On Catholic Imagination, Part 6: Becoming a Catholic Writer

Episode Topic: Becoming a Catholic Writer

From a “medieval” Sicilian-Mexican childhood in Los Angeles to the halls of Harvard, acclaimed poet Dana Gioia explores the tension between faith and secular meritocracy. Discover why the former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts advocates for the “vocation of the quitter” in this profound reflection on beauty, poetry, and the Catholic imagination.

Featured Speakers:

• Jennifer Newsome Martin '07 M.T.S., '12 Ph.D., University of Notre Dame
• Dana Gioia, Poet

Read this episode's recap over on the University of Notre Dame's open online learning community platform, ThinkND: https://go.nd.edu/230da7.

This podcast is a part of the ThinkND Series titled On Catholic Imagination. 

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Transcript

Welcome and Opening

Speaker 0:09

Good evening everyone. Welcome, welcome everyone. Thank you for coming. It's so lovely to see you all. My name is Jennifer Newsom Martin, and I'm the director of the dela Center for Ethics and Culture. I'm so delighted that you've joined our evening for the 24th annual fall conference. Ever ancient, ever new on Catholic imagination. Looking out at this audience, it is so thrilling to see our friends, old friends, and new friends joining us for this year's conference, which is always the highlight for us during the fall semester for us here at Notre Dame. For those of you who may not be familiar with our work, the dela Center for Ethics and Culture was established in 1999 to share the richness of the Catholic moral and intellectual tradition through teaching, research and engagement at the highest level and across a range of disciplines. We do this in four main ways. First is academic research and programming, of which the fall conference has become the centerpiece, along with several robust publication series with our friends at the University of Notre Dame Press. Second is student formation through our Soren Fellows program for undergraduate and graduate students at the university, which is now close to 700 Strongs. Any Soren fellows out there? Raise your hand. Okay. Let's see. Let's hear from the Soren Fellows. Very good. The third element is building and supporting a culture of life, both here on campus and in the wider public square. And finally, we assist the university in identifying and attracting the best imminent and emerging scholars whose work draws upon, engages and promotes the Catholic moral and intellectual tradition. Since the center's founding the Fall conference has been our largest annual event, and indeed is the University of Notre Dame's largest interdisciplinary conference, a truly unique and exciting gathering of scholars, artists, students, and friends from around the globe who come together every year to grapple with some of the most vital questions of ethics, culture, and public policy today. This year's conference is our largest yet, woo. We have more than 1200 guests registered for this year's event, during which we will consider questions related to our understanding of the Catholic imagination, its enduring and inexhaustible nature, and how it continues to illuminate our modern world with a particular focus on the literary arts. This conference will explore unique expressions of the Catholic imagination in presentations and performances across the disciplines. We're so grateful this year to be collaborating with the Biannual Catholic Imagination Conference, established by tonight's keynote, Dana Joya. The Catholic Imagination Conference seeks to enhance the understanding and appreciation of the richness and variety of contributions by Catholic artists. To explore the critical and theoretical foundations of the Catholic imagination and to foster community and collaboration among writers and readers who share a knowledge of and respect for the Catholic tradition. We're delighted to be partnering with them this year to bring the Catholic Imagination Conference to the Fall conference in what promises to be a unique and extraordinarily exciting collaboration. As we spend these next few days together discussing questions of imagination and meaning. We'll be hearing from more than 175 speakers across a range of disciplines, including literature, but also theology, philosophy, medicine, law, bioethics, art, film, music, theater, architecture, political science, and more. Just a few housekeeping notes before we begin. As our conference continues to grow, we have outgrown the Morris Inn Ballroom, so all of our evening keynotes will be here in this space. The Downs Club at Notre Dame Stadium. Our regular sessions during the day as usual, will be held in McKenna Hall and the Morrison with refreshments available throughout. If you pre-registered for the conference meals, those will be held in the West Wing of South Dining Hall this year. We're extraordinarily excited to feature a number of special performances and screenings in additional locations across campus, so please do check your conference program carefully for all of these locations. Lastly, we invite you to visit the publishers and vendors in McKenna 2 0 5 to 2 0 7, many of which are offering special conference discounts on volumes by our speakers. We're also very pleased to provide a family room in McKenna 2 0 4. If anyone is attending the conference with small children and needs a place to get away during the. More information on all of these can be found in your programmer on our website. And now the great honor of introducing this evening speaker. It is a true honor and privilege to be joined this evening by internationally acclaimed poet, critic, translator, and essayist Dana Joya. Mr. Joya has published six books of poetry and five volumes of literary criticism, as well as opera retti song cycles, translations, and over two dozen literary anthologies. His poetry has been anthologized in the Norton anthology of Poetry and the Oxford Book of American Poetry among others, as well as translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Chinese, and Arabic. Joya served as the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts from 2003 to 2009. A role for which he was hailed by Business Week Magazine. As the man who saved the NEA in 2015. He was named California State Poet Laureate. During his four years in that office, Joya became the first state Lau laureate to visit all 58 counties in California, where he focused on small and mid-size communities and participated in more than 100 events with local writers and students. Joy is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Presidential Citizens Medal, the American Book Award, the Poet's Prize, and Notre Dame's own La Tari Medal. The most prestigious award given to American Catholics that recognizes an individual whose genius has ennobled the arts and science. The arts and sciences illustrated the ideals of the church and enriched the heritage of humanity. Earlier this evening, he also received his latest accolade when he was awarded the Catholic Imagination Conferences. Flannery O'Connor Lifetime Achievement Award. Tonight, Mr. Joya will be offering a talk and reading entitled, becoming a Catholic Writer. Please join me in welcoming Mr. Dana Joya.

