other. But 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? And I was very slow in getting at this. Why did I stop sending work out? Because I would send poems out and the ones they would accept were the ones that sounded like other poets. And 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. And rather than wait two years, they just read 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. And I wouldn't give the New Yorker any poems because I was afraid people at my office read the New Yorker. And

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. How did you know if you were improving? Because implicit what you're saying is an objective mirror that you can hold to your own work, which I think is rare.

Well, I don't think it's rare among really good writers. I think it's rare among writers because, you know, they think everything... I mean, I get... Every day people send me poetry. And that's fine. It's good for them. But they're terrible, usually, these poems. Because they don't... You know, they...

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. And I'm also a well-known critic. And so part of what a critic does, I think 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. How do you do that? Schizophrenia. So you're just able to switch between both modes? You...

alternate between the madness of invention. It's like, you know, I write this thing and it's great. Then I look at it the next morning, I just see what's wrong with it. Then you throw yourself back into it. You just forget all the critical things. You just make it this, that, and that. 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

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. And that, I think, also comes from the fact that, you know, I would come at night and I'd 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 just go through it and I'll say, what's the worst line in this poem? I'll just cross it out. Where does the energy peak? Where does it fall off? And you start to see this shape

of your work and you know you you're doing this and you build up to a kind of a climax and you pull back and you build 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 rehearsal or something like that but you have to do that you know for a prose piece and so i'll look at a a longer prose piece that i've written and i'll

put it in kind of shapes of experience. So just when you're getting to this one thing, then I'll pull the rug out from underneath you and just keep you reading. And that's why the interesting thing about this book here is people said 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. There

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? Well, I didn't have to cultivate it. The negative emotions came, the dark forces came. What I had to do was control it. Maybe, uh, you know, one of the reasons that poetry called me to it was that at some, uh,

deep level, I'm all screwed up. You know, that I've got all these irreconcilable things going on inside of my head and that 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 of

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. And so 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. You know, 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. And so I have, you know, I have all these impulses, but, you know, 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. So I think that I've had to balance those things in my life. And 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. When my son died,

You know, I, uh, went through the, you know, with the funeral and it was right before Christmas. So I was, 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 and the job saved me in some ways because I, I, uh,

It gave an order to me. And then, you know, 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, you know, requires years of suffering and years of joy. Everything you've suffered, everything you experienced,

will not be wasted if it creates the way of seeing the world that comes into your work. What did experiencing the outer depths of grief, how did that change your writing? My wife and I lost our first child.

He died at four months of sudden infant death syndrome. He'd never been sick a day in his life. We'd waited a long time to have kids because we felt, well, kids are kind of a burden. Our lives are so busy. But as soon as we had a child, our life was suffused with joy. I mean, we realized we were just stupid to have delayed it that long. So we had it. Then suddenly...

It was abruptly, really about a week before Christmas. So it was a terrible, terrible thing. But when you're given a great grief, what most people try to do is to repress it or deny it. And I had worked with a couple of men who had lost sons.

And they were kind of old-fashioned American men so that they, after a little bit of a period of mourning, they just repressed it. What I saw them do was to, in a sense, shut off a significant portion of their own humanity to be able to cope with their life. And I understood why they were doing it, but I didn't want that to happen. So I made the decision to

that I would go wherever the grief led me. And one of the places it led me was to the graveyard. And I'm a working class guy. I mean, I'm not a sophisticated person in that. And I would clean it up because it's all I could do. It just gave me a little chore. I'm not going to sit and weep by the graveside, but I wanted to be in the, God help me, in the presence of myself. But then something strange began to happen. I would see other people there.

And these, they usually were older women. And they would come over and they would say, is this your boy? And I'd say, yes. And I said, you must have lost a child. And he goes, yes. And we would sit on the tombstones and they would tell me about the son or the daughter they lost. And this happened a couple of times. So here am I, Stanford, Harvard graduate.

educated, MBA, executive, you know, 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, excuse me, I have a tear in my eye, you know, into this club nobody wants to get to join and nobody can leave.

And 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. So it

The experience taught me humility. It taught me sympathy, 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. And my writing changed because I simplified my writing. It's really funny. People say, well, what?

How has your writing changed? And I said, well, you know, 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. And 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.

And, uh, in a way that I think invites more people into the work. So, you know, it was a, uh, 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 happened to them. And, uh, you know, you've got to make a choice of how you deal with it. And I don't think you, you know, uh,

You know, you do it by denying it. You just, you take that as part of what it means to be human and have it lead into this. And so another thing is it made me a better parent for my next two sons. They're probably both a little bit spoiled. Yeah.

When you talk about being more emotionally direct in your writing since then, what do you mean by that? See, if I can 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. And if I leave things that are kind of puzzling and mysterious to you, uh,

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, when we say the word mystery, you could mean on one hand puzzlement, but it also could mean the secrets of existence. I was thinking of wonderment. Yeah. And so my work, you know, 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. And these things are all things that are independent of it saying, well, this is a poem which gives you a response to this blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The intellectual content of a poem is real, but it's not the major reason that we read poetry.

Reading poetry to have an intensity and authenticity of feeling. Should be visceral. Poetry, it's visceral, but plus a poem is a kind of holistic language. And 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.

you know, language where you do these things. 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, you know, I'm this, that, and the other, and I'll walk away

And what do I think of that person? I haven't really thought it through what I think of that person. I, this, that, and the other. Then it's, you know, if I'm walking down the road a mile later, I say, well, that guy's pretty funny. He's stupid. You figure it out. But, you know, what poetry is, 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, you know, uh,

When you were a musician, because when I was playing, you played a lot of stuff by memory or by, you know, the chords. And you're playing it and somebody is taking the poem, you know, this song 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, you know, where print is.

is like fixed and visual. And if you have a print age education, you don't hear as well as you see. 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. Yeah. I find the Psalms read silently. You just miss...

something fundamental about their essence? They're trying to be songs. Well, I think the prophetic books, you know, I mean, you read them and they have this cumulative impact when you're hearing them aloud, you miss slightly on the page. There's a reason why one third of scripture is written as poetry because poetry communicates differently. So you'll have a book that's just all the laws, but now they're saying, no, I'm

I'm going to show you what's beyond reason. I'm going to show you we're going to participate in the divine. Yeah, you don't need to read Leviticus out loud. Yeah, exactly. You've got a checklist. Well, they did. I mean, what is it? There's one of the prophets, who it was, who just sits the people of Israel down and reads them the entire Mosaic law for days. Forget who it is, you know. Yeah.

Malachi or somebody like that. But I mean, the poor Israelites are probably comatose by the end of it. 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? I had two things I was

trying to teach my students. One of them was practical. One of them was artistic. What I tried to do, and I said, I'm teaching this class because you, in order to lead the lives that you want,

need to understand the power of language. You need to be able to hear language and know what it means. You have to hear language and know what it implies. You have to hear language and know 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. And I would say, how many of you are from immigrant homes? I would say,

30% of class, maybe 40% of the class, first generation to come to college, about 40%. How many of you speak a foreign language at home? 30, 40%, not the same people because some people have very educated parents from a foreign country. And so I said, you are now in English.

