THE PRESIDENT AND THE ARTS

10.27.08

PAGE 37

TOM PUTNAM: Good afternoon. I’m Tom Putnam, Director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. On behalf of John Shattuck, CEO of the Kennedy Library Foundation, and all of my Library colleagues, I welcome you to tonight’s special forum. In his book, Can Poetry Matter?, our guest speaker this evening quotes Walt Whitman, “To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too.” So we sincerely express our appreciation to all of you for coming.

Let me also thank our generous underwriters beginning with lead sponsor, Bank of America, the Lowell Institute, Boston Capital, the Corcoran Jennison Companies, The Boston Foundation and our media sponsors The Boston Globe, NECN, and WBUR, which broadcasts Kennedy Library Forums on Sunday evenings.

We gather this evening in the spirit of President and Mrs. Kennedy’s efforts during their years in the White House to spark a revival in American arts and culture and are honored to have with us a man who has done more than any other in recent memory to advance that cause, Dana Gioia, the ninth Chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts. After the cultural wars of the 1990s, Dana Gioia has been heralded as the man who saved the national endowment, in recognition of his successful efforts to strengthen a national consensus in favor of public funding for the arts. And for that Mr. Gioia, we all thank you. [Applause]

This important achievement is perhaps a tribute to his own fascinating life story, the son of a working class family in Los Angeles with Italian and Mexican roots. As a boy he escaped most afternoons to his local public library, “a ruinous path,” he writes, that ultimately led him to break the hearts of both his sainted parents by becoming a poet. The first in his family to attend college, he earned degrees from Stanford and Harvard Universities. For 15 years he worked as a business executive, eventually becoming a vice president of General Foods, while writing poetry on the weekends and establishing himself as a major literary figure.

When asked once to give advice to young, aspiring poets he recommended, quote, “Spending your twenties, lonely, broke and unhappy in love. It worked for me.” The author of numerous prize winning collections of poetry and criticism, his 1991 volume, Can Poetry Matter? is credited with helping to help revive the role of poetry in American public culture. His anthologies of short fiction and stories include the works of Ernest Hemmingway, whose papers I should note are housed here at the Kennedy Library -- another of Jacqueline Kennedy’s enduring gifts to our nation. Mr. Gioia recently announced his decision to leave the NEA in January, in part to have more time to write poetry, describing his current post as the most interesting job he’s ever had, but also suggesting that a poet needs the luxury of a little boredom.

Our moderator this evening, Sven Birkerts, is the author of numerous books, including Reading Life, Readings and a memoir, My Sky Blue Trades. He currently teaches at Harvard University and Bennington College and is the editor of the literary magazine Agni. I most appreciated his description in The Gutenberg Elegies of himself as, quote, “An unregenerate reader who still believes that language, not technology, is the true evolutionary miracle.” Or more simply as, quote, “A dreamy fellow who most often has an open book on his lap.”

To set the stage for tonight’s conversation, let’s watch a few excerpts of President Kennedy’s speech at the dedication of the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College, in which he speaks of Frost and on the role of the artist in a free society. There are some blips in the tape from when the footage was first shot in October of 1963. It runs about five minutes.

[Video clip]

So please join me now in welcoming Dana Gioia to the Kennedy Library. Following his opening remarks, he will be joined by Sven Birkerts. [Applause]

DANA GIOIA: Good evening. Having spent six years in Washington, I’ve grown deeply suspicious of public addresses by public officials. In most of the ones that I attend are people who read remarks written by someone else, to people they don’t know, about topics neither of them particularly care about. And so what I wanted to do tonight, before I enter my colloquy with the estimable Sven Birkerts, is to talk to you in very broad terms about some of the important things that I’ve noticed about American culture and its relation to politics and political thought since I’ve been in Washington.

This is not a topic I talk about. I can give you a very witty, well-paced speech on arts funding, on the strategies of the NEA, but we don’t want to talk about that tonight. What I would like to do is to give you a talk that you are unlikely to hear anywhere else, probably for good reason. And if I really want to make it unlike a talk that you are going to hear elsewhere in the public, basically this presidential library, why not begin with a poem?

This is a poem I often think about when I’m in Washington. I’m sure you all know it. It’s from Shakespeare’s As You Like It. It is spoken by the Duke Senior, whose kingdom has been usurped by his brother. He is now living in exile in the forests of Arden. And some of his advisors, some of the knights that are with him, want him to make peace with this brother so they can return to the court, which is much more comfortable than the cold forest. And this is what he tells them:

“Now, my co mates and brothers in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
Here feel we but the penalty of Adam,
The seasons' difference; as [when] the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter's wind,
Which, when it bites and blows upon my body,
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say
'[Here] is no flattery: these are counselors
[Who] feelingly persuade me what I am.
Sweet are the uses of adversity,
. . . And this our life exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in … running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.”

What that’s about, in a way … [Applause] Thank you … is the difference between a life of contemplation -- you might even say a life of the imagination -- and a life of power. We live in a world where power and the imagination aren’t really on easy speaking terms. And there is a whole series of reasons why this is the case. I mean one of them is fundamental -- is that there are different ways with which we understand and express the world. There are at least four of these ways.