Medieval Los Angeles Roots

Leaving Academia Writing Alone

Road as Life Sonnet

Poem for Lost Son

Virgin Mary and LA Origins

Speaker 2 7:58

thank you Jennifer. Uh, thank you Notre Dame for, calling this great convocation into being, I was, when I was asked to be keynote speaker tonight, uh, Justin Petrek asked what was the title of my talk, and I told him I didn't have a talk and I didn't have a title. And, and I, and that disappointed him. Uh, and so I said, well, how about the becoming a Catholic author? And he, he was very happy. but then I, as the date approached, I, I began to write something about that and I, I, I started seeing page after page of Dower Theological and the literary Speculation, and I said to myself, this is Friday night. It's after dinner. Halloween is going out outside. Maybe I should do something a little, a little different. and so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna give you about a 20 minute talk. And then I'm gonna read seven poems, six of which are very short, and then I'll answer any questions you might have. I was born and raised in Los Angeles, California towards the end of the 13th century. I grew up in a medieval peasant village located in six stucco apartments, which housed three generations of my father's Sicilian family. It was a large peasant village, nearly a hundred people. Few of the adults spoke English, and most of the older generation could neither read nor write. My grandmother signed her name with an X. That was enough to get you through the Middle Ages in my village. All the adults either spoke a foreign language. Or had a heavy accent. My family's Italian dialect cast was a bit odd because most of the other adults spoke Spanish, like my mother's family. Each morning I left my village to walk three blocks, sometimes alone. Sometimes in the company of my cousins to St. Joseph's Church, where I would join 700 classmates for daily mass. St. Joseph's was the largest church in Los Angeles. The priests all had accents too. They were Irish, but the mass was in Latin, A language which I began to study at 11 when all the boys were drafted, like it or not, to serve at the altar. After mass, we filed across the street to the parish school, run by the Sisters of Providence. Who taught us, of course, in English. So by nine in the morning I had heard and spoken three languages, Italian, English, and Spanish, which is to say the languages of the old world, the new world, and the next world Life in medieval Los Angeles was rough and unpredictable across both sides of my family. We usually had relatives in jail. Two of my relatives had been murdered, and I had a cousin in jail for murder. Almost everyone had been robbed often at gunpoint, but we were safe from some dangers. Our village was so Catholic that I grew up never knowing anyone who had been divorced. The young men were often away for military service or employment. The older Mexican men had worked as Vaqueros cowboys in the southwest. My Mexican uncles all served in the Merchant Marines. I shared a bedroom with one of my uncles when he came on shore. My parents were pioneers of diversity. My father had broken the taboo. When he married a Mexican girl, it was considered a scandal among the Italians. Everyone else in his generation had married a girl from Casta, Reza. my Mexican and Italian relations never mixed. We had to visit the Mexicans in their village. My village also contained every possible political opinion. The Mexican uncle who lived with us belonged to the to the Communist Party. My father's older brother was an atheist, an anarchist. No one much cared. Blood mattered more than politics, but we did have one secret shame worse than have being related to a murderer or a communist. Both of my grandfathers were free masons and therefore headed to hell. But LA in the 13th century. Was an age of faith. People believed in saints, ghosts, and miracles. So no one was surprised when my communist uncle joined the Catholic church, or when my Masonic grandfather accepted last rights to stop his wife from crying about his damnation. I always knew there was another world, not just the Heavenly Kingdom, but another one just down the street called 20th Century America. I assumed that it was made up of millions of small villages just like ours. Catholicism was everything to me. I didn't feel the Roman Catholic Church as an abstraction. I saw my daily life as part of an unbroken continuity that stretched back to the time of Christ and CAEs. And reached all the way into our neighborhood of working class la I even experienced Latin as a living language. How odd that seems now. I heard