And you need to bring, 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. And the

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 and I would have introduced each of them and have them recite a poem. And the board loved it, you know, because they saw that

the fruits of the humanities. I would bring them to public events with me and things like this 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. And I wanted them to hear how people had shaped sound to capture and convey importance.

Meaning, you know, I took like Robert Frost's thing, that poetry is a way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget. Wow, that's a heck of a quote. It is. I mean, a way of remembering. So who's the mother of the muses? Nemnosine, the goddess of memory. A way of remembering what it would impoverish us. So whatever you're remembering is valuable memory.

And forget is the human condition, oblivion. Most of what we're around us is going to be wiped out by time, by death, by events. And so you have to, in a sense, create these, 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 it was a bird in the poem, I wanted to know what kind of bird was it, describe it. And after a while, they realized they would learn it. I said, 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. And most of my class had a conversion experience. There was 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 and by learning it and by reading it and by memorizing it they were awakening themselves to their own sense of their own human capacity. 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, oh, there's rhyme schemes and there's verse schemes and whatever. Here's how it's constructed. I mean, I don't even know. And then, I mean, 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. Yeah, 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. And then about 1930s, 1920s and 30s, a group of brilliant Southerners called the New Critics figured out

the way to analyze poetry. And they're 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 a 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. So 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. If you made anybody who listened to a pop song- That's exactly what I was thinking about. Yeah, analyze the chord sequences and basically the-

The sounding of the chords. No, you've got to be at the club and be like, I love this song. And then you figure out what's going on later. And what's the proper response to a song? It's to dance. It's to tap your foot. It's to sing along. And 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.

And in fact, kids that are terrible English students suddenly become the best people in the class. I mean, Tolstoy, at one point, they're asking him about, you know, should novel...

you know, deal with social issues and things like that. He says, no, no, it's not commensurate with those things. What a novel does is to make you feel the joy of being alive in the world. And so, you know, what art does by igniting all of our human capacity, it makes us understand that

gee, you know, most of the day I'm not this alive. Most of the day I'm just kind of 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. And so, you know, you've got to go back to this, I think, this primal notion of

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

The 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. And 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 have pronounced it. And you feel this, which is the meter that you use for magic spells, you know.

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? If I'm writing poetry, I got to be moving. You got to be moving. So do you walk around with a notebook or? What I'll do is, you know, I'll sit at my desk here and I'll do something and I'll just walk. This studio is designed so I can walk in a circle.

And I walk in a circle muttering like a madman. And I just recite it until I, and I'll just change it. Then I'll feel the lines get right. But 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 an intellectual thing. Oh, that's right. It's 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. 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. It's all impulse. Sometimes I plan to read certain books, but in general, it's like, oh, I mean, look at the environment I create myself. It's full of books. You know, and the sad thing about this, I've read most of these books. I've read all or part of the books I've read many times. And I've got

images of paintings and drawings and things that I think are beautiful. And it's there to sort of keep me alive. But these aren't the kinds of books that I would find in Barnes & Noble. Not for the most part. These are completely different. I've got about, I don't know, 4,000 or 5,000 books in this room. And I've probably got about 20,000 books...

you know, in my house and my, you know, various places. I mean... But what is it... What do you see as the unifying thread amongst these books? What I have here is a...

a collection of poetry, poetry criticism and literary writing. I'll be writing something and it'll remind me of something. Then I'll go over and I'll read that and see what, you know, am I remembering it right? Then I'll go back and I'll work it again. Then I'll go back and read it. And I'm playing off my memory and my experience. Do I waste time? Well, yeah. But sometimes, you know, by wasting time, you come across something you didn't intend.

The great danger is the internet. Do you have internet in here? 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. But I just try to dip into things that are good. I mean, every day I try to take something that's really intelligent.

and that I've read before or that I should have read, and I just read it. And so I've 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. And I've only got one prose piece that I've agreed to write, which is on T.S. Eliot. And so I've got these books of Eliot. I just...

I just go and I'll read, you know, 20 pages of Eliot. And it's just, it's wonderful. Then I'll just put it down. Do you take notes as you do that? So what's on the notes? Well, this is, I'm just, you know, I'm just taking, I'm reading notes.

In this case, I'm reading René Vellick, this great Czech critic on things about him talking about types of criticism going through. And then I go to, you know, to Eliot and to Valéry, you know, and so I just, you know, going through and I'm just, I begin 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

of frame of mind and thinking about, you know, why do people write criticism? You know, why do we read criticism? You know, and 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. 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. What you want to write, sit down and write. If you want to write, be patient, I would say. Think about things. I mean, Wallace Stevens, you know, he said people talk about writing, they never really talk about the meditation that precedes writing.

I'm very big on this, you know, because I can sit down and 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. You know, I don't date with the muse, you know, via a, you know, a dating site. You know, I just go to places the muse might hang around and if she shows up, you know, it'll be great. If not, I'll

she'll show up eventually. But, you know, patience and fortitude, you know, 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. Nura dies sine renea, which was said by Prini the Elder. What this means is not

A day without writing a line. You know, a line is not much to write. A sentence is not much to write. But, you know, if you can write a good sentence, then you'll write another good sentence after it. You write a good line and it'll either now or future will sort of cultivate. So in a month, how many days out of that month do you write a line? I try to write every day something. And if not, I feel guilty. When it happens, it happens and you can't stop it.

I mean, then I'll just, you know, just be every day around the clock. I'll be working on it because it'll come, you know. And 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 is I can't write a poem, but I...

revise the lyrics of one of the songs for the operas that I'm writing about, something I'm working. I do a lot of work with composers and that's very good because they have their deadlines and things like that. And so I'll be revising something or this, that, or the 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 I'll get, they'll send me something and I'll revise it or whatever. So every day I'm doing writing and, but

Usually there's a big project or two big projects that I want to work on. I think there's a certain mentality

of delaying, of pushing it aside and 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. And I know that sounds very counterproductive. It sounds like a way of making excuses for not writing, but I think the inspiration should be overpowering. So tell me this, we talked earlier about how you've

How you went about deliberately improving your poetry. How have you done the same thing with prose? How is the process of improvement and deconstruction different? I divide my prose into two pieces. I mean, I wrote at least a million words in these textbooks where I'd write a biography and I'd make sure that if I had an author's biography, it would be two pages that it was interesting. I

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. I mean, just the first sentence would get you. This is writing where it's kind of a

I know where it's going. I know it's going to end up where Guillaume de Mauboussant dies and critics say this about his work. And I've got a book review here. I know the review is going to be 1,200 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.

And 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. And sometimes I'll just change this sentence. The next day I'll change that sentence and this sentence. But then a week later, suddenly this paragraph is full of emotion. It's got these little image or two that triggers other things. If you ask me what I call it, I call it layering. Layering.