One of them is very easy to explain. It is a scientific worldview where you can take reality. You can understand it, measure it, present it through mathematics, through science. And you can, by this way of expressing the world, you can do amazing things. You can make cameras, electric lights. You can have airplanes, you know, these huge metal objects that fly through the air. And everybody understands the instrumentality of this, the importance of this. Although I would imagine there is almost no one in this room who could tell us how something as simple as an electric light works. You know, we take it on faith and we are glad that somebody knows this so that we can enjoy these luxuries.

There’s another way, and this is something that we are all, especially at the JFK Library, are very comfortable with. And that’s a way of understanding and expressing the world through analysis and through conceptual language. We can find a way of taking everything in our experience and bringing it into sort of general concepts that, you know, here are three women sitting in the front row, which is not to be confused with three women sitting in the front row. Conceptually they are the same, even though in reality they are quite different.

This allows us to pass laws. It allows us to have political debate. It allows us to write newspaper articles. And through our educational process, institutions love conceptual language because it’s much more definite. And it gives us a way of running very complicated societies. And we use it so often that we begin to believe that it is really the most truthful language.

There’s another kind of way of experiencing and expressing the world I don’t even want to get into but I have to acknowledge it, which is a mystical way. You know, if you go to a Benedictine monastery or a Buddhist monastery, there are people there who, in a sense, both perceive and communicate fundamental aspects of reality in ways which are not conceptual, not scientific, but seem to be quite genuine.

Let’s just put that off to one side because the one I really want to talk about is something we don’t even have a comfortable name for. You can call it a poetic means of understanding and expressing reality, which is to say, poesis, the made thing, an artistic and aesthetic thing. And this is something that is really quite different from conceptual language. What poesis does, what this imaginative, this intuitive language does, is to insist that, indeed, when we experience the world, we experience our lives. We do not separate it as it happens to us between the way we think about it, the way we feel it, the way we imagine it; it touches on our memories, our physical body, our senses, our conceptual ability are all, actually, a holistic kind of mess.

And this is the way we live most of our lives. And out of this way of, in a sense, experiencing reality, before we make it scientific, before we make it conceptual, before we even link it to the cosmos of the mystics, we face the fact that we respond to life, we lead our lives moment by moment, more or less with the fullness of our humanity, which includes our mind, our body, our intelligence, our senses, our imagination, our intuition, our memory. Which is to say, I recognize something about this audience. Everyone of you has come here this evening for a variety of reasons, and you have brought to this room your entire life experience. And this person’s life experience is going to be different than this person’s life experience. And that’s the way we live. It is part of the completeness of our humanity. It is part of the human condition.

The arts come out of that poesis. They come out of that poetical knowledge and, in fact, express both, understand the world before we have had a chance to analyze it into neat, abstract, generalized concepts. That’s the first thing I want to say tonight, that there are these, let’s say for convenience sake, these three ways of talking about the world: the scientific, the analytic conceptual; the artistic, intuitive, poetic.

Secondly, we now live in a society which is so complex that we specialize in small branches of knowledge. The prosperity of modern society, in many ways, is because of this specialization. In the old days you might have gone to a doctor for anything that ailed you. Now, there are dozens of specialties. You might have gone to a teacher to instruct you. Now, there are dozens of specialties there, too. The specialization of knowledge has given us tremendous accuracy and power over certain things. But it has also isolated us increasingly in our society.

I think it’s a truism that goes back to the fifties with people like C.P. Snow saying that scientists and non-scientists could no longer speak to each other. They lived in different worlds. But I think in the beginning of the 21st century, we are now in a situation where even scientists can’t speak to each other because science has gotten so broad. Some of you, I assume, teach in universities. How often do you have meaningful conversations with people who are several departments away?

In the 21st century, we can basically talk to the people who are in our specialty and a couple of related specialties. But we find ourselves really unable to explain what we do or understand what somebody else does when you take too many steps. It is rather like 19th century Italy. If you went to the next village, you could understand the dialect and speak it perfectly. If you went two villages away, you could pretty much understand everything you said. You go 50 miles away, and they are speaking a Romance language you can’t even understand.

So there are these large languages. There is this specialization that is going on. And we have, in a sense, a society, which is less and less able. And, in fact, there is another thing, which people rarely acknowledge. And I’m sure some of you are already experiencing it in relation to what I am telling you. Since I am not explaining this to you in the concepts of your profession, I am not using the shibboleths of your specialty. In some ways it annoys you, what I’m talking about. You go, “Oh, God, this guy is this vague generalist who is not really nailing—you know, as a linguist, I know this,” or “As a historian I know this,” or “As a political scientist I know this.”

And so we have this kind of—as part of this hyperspecialization, this suspicion, this annoyance at people who aren’t doing it the right way—scientists who don’t think that the people in social studies are doing it quite in the right way. And so what this leads us to is a society in which there are dozens and dozens of consequences that would be interesting to talk about. But I want to talk about simply one of them. And I will make the case, and I don’t think anybody can disagree with this.

At the beginning of the 21st century in the United States of America, we live in a society which no longer understands the human purposes of the arts. There is some vague superstition we have that we still need them. But we don’t really quite know why. And because we have our society increasingly run by institutions, which have their own languages, their own little conceptual territories; because we don’t understand the arts, because we don’t realize the human purposes of them, we have systematically removed them from our society.