it, studied it. I sang in it and prayed in it every day until I was 18. To this day, I still pray mostly in Latin. Do I have a certain nostalgia for this time? Of course. Do I think it can ever be recaptured? No, never. Not any more than my parents and grandparents can be brought back to life, but it's not a bad thing to remember and love one's origins. This was my world until my 18th birthday when I became the first member of my family to go to college, first to Stanford. Then to Harvard. Stanford was not only 360 miles from the city of our lady, queen of the angels, it was located in the late 20th century. It was not just another village, it was another planet. In the process of being called Silicon Valley, I could say many things about my experience, most of them about class and privilege. But let me summarize my experience in one sentence. At 18, I entered the privileged secular world of elite universities and the competitive meritocracy that they fostered. It wasn't a bad world, but none of the tribal loyalties or identities I had grown up with existed there and my family back home, never. Really understood what it was all about. The new system emphasized personal identity and individual accomplishment, not family and tribal responsibility. This would be the public and professional world I would live in one way or another for the rest of my life. Most of the time I felt like a street cat who had wandered into the Westminster Kennel Club. I've never been able to shake my working class origins, my distrust of institutions or my Catholicism. But please note I do not fault the institutions themselves. the problem was me. The schools treated me well. The professors were helpful and accessible. The support systems were terrific. Success was encouraged and rewarded. This new world wasn't a bad place for normal people. The trouble is I'm not normal. I may have been socially out of place, but I immediately felt at home intellectually. I loved the world of scholarship and study. To this day, my idea of heaven is a university library. By 20, I knew that poetry was my calling, and I approached literary study with a sort of ferocity. In retrospect, I realized that I saw poetry as a substitute for a religious vocation, and at some level I felt that since I didn't belong. At Harvard or Stanford, that the only way I could disguise my dark secret was by being the best student possible. I surrendered myself to the thrill and anxiety of competing in a meritocracy, which also meant living by the standards of the institutions that judged my performance. I received a fine literary education at both schools in graduate school at Harvard, for instance, I studied with Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Fitzgerald, Northrop Fry, and Edward Saeed. But after a few years, I realized I was getting superb training for a life I didn't want to lead. Uh, I was being trained to be a professor in a research university, and to to write in a way that could be understood only by a few thousand people. I wanted to be a poet, though I wasn't sure back then exactly what that meant, but I did know one thing I didn't want to write in a way that excluded the people I came from. I couldn't reconcile the two parts of my identity, and I slowly recognized to my own astonishment that poetry didn't originate, didn't reside in the academic part of my life. It was rooted in my childhood world of my mother reciting poems to me of my Mexican grandfather reciting corridos and ballads to me. And I also noticed that the forces that drew me to poetry were never discussed in my courses. We never talked about what it was or why human beings actually needed literature or poetry, what were its human purposes beyond being a subject of academic study. I was also puzzled that the idea of beauty was never discussed seriously, except as a historical notion found in ancient texts such as Aristotle's Poetics, the very word beauty was treated as a sort of embarrassment. Meant by my professors who usually passed over it in silence as if someone had just farted. I couldn't put it together yet, but I knew somehow it was related to the same metaphysical divide I felt between my religious and academic life. When I mentioned my Catholicism to my professors, all of whom, until my final year at Harvard, when I met Robert Fitzgerald were atheists or agnostics, they weren't hostile, just slightly surprised or amused. They were sure that religion was something I would outgrow, but I never managed to. By then, I was a fairly negligent Catholic, but I never doubted it was my faith. My worldview and my identity, my, my sense of existence remained