In my poetry, I began doing something that I now, which is, you know, playwrights do. I have a text and I have a subtext. There's certain things that I don't put in the poem that I want you to feel. And I realized that an essay should have a certain subtext too. So 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

a little known poet. 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? And so I put a few more quotations in and it worked a little bit better. So then I just realized I needed to describe the guy. So I wrote two paragraphs that are just evoke this weird

In a way that's both touching and funny. How, when you're thinking about describing him and you have that challenge, how do you describe somebody well? People will say, well, so-and-so, they'll describe him this, that, and the other and pull from this. No, 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. And everything you want to do

you know, uh, will happen. So I said this guy that, you know, you know, 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, you know, a tall, uh, uh, you know, man always sitting at, at, at, in the, you know, standing in the corner of the room, uh, with, with beautiful Hebraic looks. He could have been played a prophet, uh,

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 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. So I just evoke this strange guy that has chosen his whole identity to be an outsider, to be a pariah.

And so you do this, 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 has literally painted himself in

into a corner in New York literary life. And what do most people get wrong when they try to describe? I'm sure that they can, there's a thousand things that most people get wrong. But fundamentally, when you're reading something and the description just falls flat. Almost everything that you do should tell a story. I don't mean like 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. Now 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. And so I think that what you do is you create a scene in which that person

is at the center you know otherwise i think it's it's just a list of details and i've seen i can't tell you how often when i'm reading a novel they'll describe the character and and doesn't mean anything to me after after a while but you know if they can if they can show how the person moves with their body and depict the size of the body and something and it doesn't have to be elaborate it just has to be beginning middle end it can be three sentences right so uh

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, you know, the old fashioned journalist, you know, kept himself or herself out of the story, uh, you know, there, but the older I got, the more I understood that, first of all, uh,

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. And then secondly, sometimes things that you know can best be expressed by telling your personal anecdote, by telling a story with your in it, so that they understand

learn whatever it is or hear whatever it is happen the way it happened to you. Break that down for me. I was the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts for six and a half years. And 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. So I came in at 8 a.m. into the Chorus America booth

you know, meeting and address it. And they're all singing and they're all friends because they're all part of choruses and they sing in harmony and they sing at things and they say, let's all sing God, you know, America the beautiful and they sing it and they're full of joy and everything else. Then I go to the League of American Symphony Orchestras

And there's room for all these tables and each table is the board of a different symphony and there's the board chairman. And you could be among bankers, you know, because they've got big halls and they've got to fill 3,000 seats for every audit, you know, and they've got to get subscriptions. So, you know, it's like a banking sort of thing. And you go through, you know, through this, you know, point by point to all these different groups and 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. And it's a very easy way of making complicated points, which is to say in this case is that every art form has a remarkably different personality that's reflected in the artists and in the organizations themselves. Did you break down other people's prose in the way that you did for poetry? 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. So you went to them as in you picked up their work or you went to go speak to them? No, these are, for the most part, dead people I've never met.

I've never met George Orwell. I've never met Randall. There's certain people I think are really good. Randall Jarrell. Okay. Great prose writer. A fellow who died more recently. I never met him. I exchanged a couple of letters. Clive James. Okay. Who most people know from television because he...

hosted a show on the great cities of the world for BBC, but I know him as a poetry critic. And he's just terrific. I mean, he just, and I just looked, you know, the way like what Clive James did, he was an Australian who came to England and conquered, you know, he, everything he did, he did really well. And he had this ability to create a paragraph and he would just have this knockout sentence, right?

And it would just, you know, I just rivet you and it kind of put everything else in, you know, Jor-El kind of, Randall Jor-El would sort of weave himself in and out of it. Orwell, you know, it's like a tonic note that he had that he would go,

Around you know like this and there's a real sense of controlling his voice his tone his idiom hmm I mean, it's an amazing amount of control Highly moralistic, but never boring. So is your reading somebody like Orwell you admire him Is that a process of just reading more of his books? Is that a copy work? I'm gonna copy his sentences Well at some time you got to sit down and you 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 and

And I'll tell you what I learned again and again and again. You see something, this 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. 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 it

Suddenly, it creates all kinds of associations and reflections that it's this battery. When you link into it, it electrifies your consciousness. And that's the thing that I really like about Orwell. I like 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 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 got to read. You can't be a writer unless you read. You can't be a writer unless you read a lot. And you've got to make judgments and you say, well, who are the people you think

really the best. And then you don't have to write a book about them. Just say, well, you know, what do I like about them? And find a paragraph, find a page, and just look at what they do. And 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, someone's forgotten him, Cyril Connolly. The way this book begins is wonderful. This is a book about why he never wrote a great book.

And it's called The Unquiet Grave. And it's the first sentence. 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 on. His first book called Enemies of Promise, which each chapter shows you a different way that you'll go wrong as a writer. Oh, that's cool. And it's like, no matter what you do, you're going to end up unsuccessful. 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? They get a job at the university. They live as a freelance where they've got to crank out things every week. And 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. And I think that each of those things is a trap. You've got to find a way to

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 like a big piece, a big article.

And it just got a lot of attention. So, you know, an editor from a major house called up and wants to do it as a book. And you can say, well, yeah, because you, you know, you've got a big publisher and you know exactly the book it is you want to write. And he's going to get, you know, 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 because,

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. Yeah. Well, this is a major question then. How do you know that you're ready for a book? 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 –

how bad my advice is for people. This 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 it. I said, no, no, no. I had done a book with this little press. There's only two people then called Gray Wolf Press. It's now

a major kind of literary press, but then it was just two people. And he wanted the book. And 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. And I knew I wouldn't win and I knew who would win. And then I sent it to Graywolf and he wanted it, but I'd also sent it to Alfred Knopf.

which was probably arguably the best place for a new poet to appear. Gray Wolf said they wanted it, but the next day Knopf called me up and they wanted to publish it. And I knew that the reason that the Knopf editor wanted to publish it was that I had just published a piece in the New Yorker that was very celebrated. And I figured that she probably hadn't even read it. She just said, oh, he's a hot writer.

So I told Alfred Knopf I did not want my book to come out with them. And I went with this two-person operation called Grey Wolf 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 Grey Wolf, was quite different from me in a lot of ways. But I really inspired.

respected his integrity. And I said, that's the kind of guy that I can work with. It's now 42 years later, I'm still with Grey Wolf. How about that? Every one of my books with Grey Wolf, every one of my poetry books is still in print. The Knopf, I probably would have gotten a little bit more initial sales on, but my book would have been out of print two years later. And so I did it.

out of intuition, maybe a little bit out of stubbornness and disapproval of this. 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 at 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 versus that. 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, you know, which is a great sacrifice for me. You know, and, you know, my writing was official writing. I knew that was the price that I would have to do. Now, I probably could have written a lot of crappy stuff and everybody would publish everything, you know, because that, but I just said that I had to separate my public career from my literary career. So if I came to you and I said,

Dana, I'm thinking of writing my very first book. And then we begin 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? Well, you know, the thing is I would say, well, what is your book? Tell me about the book you want to write. Have you done like 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. And so the question is, do you want to squander that

Or do you want to maximize that? You know, 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, you know, like emerge like Minerva from the, you know, the skull of Jupiter fully armed. But I think part of it is just talking with somebody and what is the book and this, that and the other. And see what happens then too, is that a lot of times people, you'll have an article that you're turning into a book and

And then you're just cranking it out the previous chapters. And there's a person I know who did what ended up being a very successful book. And the person was very, I don't even want to give the gender of the person away, was very excited about it and sent me this. And this is a person I kind of had mentored a little bit. And I just said, this is just badly written. And so I went over and I took about the first 30 pages and I just was merciless about it.

