Dana Gioia: belief

Transcript context

…As you must know in the main Bishop biography, it suggested she was not such a popular professor at Harvard, yet you loved studying with her. What accounts for that difference in perspective? I think actually, it was my memoir that really brought this to light because nobody wanted to take her classes. She was not popular, she was not prestigious and Harvard students are absolute barometers of prestige. They can feel it and they gravitate towards it. I liked her, she was a bad teacher, there’s no question about that, she was a bad teacher, but you were in a room with a great poet who had no pretensions at all. She says, “I am a bad teacher,” and you would just talk about poems. She would look at them, you’d feel material, and there is no substitute for a young artist to the experience of being in the presence of a master. My brother Ted, who’s a famous historian jazz critic, he played piano with Stan Getz. Stan was a very difficult guy but he was one of the great jazz geniuses in the last half-century, and just seeing how Getz worked, how Getz performed, how Getz conceived of things was like a university degree. The same thing for me was Bishop and Robert Fitzgerald. I was with two of the greatest Craftsman poets of their generation sometimes twice a week. It was transformative to me much better than an organized lecturer. Is memorizing poetry a good way to learn it?…

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