metaphysical. I was in a world that was simultaneously physical and spiritual, temporal and eternal. I actually believed in the continuity of the living and the dead. It wasn't really an intellectual opinion. It was an instinct, an intuition, and I could only understand poetry in the same way. A real poem did something to me that ordinary language did not. It cast a spell. I remember coming across a private remark, Wallace Stevens made, who said a poem is either magnificent or it is nothing. Yes. I said to myself. Yes. In fact, I went even farther in one class. I agreed with Edgar Allen Poe when he wrote this feverish description of poetry, which my distinguished professor found quite publicly embarrassing. Poe wrote, it is the desire of the moth for the star. It is no mere appreciation of the beauty before us, but the wild effort to reach the beauty above. Inspired by an ecstatic precious of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle to attain a portion of that loveliness whose very elements pertain to eternity alone. The passage goes on. But I think I've given you enough that you can be embarrassed by poe too, his linguistic and emotional excess. But here again, as my professor winced, I said to myself, yes, yes. That's it, isn't it? Years later, I was greatly relieved when I discovered that Charles Aire loved this passage above all else in Poe. I loved scholarship. I loved my teachers. I wasn't strong enough to resist the brilliant pos and promises of Harvard. I could only surrender or run away. And so I fled. I fled into a wilderness of my own making where I could start over. Isolation. I had to give poetry its own space and I decided to separate it in my life. I, so I had to separate my artistic life from my economic life. I worked in business during the day. I wrote at night and on weekends, and I also decided that I would no longer for the time being try to publish. I had already published a lot, but none of it was good enough. For the next seven years I wrote privately with any thought of publication. Actually, it might be more accurate to say that I rewrote the same poems night after night. I often took a work and do a hundred drafts. Writing became a sort of meditation, a prayer, a conversation between my intellect and intuition between sound and sense, which I was often simply a bystander. It was foolish and impractical as a way to lead my life. One of my best friends said, this is career suicide, but I trusted William Blake who said, the fool who persists in his folly will become wise. I never became wise, but I did become less stupid. Then one day I started publishing again. One thing led to another, and tonight I'm at Notre Dame offering you my bad example. Well, that's how one Catholic became a poet. All of this happened 50 years ago in another century in another culture. My story may not apply to anyone but my myself. If you are a practical sort of person, you'll know that nothing I've said so far makes any sense. Don't listen to a fool in his folly. But since most of you are writers and the rest of you are academics or religious or clergy, then clearly you are not practical people. Uh, so let me summarize the bad advice I offer. It is terrible advice for any normal person, but it may be useful to you. If you want to be a writer, don't meet the world on the world's terms. Stand on your own ground even if you don't know where that ground is. If you stand firm, the ground will come to you. Write to please yourself, especially when nothing you write pleases. You. Keep trying what doesn't work until it does. Don't let an institution define the terms of your success. It doesn't know the nature of your vocation. Only you and God do. In fact, you may not even be able to discern it for years, but remember, as Tolkien said, not all who wander. Are lost. Accept your setbacks, humiliations and defeat. They nourish your strength and your resolve. Remember that the saints in glory proudly hold the instruments of their own ordom and especially learn how to quit, how to walk away from what the world views as successes. Quitting one thing is the start of something else. TS Elliot quit graduate school. Robinson Jeffers dropped out of USC medical school where he was the number one student, and my favorite is that Ezra Pound got fired from Wabash College, thereby missing the chance to spend his entire life in Crawfordsville, Indiana. Robert Frost dropped out of college twice an inspiration to us all. My son only did it, managed to do that once, first at Dartmouth, later at Harvard, where he had an a average. As Frost said, years later, and I don't think most of you have ever heard this