To the person's credit, they then rewrote it. And I said, now you've got to do the whole manuscript. And I said, do the manuscript and do 200 changes. They called back triumphantly a couple of days later, and they'd spent all the time and had 200 changes. I said, print it out again. Now go through and do another 200 changes. They said, why can't I do this? I said, do it. And they did it.

And the book got better and better, but they, their editor 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. You know, your editor just wants, you know, it's like if you, you know, you do a favor for somebody, as soon as you do it, you know, they need the next favor, you know? So, and they did it. The book got good. The book was very, was very successful. That being said, I think it could have, you know, 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, of making that person had to have this by this date, the copy editor on this date. So I think what I would say is, you know, 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.

And most people, they start going through that, say, "I better wait," or, "I better do a little bit more work," or, "I better do it." 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 signed you and they got to get you in the system on these dates and push 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 marshalling your talent. 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. Yeah.

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? Any real writer has to go to revision with the same openness to experience that they bring to creating the first draft. You know, revision is a creative activity. And 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. 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? Yes, I do. At the beginning of my career was always very dependent on

on one or two people for their feedback. Now, if you remember what I said, for almost seven years, I worked in isolation. I would go to the office during the day. I would come back and write at night. I had my life with my wife, but I was not leading a

a literary life in the conventional social sense. And so what I would do is I would send my poems to usually at any given moment, one or two people 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 help. I like the people that circle things. I like this line, this, that, and the other. Over the course of my whole career,

There's been about half a dozen people that are like this. Not all at the same time. I mean, and that'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. And what do you look for in good collaborators? I look for candor. You know, the hard part of writing a poem, because think about this, you know, 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 things.

with the music. And so, you know, you send it to somebody and just say, you know, 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. And 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 know, you

Learn to revise around it. A lot of times they'll say they don't get this line. So the temptation is to cut the line out. No, sometimes it's you change the context so that line becomes more powerful. But yes, a young writer

should find other writers more or less on the same level whose intelligence and whose honesty you respect and exchange manuscripts. And you need to give them all your intelligence and candor and imagination so that you have an honest transaction with them. And what I've seen is when you're doing this, both of you will get better. Feedback is a heck of a way to improve. Giving other people feedback. Yeah.

One thing I noticed when I read about literary history, very rarely does a single poet just emerge out of nowhere. Little groups of poets, friendships of poets. Find someone who has a catalytic effect on you and you'll make both of you, your writing better. And so I really sought very consciously to create a community of

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, which 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 of it. Nowadays, I've got this conference on the Catholic literary imagination. We had 1,300 people. And so you create a community, and if you create a healthy community, writers are looking for that. 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? When I was working in business,

you know, late at night, about nine o'clock, I would come down to this table and I had, you know, an hour, 90 minutes to write. And the question is, 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 job that was a 10-hour-a-day job. And so I had to find a way of getting from this world to that world. And the way I did it

was that I would take, I was writing prose, I would take the paragraph that I had written the night before and I'd recopy it. And as I recopied it, I'd say, well, you know, this word could be a little different. I began to revise it. And by the time that I finished recopying that paragraph, which might be 20 minutes, I suddenly was like back in the inspiration and I picked up the continuity and then I would write again. And so what it was for me was a way of re-entering

my inspiration, reentering my frame of thought, my argument, my emotional tone at that point, which I think if I'd said, well, that's done, I'm going to write from scratch, I think it would have been more difficult. And the same thing when I was writing a poem, I would just recopy what I had up to that point. And as I recopied it,

I'd start to hear it again. I might play with a couple of words, you know. And then by the time I was down to where I had to write something new, I was in the poem. I had this swing of the music and everything. So, you know, so anyway, it worked for me. So I could do night after night after night because otherwise, you know, you would just stare at the empty page and feel despair.

You said you stopped after 90 minutes. Did you follow a Hemingway stop mid-sentence or how do you think about ending your writing? I wasn't like – I look at the clock and it's quarter 11. I'm going to get up –

you know, early next morning. Because if you really are 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, you know, when it was, when you just sort of said, okay, it's about time, it's about time to end and not feel that was a defeat. See, 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. Because, you know, writers tend to be moody people. And if they aren't already moody,

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've got to find some mechanism for doing this. And not everybody has maybe the same things, but it's the same problem that you're dealing with.

I want to tell you about the only app that I use to read articles, and it's called Reader. So 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.

So whenever I'm on my phone, I'm on my computer, I'll come across a new article. And what I do is 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. So then if I'm writing and I need that perfect quote, that perfect example, it's just right there waiting for me. And because of that, I don't have to dig through old notes or endless browser tabs anymore. And that means that I can focus on writing.

Reader is the sponsor of today's episode. And look, I gotta love a product in order to promote it. And I can tell you that I use Reader every single day. So this is what I did. I called up the CEO and I said, "Yo, will you give How I Write Listeners 60 days free?" And he said, "Sure." They gotta sign up though at readwise.io/davidperel. And there's a link in the description below. All right, back to the episode.

Yeah, 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. So a predator coming down on it would be frightened and would go away. I was moved by just the beauty of it, the fragility of it, and the fact that I see it

Only a few times and it's always late at night when no one else is around enough on a foggy evening And so I began to write a poem so I I jotted down You know seven lines only the first two words appear in the final poem which is pardon me and so then This is November 13th a week later

I finally had a moment's peace and I begin to write this and, you know, and it goes, pardon me, moth. I had to learn your name because one of the things that, that struck me is I couldn't remember the technical name of the moth, but I'd seen it before. And so I was like stumbling on somebody whose name you didn't remember. So I have this conversation with a moth. It's still, I mean, it's, you can just tell it's just disorganized. It's, it's lines. And I went through 10 lines.

Is this all in the same night? Well, the first three pages are the next day. 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 broad wings marked with two ferocious eyes, But your fierce gaze proved beauty in disguise, A dusty sweetness under fictive eyes, 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? So it's just a moment of kind of wonder at night when I see the beauty of something and I realize it's big, but it's fragile. And it reminds me of myself in a way. So I go through...

