Dana Gioia: belief

Transcript context

…Why did they stop appearing? Harry Potter is a long book or the series of them is long, you put them all together. Lord of the Rings, the three volumes, they’re fairly long. Why aren’t poems long anymore? Well, it’s interesting. In the modern movement, and I’m talking about maybe 1914 to the Second World War, there was a huge transformation in all the arts, music, sculpture, painting, literature, and art became, in every form, more abstract, more conceptual, more formal, not in a sense of rhyme and meter or whatever but in terms of these structural designs. As part of that, there was a general bias against narrative. Putting a story in was somehow condescending to a stupid audience but the fact is, humanity needs stories. People lead their individual life as a story. One of the reasons you need lots of stories is that in every life, your story comes to an impasse. You have to, in a sense, revise the narrative of your own life, and what fiction does, what poetry does, what narrative does is give you a wealth of narrative possibilities so you can recognize that no matter how bad your life is right now, that there’s an escape, there’s a rescue, there might even, in the Greek sense, be a deus ex machina, an intervention which saves you. I believe that the suicide epidemic in the United States, the opioid epidemic in the United States, especially among young people, is among people who cannot, in a sense, get control of the stories of their own lives. The deprivation of narrative of stories, the cheapening of narratives in our mass culture, I think has had tremendous human cost, both in the loss of creativity, loss of productivity, and also, at its worst in terms of suicide, drug use, and death. Is rap music, simply the new poetry? It’s very popular. It is poetic in some broader notion of the term.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.