The Deepest Conversation You'll Ever Hear About Writing — Dana Gioia

A three-hour conversation with David Perell on the How I Write podcast, and the fullest self-portrait of Gioia’s practice on record. He composes by saying lines aloud — reciting a moth quatrain born at 12:30 at night in the fog — and argues that being transfixed by a moment of your own life ‘is what art is all about.’ The centerpiece is his account of how poetry lost its audience: the New Critics figured out how to analyze poems correctly, ‘and it killed the audience,’ replacing recitation with visual analysis of the dead silent page. His own pedagogy inverts it — experience, perform, memorize, and only then analyze — and he describes students who memorized poems as ‘awakening themselves to their own human capacity.’