You know, all these things that I'm trying to do and I'm working with the rhyme scheme. But what's interesting is you only realized that around draft four that you're going to do a rhyme scheme. Did I hear you right? I knew that I had a kind of thing. So what I try to do is I try to write the language and I ask myself, and this sounds odd, people think that you impose a form, which you don't. I write the language and I say, what does this poem mean?

want to sound like? What do the words that are coming to me want to sound like? So I go through these, you know, 10 of these, you know, handwritten drafts, and then I gradually say, "Okay, I kind of know what the poem sounds like and looks like now." Two months later, I take it and I bring it to the computer. And that's a very big moment.

And I think people cheat themselves that don't do this because as soon as you put it on the computer, you go, wow, this looks and sounds differently from what I thought it was. And it gives you this moment of objectivity. And so then I begin doing it and then it happens fairly rapidly. Within the next week, you know, I take it through another, you know, 10 drafts and I keep playing with the rhyme scheme. And then gradually, you know, a week later,

I have what is almost this Finnish poem. I'm calling it Apology to a Luna Moth because it's a luna moth. Terrible title. Because the poem is, it is an apology. I'm talking to an animal which can't talk back. And so it's a kind of fictive, as they say, conversation. Terrible title and

Usually a good, it's often good to begin a poem with a version of its first line. So it becomes, pardon me, pilgrim.

And so, "Pardon Me, Pilgrim" is a pretty odd way to begin a poem where you're talking to an insect. But it's set, the title does it, then you hear it again in the first line. So the idea that this mysterious nocturnal animal is a pilgrim becomes established. By then, pretty much every line is rhymed. I've got some lines rhymed four times. It's a very intensely rhymed poem, you know, and it's finished. And so, "Pardon Me, Pilgrim,"

To a luna moth. When you're trying to do the rhyme scheme, I'm imagining 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? I occasionally use a thesaurus. What I do is I say the lines aloud. And so 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. And I like the effect of that. I like the fact 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 10 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. When there's

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, you know, I feel as if the world has revealed one of its secrets to me. And I'm grateful. If I have any advice at all to talk to a

to people that want to be real writers, I would say the thing you should try to do in your writing is to be grateful.

for being alive, just to be suffused with gratitude at what is given you. And 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.

There's a real theme over the time we've spent together of seeing the miraculous in the mundane and being, you're really in tune with where you live and the rhythms and the seasons and the animals and just looking a little bit deeper than most people would. Everything I'm saying for most writers will be bad advice. But for me, my experience of my daily life is

almost always in the country, but even in the city is metaphysical, which is to say, I experienced two worlds at once. I experienced 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. I mean, because it is a fundamental belief for anyone who's religious that there's the temporal, the eternal, the physical, the spiritual. But I think it's a kind of an alertness. After having lost my son...

I realized something that you don't realize as a child. You don't realize as an adolescent. You don't realize as a young adult, which is most people go through life bearing terrible sorrows, terrible losses. And to everyone's credit, they get on with it. They get on with their lives. But there's 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

And 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. I mean, I know that certain political people, you know, make a ritual of this. But in individual and social reactions, you know, we, for very good reasons, you know, we maintain our calm. We get on with our lives. But for these people, it created these...

strange moments of intimacy with other people in which they talked about things that they could not have shared with me under normal circumstances. And so, and 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, as it were, survivors, survivors of the tragedies or the hardships of their own life. And there is a

something sad about that, but there's also something very noble about that. So anyway, I think that 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. That's a good answer. You talk about people...

walking into your office and what did the business world teach you about writing and how that kind of writing is different from the poetry that you aspire to? Well, when I tell writers or they ask me about the fact that you spent 15 years in the corporate world and you're working 10 hours a day, you're traveling all the time, that must have been terrible. And I, in retrospect, realize it was very difficult

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, listening to how they told stories, seeing what they found interesting, what they didn't. And 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, you know, teaching poetry.

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 poem that is metrical. I mean, I guess I'm educated enough to do these podcasts and I think of

poems as being rhymes and meter, and I don't really know how else to read a poem. When I think of a poem, I think of rhyme schemes. That's a prejudice that you share with the great mass of humanity. Yeah. Well, I wrote a poem that became very controversial, and it's called Cruising with the Beach Boys. And it's just about being in a car, hearing an old Beach Boys song, and thinking about when I first heard it. It

it was immediately popular, but it was immediately attacked, you know, for all these reasons. But I think the reason it was attacked by so many people is that it just bothered them that I was writing this poem and 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. And 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 well 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 of the music and it's You were saying this earlier. It's pre intellectual. It just hits your soul. It hits your body and you're like I like this and and

A lot of the poetry that I read, which isn't much because I don't really like it, that feels more academic, I don't feel that at all. I actually feel nothing. The only thing that gets activated is my brain. Well, that's because I think for the most part, poetry should be heard.

and not read silently. When you read silently after you've heard it, you know, as a way of refreshing the musical memory. When I was at Harvard, which was a wonderful school, brilliant professors there, you know, 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, that the average person would never go back to reading poetry. It was gone. It was democratic. Thirdly, that 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.

And then the fourth one was really quite interesting. And this was honestly dogma that the African-American writers would never use rhyme and meter again because

It was European and they had been liberated from, you know, the manacles of this European art form. Now, 10 years later, you know, you got Kool Herc in South Bronx and nobody told him he's not supposed to use rhyme and meter. He invents, as it were, or he first publicizes hip hop and rap within 10 years is the most popular form of recorded sound everywhere in the world. And so, you know, 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 able 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. 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. And suddenly long distance phone rates becoming affordable

people don't write letters so much anymore. Right. You know, having radio stations that were not just three radio stations, but a hundred radio stations. Then suddenly you have this thing called the internet, which is first just print, but then suddenly, you know, 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, you know, 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. And so I saw that happening. And 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...

you know, 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, you know, kind of...

of technology. Now, luckily, one of my sons was a filmmaker. And 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, "You know, these lectures that you gave are really interesting. Can we film some of those?" And we bring him into the new medium. But I said, "Well, I don't really want to just be a talking head. Let's integrate visuals into it, integrate these other things." And 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. And 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 now. For writers who do want to thrive in the digital culture, how should they be thinking about the strategy of their work differently? Well, I think that anybody who wants to be a serious writer now

has to be polymathic. If you go back to the Renaissance, you go, 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. Right.

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 is

needs to be interrelated. And 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, uh,

filmed appearances. He does that in the books, pages of books, you know, and he does that in dialogues and things like this. He even does that in terms of training people, you know, who are working with him to, you know, carry on, you know, 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. They're...

Robert Frost can do it, and T.S. Eliot can sort of more or less do it. But the other ones, they never occurred to them that they would be speaking to a live audience. 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. Rhetoric was taught and it was really the art of public speaking to persuade listeners or the art of writing to persuade the reader. I think that that is extremely important. Now, what was used in rhetoric, one of the things that was used in rhetoric was poetry.

You know, they would have you recite, memorize and recite poems so that you understood how to speak to an audience and not only convey words, but to convey emotions. And so I think that we live in a rhetorical universe because we're actually much more like the Greeks and Romans. We have writing, but most of the persuasion is done through speech. And so when you look at YouTube and, you know, everybody's

Every day I listen to three or four people who have relatively highly specialized broadcasts on classical music, on theology, on politics, on literature, on YouTube. And the people who are good, who have a kind of rhetorical position. And they persuade me to listen and accept their point of view. You know, those people would not have been writing an essay every day.

