Dana Gioia: What is Poetry?

Dana Gioia
Poet; Former Chmn, National Endowment of the Arts

Question: What is poetry?

Dana Gioia: Well poetry is humanity’s answer to mortality. I mean if you had to talk about what poetry is about – what all poetry is about – it’s about time and mortality; that we live these finite existences through the world. Because the world, every year, renews itself in spring. And we see this kind of cyclical aspect of natural life. And yet our own lives are linear and finite. And it makes, in a sense, something enormously precious. If we were gods, if we were eternal, we would not need poetry. We would not need the arts. We would have existence unchallenged, unlimited. But because we’re mortal – because we face death – we have to in a sense constantly stop and understand our lives in different ways.

- 7/6/07, http://bigthink.com/