quote, I couldn't have held my own and done myself credit unless I had been a quitter. My infant industries needed the protection of a dead space around them. Everybody was too strong for me, but at least I was strong enough not to stay where they were. Now, I have said some odd things because nowadays being both a real writer and a real Catholic is an odd. And anomalous thing, sooner or later, you have to break from the world. So quit hide, work and wander as your own destiny dictates, or as Ray Bradbury said, and this I think is probably the most useful advice I've ever been given by a writer. Jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down. And most important, don't listen to me. I have barely figured out my own life. So, uh, thank you. Um, thank you. Um, I'm gonna read seven poems now. I'm gonna start. End with a poem about Los Angeles. My, as you, those of you who have been awake know, was my hometown. this is Pagan Los Angeles. I was asked to write the lyrics for a vocal album by a jazz pianist named Helen Song. And this was the one of the first lyric I wrote for her. If you think of La, la is the capital of beautiful people. You come there and if you're beautiful enough, you can make a living just by being gorgeous. and that gives you a certain power. But those of us who are not beautiful, and I'm certainly the poster boy of that, know what happens to beauty, pity, the beautiful, pity, the beautiful. The dolls and the dishes. The babes with big daddies granting their wishes. Pity the pretty boys, the hunks and Apollos, the golden lads whom success always follows. The hotties, the knockouts, the tens out of 10, the drop dead gorgeous. The great leading men pity the faded, the bloated, the browsey. The ponche Adonis whose lux gone lousy. Pity the gods no longer divine pity. The night the stars lose their shine. when, when I grew up, almost every place that you owned or rented had a little. cubbyhole, I guess for the, for the telephone. I never saw any telephone located there. Uh, what I saw were Virgin Mary's, Jesus's Josephs St. Michael's, and, uh, every Mexican and Italian I knew turned that into a little home shrine, which is a tradition among, among the Latin people. this poem is spoken by one of those statues, a Santo, which, they couldn't, IM, uh, afford to import professional sculpture from, from Europe. So native carvers, you know, would, would, uh, sculpt wood and make images both for churches and for home shrines. This poem is spoken by a Mexican santo, a Mexican santo of a saint, who's been around, and lived through the Mexican Revolution. The, the actual sculptors are all unknown because no one, signed their work. So this takes place in the museum and it's spoken by a statue. It's called the Angel with the broken wing. I am the angel of, with broken wing, the one large statue in this crowded room. The staff finds me too fierce, and so they shut faith's, ardor in this air conditioned term. I'm gonna start over again. I, I, I, thought I knew it and I don't. I am the angel with the broken wing, the one large statue in this quiet room. The staff finds me too fierce, and so they shut faith's arder in this air conditioned tomb. The docents praise, my elegant design above the chatter of the gallery. Perhaps I am a masterpiece of sorts, a perfect emblem for futility. Mendoza carved me for a country church. His name's forgotten now, except by me. I stood beside the gilded altar where the hopeless offered God their misery. I heard their women whispering at my feet. Prayers for the lost, the dying, and the dead. Their candles stretched my shadow up the wall, and I became the hunger that they fed. I broke my left wing in the revolution. Even a saint can save our irony. When troops were sent to vandalize the chapel, they hit me once. Almost apologetically for even the godless feels something in a church, a twinge of hope, fear, who knows what it is, A trembling, unaccounted by their laws, an ancient memory that they can't dismiss. There is so much that I must tell God the howling of the damned can't reach so high. But I stand like a dead thing nailed to a perch, a crippled saint against a painted sky. Um, this is a sonnet. it's uses one of the oldest images that exists in poetry. The idea of the road as the course of life, the road. He sometimes felt that he had missed his life by being far too busy looking for it, searching the distance. He often turned to find that he had passed some milestone, unaware, and someone else was walking next to him. First friends, then lovers, now children and a wife. They were good company generous, kind, but equally bewildered to be there. He