You know, they've embodied, in a sense, their personality and their message and their expertise on a subject matter. So 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. 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 and persuade them to listen to an agency, which in many cases they disapproved of.

about what we were doing, why it was good, and why they should support us. And you get to be pretty good at that rhetoric or you just...

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. And how do you do that? How do you frame and structure those arguments so that they are persuasive using rhetoric? Well, it's like the old joke. There's a tourist, he's walking on the streets of Manhattan and he's got these two concert tickets and he's lost. And

And he comes up to this person and says, "How do I get to Carnegie Hall?" And the person says, "Practice, practice, practice." So, I mean, there is no substitute in life for hard work. I mean, if you want to have a ripped physique, you got to work out. If you want to play an instrument, you have to practice. If you want to be a good writer,

a good speaker, you have to read, you have to write, you have to rewrite. And

You have to do all of those things in a kind of social context. You know, you have to, in a sense, write so that people understand you, which means to get to be in a feedback loop with your audience. Now, your first audience may just be your friends or maybe a very small readership, but, you know, you develop that and then you, you know, it's like a boxer. You know, 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. And it's the same thing. Is it,

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 there probably Truman Capote 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. But 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.

But 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? And make that a way that you work. I mean, if you're writing a note to your wife or your husband,

Make it witty. Just work it in. So actually work on it so your whole relationship to language is mastery.

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? I have. 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. Poetry is...

is related to magic. If you go back to the ancient world, like in Latin, the word for poem is carmen. But carmen means a poem, it means a magic spell, it means a prophecy, and it means a song. Whoa. So you go back to the ancient world, there's this sense that what a poem is is a magic spell which enchants

the listener. And this is actually the title essay of my most recent book called Poetry as Enchantment. You know, we experience this in the rock world, in popular music. You know, Madonna comes out, Lady Gaga comes out, and they enchant people.

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, begins to tap their feet, sometimes begins to sing along. And so people pay $200 for a ticket to be enchanted by the spell of an artist. What a poem does is to create an enchantment, to create a kind of verbal magical spell. A magical spell are 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 know, 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, you know? And so I think...

That love poetry, more than any kind of poetry, needs a tune. So I've always written love poems, and I just try to create a spell where they can feel what I feel. Who's done a good job of this, who you admire? My favorite love poet in the language is probably John Donne.

John Donne was a guy who 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 he became the most famous preacher in England, which is sort of like being the number one Hollywood star today. I mean, it was a position people would crowd into the St. Paul's to hear these sermons, and the sermons are tremendous. But he invented a kind of love poem that I adore.

And he understood that the best way to charm a girl is often to be funny. And he would create this wildly comic argument that he would pursue with absolute logic. I mean, there's a very famous one people study called The Flea. And he's saying, well, why do you give to the flea

what you won't give to me. You know, the flea bites you and you mingle your blood, you know, and what I want, you know, he really, he wants to have sex with the girl, but you know, the flea has already bit him and bit her. So their bloods are mingled. So they're as good as married. And so why can't they enjoy the, as it were, the fruits of marriage. So I love the notion of a love poem that has a salacious desire, but it's expressed through kind of comic logic. I love Tennyson's love poems, you know, which tend to be

you know, kind of unhappy and melancholy. And I was always an unhappy and melancholy lover. So, you know, 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.

And it's just this wonderful sonorous thing. So Tennyson is just writing with saying, I'm going to make the music of my, uh,

words be so sensuous that you fall in love with. I love W.H. Auden, who deals with love's paradox. And so anyway, I find Auden really wonderful. Robert Graves is another one who I find good. But I think it seems to me that you go all the way back to the ancient world and you have this notion of these love poems. And I courted my own wife

by reciting poems by myself and others, by writing her poems. Well, have you written a love poem that you're proud of? Yes. And I hope my pride is justified, but I was putting together my selected poems. This is called 99 Poems, and it's 40 years of work. And when I was putting the book together, it seemed to me that I should end it

with a love poem to my wife. And 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. And 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.

your decision to be a Catholic writer and how the style of an almost biblical style has infused into your work. And I went back and I read Prayer at Winter Solstice. Yes.

And the end goes like this: And the language there is very biblical.

That poem is a poem that probably people who are not Christian or Catholic won't understand because that poem is based on something that I did not believe, I think, when I was a kid. But everything that is given to you in life, every suffering, every pain, every loss,

that if you can accept, eventually becomes a kind of blessing. My son's death transformed me into a kinder, more patient and empathetic person than I was before. When I was young, I was successful at everything I did. I didn't appreciate

I think the sorrows, the difficulties that most people had. Like, ah, if they just worked harder, if they did this, they'd succeed. It humbled me. And so what that poem is, is really 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 in an overt way as a Catholic through much of my career because I was writing about things. I was participating in the mainstream literary world. My Catholicism was there, as it were, under the surface. My values were there. But it was about 15 years

maybe almost 20 years ago, I realized that the culture I was in, the literary, the academic, the intellectual culture had become more and more anti-Christian and anti-Catholic. I mean, I would just see these attacks consistently across, you know, certain publications, every issue about it. And I said, well,

If this is what I believe, I have to step forward. And I knew that that would alienate me among many people who were literary experts.

But they were already mad at me because I did all of these things such as give bad reviews to powerful people and things. I was not playing the rules of the New York Literary Game. And so I began to write poems that I wouldn't have written otherwise. And then I wrote an essay called The Catholic Writer Today. Mm-hmm.

that essentially became a kind of international statement. People all over the world began to respond to it. You know, what happens is interesting because if you take something that's forbidden or that's under attack and you articulate why you think that's wrong, it gives other people the courage to step forward. And so one of the things that I did with this is I created a Catholic writers' conference, invited only people I thought were

who were writers of the highest quality, who were good people of fine, fine character, who were persuasive public speakers. And 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 too. You welcome the man, you don't charge a... People thought I was nuts. You got to charge a fee, you're going to go. And I said, if it's the right idea...

people will step forward and pay for it for us. And indeed they did. And suddenly they're in this group and they realize, you know, I'm not crazy. I mean, there's all these smart, intelligent people that share my beliefs. And I

this community was created. And I had done it because one of the foundational books for me in my life is St. Augustine's City of God. And it's a long, complicated book, but at the core of this, Augustine is writing this book after the vandals have come and destroyed Rome. They've looted it, they've stripped it, they've burned part of it down. And people are going, oh my God, the world is ending because Rome has fallen.

And 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. And this struck me years ago.

