Dana Gioia on Poetry, Death and Mortality

EconTalk

Library of Economics and Liberty

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 17 April 2023

⏱️ 59 minutes

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Summary

When he was a child, poet Dana Gioia's mother would come home from a long day of work and recite poems while she cleaned. It was a way, he realized later, for her to express the feelings she didn't want to describe directly, and to vent her sorrows without burdening her son. This, he believes, is what makes poetry so compelling: It's the secret language of emotions, a bit of magic that gets us through the day. Listen as Gioia speaks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about poems, mortality, and loved ones who died too young. Gioia also explains the fundamental role of allusions in poems, and how--if they’re really good--they have the power to summon the dead.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics
0:07.0	and Liberty.
0:08.0	I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover
0:13.0	Institution.
0:14.0	Go to econtalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode and find links down
0:18.6	the information related to today's conversation.
0:21.6	You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006.
0:26.8	Our email address is mail at econtalk.org.
0:30.2	We'd love to hear from you.
0:37.8	Today is March 9, 2023 and my guest is the poet, Dana Joya.
0:43.3	He was last year in February of 2021, talking about his book studying with Miss Bishop Dana.
0:49.9	Welcome back to econtalk.
0:51.2	Good to be back.
0:54.0	Our topic for today is death, mortality and impermanence.
0:58.6	We're going to look at those topics using a couple of poems from your new collection of poetry
1:03.6	meet me at the lighthouse and I'm sure we're going to get into some other topics along
1:08.6	the way.
1:09.6	Let's start with meet me at the lighthouse.
1:13.1	That is the book but it's also named after one of the poems and I'd like you to read it
1:20.2	and we'll talk about it.
1:22.9	Let me show you this is a picture actually of the entrance of the lighthouse.
1:29.6	It is an actual nightclub, a rather shabby one that's in Hermos of Beach, California,
	...

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