As a way of organizing, as it were, my social life,

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, gee, the rules by which the outer world is regulated are not in effect here. And here we treat each other as equals. We respect each other. We're dedicated to truth. We're dedicated to those things which, as it were, call forth our best self. And so immediately doing it

at USC with these people, people said, I want to do this at my campus. I want to do this. And so we've done it at Fordham. We've done it at, uh, uh,

Loyola, Chicago, then at the University of Dallas. And this last fall, we did it at Notre Dame. Each one is bigger than the one before. We have 1,300 registered people at Notre Dame. You see a movement. And what happens is people begin to create reading groups, magazines, presses, and create the infrastructure. Because what I think we have to do in the United States is we have to create

a counter culture. 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. And 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. And 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. And 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.

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? And how does that apply to infusing poetry with a sense of emotion? Well, as a poet, to me, 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, by the way. I mean, if you ask a Frenchman or an Italian about biblical language, they don't really have it so much because they were using the Latin more than they were the vernacular. But we had this incredible event in the Protestant Reformation

They decided to, at the period where English was most magnificently written, it was Shakespeare's era, to translate the Bible again into English. And so you have this extraordinary translation of the Bible. I know some Christians say, no, I want, you know, it's too formal, this, that, and the other. 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 take different translations, but we have a foundational translation in English, which for several hundred years, most people heard many times a day.

And so it began to form the whole way that people heard English as an elevated language. Well, 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. And it almost feels like a gradient in order to get there. Yeah, well, you...

I like to write as I like to start something that interests you. Then I like to take a turn that surprises you. Then if the poem is long, I'll do it again. And so 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.

Can you tell me about your commonplace book? 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. And so I've filled three or four of them in my life. This one, I just had the beginning. It 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. 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 because most

things are never meant, which is to say the things that happen are often unintended consequences. But I, you know, I fill it up and I filled another one up here. This is one that I actually was finding various things that I liked and I was marking them, but this goes from 1986 in New York to 2016 in Los Angeles, you know, and it's just, you know,

probably, you know, a thousand little quotations in here. And here's the one I'm working on now. And I look back and I, you know, I just see, like on this page, I've got Chekhov, Stendhal, Nietzsche, Shakespeare. It's a wonderful thing by the extraordinarily wise by George Balanchine. He goes, God creates, I assemble. Wow. And that's actually, I think, a profound notion of art, which is that, you know, artists, we don't create. Right.

There's creation.

and we respond and we imitate creation and we take elements of creation and we assemble them. And that's why the work resonates because, you know, what do we share? We all share reality. Our artist works with the things of reality to create something that can communicate. But it was, you know, Balanchine said that in four words, God creates, I assemble. He takes the human body, he takes motions, he takes the laws of gravity and...

and thermodynamics. And out of that, you know, he created the New York City Ballet. Really the best choreography ever done. Is that commonplace book just a list of good quotes? This is...

a way of me preserving things that I find insightful and wise. So you could say they're good quotes, but they're things that when they 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 goes, "I had become to myself

a place of unhappiness in which I could not bear to be, but I could not escape from myself. And I read that, you know, I said, you know, Augustine is describing what my life was like at a certain point in my life. I was unhappy, but I couldn't escape from my own unhappiness because I was defining my world as myself. And I think those of us who are Christian Christians

understand that we, I think we've got to be really frank about it, 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, the happiness is to say 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 meaningful. 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. 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 where you can read a quote and have that whole chain of thought from presumably most of the quotes that are in there. Yeah. Well, the thing is that if you read a lot, if you live a lot, you just forget a lot of things. Yeah. And so the question is, 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. You know, think about this. There's two kinds of communicating meaning. You can have a kind of intellectual meaning that's a laser, you know, cuts right to the point. Or you can radiate meanings in different directions. And I feel as a poet,

I'm trying to radiate. As a prose writer, I'm trying to be laser focused. And it's two different kinds of writing, but they're both based on light, on illumination, on reaching people. 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. Okay. Baudelaire.

Baudelaire is the greatest poet of having fucked up your life. I mean, 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 kind of notion that you're just heading downhill and you can't stop it at times. And Baudelaire turns that into the subject of his poetry. So it's the great...

great song of failure. Marshall McLuhan. Marshall McLuhan was this religious visionary who thought he was a technological expert. And he understood before anybody else did that the media that we use have spiritual dimensions that we experience, but we don't explain. So he was very famous then for

20, 30 years, everybody simply mocked Marshall McLuhan. Nobody read him. He was a subject. Then suddenly we find ourselves at the beginning of the 21st century and we go, you know, this is exactly what McLuhan told us was going to happen. I think he's a visionary technologist, you know, probably in American history, the greatest one that ever lived. You know, he was never selling you a product except for Marshall McLuhan. And I think most of his wacky

proved to be true. Bob Dylan. I love Bob Dylan. When Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize, writers went nuts because somehow it was like he was poaching on their territory. And the Swedes, I'm sure, chose Bob Dylan for all the wrong reasons. And

And he humiliated them. But, you know, he's a poet. When you listen to Dylan, he's borrowed all the tunes. It's the lyrics, you know, that are there. So I think Bob Dylan, he changed the nature of pop music. He changed the nature of American folk song, of the American rock song. And he gave us the images to understand the kind of weird industrial urban environment that we find ourselves. How about the Beatles?

I love the Beatles. I wouldn't make great intellectual defense of the Beatles, but I love their songs. And I think it's interesting that they were never as good separately as they were together. And 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. The speeches of Martin Luther King. Martin Luther King...

may have been the last great political speaker in the United States. And 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 know, you get beyond him and people become partisan, they become quibbling. But Martin Luther King calls us all to a kind of common Christian decency. Country music. 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. Yeah.

But anyway, it's something I listen to on the radio, but I don't buy albums. John Steinbeck. 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 Grapes of Wrath's 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. John Cheever.

I love John Cheever, who gets so little respect. John Cheever, for people who don't know him, is the person who published more stories in The New Yorker than anyone else. And they tend to be little stories of middle-class life, either in Manhattan or the suburbs.

But when I read John Cheever, I was in high school and I had no idea that there was any place in the United States that 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.

And then I came back, you know, I moved to New York where I lived 20 years and I lived in Cheever country. All these people were living lives exactly out of a John Cheever story. And I realized more than ever, he wasn't a realist. He was a fabulist. And he has written some of the most beautiful paragraphs I've ever read. I've,

taken his paragraphs and I've looked at them word by word and say, how does he do this all in 20 lines? What did you learn by doing that? I've learned the importance of the evocative detail. How you can take something and then have a single sentence and

that is just overwhelming. There's a story of his. He used to read it called The Death of Justina. And it's a John Cheever New Yorker story because it's about Aunt Justina comes to your house and dies. But because of zoning difficulties, you can't get anybody to pick up the body. So every night, you know, Aunt Justina is still, you know, 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 story

social satire of suburban regulations but it's 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 religious vision he has this dream it starts off with saying on sunday i gave up tobacco uh

and alcohol. Bereft of these small pleasures, I watched the sunrise with the horror that the earliest people must have done of darkness descending on the world from which you would never recover. And he goes through these things and it's like a little detail about the house and there's this cosmic thing and it's this kind of manipulation. But like the fact that he has this dream where

You're in a supermarket where everything is just white and unwrapped. You only have these shapes that you can vaguely do it. 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. All right, I got more for you. This is great. Tarantino. 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, makes you interested in it. I think 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

And I think he ends up with a film that's a wonderful film. Tolkien. 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 kind of 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. And 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, great loss. And interestingly, you know, comes out of it

morally strengthened and aware in a way that he wasn't. So, I mean, you know, it is the English version of war and peace. You know, Frodo, you know, is Pierre. Well, now you got me thinking about Russian literature. Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky is a great...

kind of crazy novelist in a way. I mean, and 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, you know, the, you know,

my top 10 great novels, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky would both be on it. I think Anna Karenina is the greatest novel ever written. I think 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 rein in sufficiently. But

But he's one of the great, great writers of the Western tradition, period. 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 would? When I read, I don't take notes. I hate to take notes when I'm reading because it interrupts the thing of the book. But I'm a serious reader. There's a few things that I haven't read, but I've spent...

you know, my life reading, you know, reading books and it tried to read as many of the great novels as possible. And then I try to reread them, uh, you know, and, uh, when you reread them, you're often, you know, cause it's been 20, 30 years since you first read them. It's a different book, but I, the novel to me is the literary form, uh,

that I'm most immersed in. I read novels as a kid. 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. I think- What isn't being taught or 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 and 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 it

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 a superior mind of

You know, killing a nasty old pawnbroker. Going through that, there's another character, Slav Rogan, who's actually the most interesting character in this kind of seductor, you know, 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.

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. So 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 Furence, The Madness of Hercules. And Hercules goes into the underworld and when he comes out, he's been contaminated by it. And he goes mad and he kills his family. And I think there's a real wisdom behind

that, you know, Euripides, who wrote the first version, and Seneca, who wrote the latter version of this, 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. Is this the story of the knowledge of the tree of good and evil? That there are certain kinds of knowledge that are basically a deal with the devil? That yes, you get knowledge, but it's not

Not the way. 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 what's the first thing that happens?

When they get this knowledge, they become ashamed of their bodies. Right, put the fig leaves on. And I think implicitly, sex goes from this joyful, natural function to something they realize they can misuse. 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. In order for Aeneas to do this, he has to have the golden bow.

which becomes the title of this great mythological thing that's looking at universal mythology that Sir James Fraser writes. But he has to have, as it were, divine protection. And the thing that

is the violation that Hercules does. Is he going to hell as his last labor? Because he has to bring up Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guards the underworld. And 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, a division between the gods above and the gods below, the sky gods and the demons, each is supposed to stay in their realm. And 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 does Tolkien's things take place? On myths.

on Middle Earth, hell below, heaven above. This is the realm of mortals. And Middle Earth is what? It's a battleground. Last question. I want to talk about what you've learned from operas about building great characters. Those are specific kind of character, but what have you learned? Well, you know, opera is a very strange medium because it is so interesting

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, which is La Boheme, is four scenes.

And 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,

And 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. That 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, which is I had to write something that was simple enough that the composer could take it and add everything the composer wanted

needed to do and give them room so if you have it too tightly you know the composer can't get through it and i see the really bad libretti this way you know 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 a song so that's the first thing so 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. So I have, right for the composer, I have to write for the audience. It has to be simple enough that if they miss a word, they can still get the gist of it. Okay, 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. That they know what the character wants, where the characters come from. And so I have to give words that the singer can literally, I mean, literally embody. So...

As far as character is concerned, what makes a good character in opera and how is that different from a novel? 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.

And so 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. So the novel is essentially ironic. It has an outer thing and then whatever is going on, you know, two meanings at once. Opera works very differently. You know, how do we know the inner life of a singer? They sing it to you.

And the music carries you through. So you have a plot, but the plot exists maybe five minutes or 10 minutes of music.

you know, plot and scene setting and everything else. And then suddenly there's a laser that comes out of you there who goes from her inner life to yours. And that's what people do. They operate. They are riveted by suddenly participating in the inner life of a character in great joy and great pain and great confusion. So there's a kind of hypnotic transference that goes on that is intensive and

that is lyrical and is holistic. So when you're writing opera, you're trying to write moments of great emotion in a way which drags, doesn't drag, that entrances the audience to join. And then walk me through a character from a novel that you wrote

really think the author nailed and show me how there's the difference between the internal and the external. Anna Karenina, greatest hero, whatever. You know, you meet her as a young woman, you see everything that's ever happened to you, you see what she thinks, then she resolves this and she changes her mind about that and she does this and she gets, falls into, she's married but flies a love affair and he has, 800 pages later, she jumps in front of a train.

And you're with her every moment. La Traviata, you know, which is about Violetta, who's a courtesan. So it's, you know, she's essentially a kind of high-class prostitute. The first act of La Traviata, I don't know, it's probably 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. You've been inside of her confusion. You've been inside of all the dilemmas that she does. And she never lets you go. And she ends up dying of tuberculosis in the last act. But there's a sudden transference. And you don't have all the careful things. The music has to take you 200 pages long.

into what a novel's text would be. Opera tells a story in the way that tragedy tells a story that rather than, you know, be Homer and be in 24 books, you know, it takes place in about an hour. And so 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. And what people go for, it is not the connective tissue. It's not the, oh, I love

La Traviata because of the social backstory. No, you love it because of these moments. And so opera, you do it through melody, through drama. And that's why in opera, like all poetic forms, I can take an aria

you know, out of the opera and I can 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, you know, I say, oh, 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? Is this person, you know, you can't make any sense out of it because it's part of a continuity. Opera,

Like poetry is wonderfully acceptable. I can, you know, I can take, you know, a line from Shakespeare. I can take it out of context and you'll feel the power.

Sweet are the uses of adversity. This is our life, except 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. You don't know why they're saying it, but you say, okay. It's so beautiful. It's this vision that life is good, that the world is good. And in fact, you're doing Anna Cremetta a disservice if you take

five pages out of context and say, this is Anna Karenina. It isn't Anna Karenina. Anna Karenina is this great, you know, 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. And I, it's actually the very people that are on the cover of this. There's this great production. This is of Weep, Shudder, Die. Yeah, of La Boheme by Opera Australia that was directed by

by this guy who then became a famous filmmaker, Baz Luhrmann, Moulin Rouge, Romeo and Juliet. And he does this. And I just tell people, here's a link, watch this for 11 minutes. And they all come back, I got to have more of this. Because it's where Mimi, this seamstress, meets Rodolfo, this poet. And 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. And 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, you know, they're giving you a stage play, you know, they're not lyric. And so,

I think that, you know, for any writer, understand the...

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 and give it to them? It doesn't mean to cheapen it or anything else, but to give them the best possible version of that experience. And the big lesson I've taken from this interview is just the tremendous amount of study that you've put into that. I mean, going all the way back to the beginning of just breaking down the poems and

That's going to be one of the big things I take away. And the other thing about how much I talk. That was fun. Thank you. My pleasure.