noticed then that no one chose the way all seemed to drift by some collective will. The path grew easier with each passing day since it was worn and mostly sloped downhill. The road ahead seemed hazy in the gloom. Where was it he had meant to go and with whom? I thought knowing Catholics that we'd have a lot of sinners, uh, in the audience. I count myself among them. And, and one of our problems is really to figure out which of the seven deadly sins we like the most. and so, and I, I thought about that, you know, and it struck me that is that the seven deadly sins, they must be kind of like the Justice League of America or, or super friends. They, they kind hang out together. And so I imagine them all having dinner in a diner. and they're inviting a new sinner in, and Pride is making a pitch. and as you know, pride is the deadliest of all those sins. So he, this is pride talking to a potential convert. Forget about, wait. So title the seven Deadly Sins. Forget about the other six says Pride. They're only using you. Admittedly. Lust is a looker, but you can do better. And why do they keep bringing us to this cheesy dive? The food's so bad that even gluttony can't finish his meal. Notice how avarice keeps refilling his glass whenever he thinks. We're not looking well envy eyes. Your plate hell, we're not even done. And anger is already arguing about the bill. I am the only one who ever leaves a decent tip. Let them all go the losers. It's a relief to see sloths fat butt go out the door. But stick around. I have a story that not everyone appreciates about the special satisfaction of staying on board as the last grubby lifeboat pushes away. Okay, I have three more poems. Um, my wife and I lost our first, child, our first son, uh, in infancy. He was four months old. He died of sudden infant death syndrome. Lovely, healthy child until suddenly he wasn't. and I've written a lot of poems about him and I wanted to have one of the poems about him. tonight. This is a very, very short one, in free verse, and I wrote it on what would've been. His 21st birthday. If, any of you have lost a child, I hope you, none of you have. you realize that although the child dies from then on, whenever you see a kid that would be about the same age, you begin to have this phantom relationship of what he might have been. This is called majority mess, legal majority. Now you'd be three. I said to myself, seeing a child born in the same summer as you now you'd be six or seven or 10, I watched you grow in foreign bodies leaping into a pool, all laughter or frowning over a keyboard, but mostly just standing. Taller each time. How splendid your most mundane action seemed in these joyful proxies. I often held back tears. Now you are 21. Finally, it makes sense that you have moved away into your own afterlife. thank you. And I generally try to keep my family out of my poems because I, I don't, you know, think my ch my living sons would appreciate me saying what I really think in verse, uh, and, uh, I've often, It felt the same way about my wife, uh, in a sense, which is that, you know, you're taking a chance. you know, and, and I, but there's not a lot of poems about happy marriages. and I think it's because sometimes if you write about it, the marriage doesn't get happy, you know?'cause you always say something wrong. But I was putting together my new and selected poems and I wanted to end it with a poem about my wife, about, in a sense, what really goes into a, to a, a true marriage? And it seems to me a true marriage is mostly talk, it's a kind of endless paver. you find somebody that you, you're involved in a conversation that never ends. And for the younger people, you will know when you're really in love with someone, if. Something that happens to you isn't entirely real until you share it with them. You have to wrap your story around their story, in a way that's endless. And so you create what is the most intimate and valuable conversation in your whole life. The problem is it's very fragile. If you lose your husband or your wife, your, you know, your, your lover. who else do you speak this language to? And so it reminded me of these California Indian tribes, which now have me, only one or two people alive. And when those people die, the language dies. The songs die. The dances die. But I don't think that diminishes the value of what was marriage of Benny years. Most of what happens happens beyond words. The lexicon of lip and fingertip defies translation into common speech. I recognize the musk of your dark hair. It always thrills me though I can't describe it. My finger on your thigh does not touch skin. It touches your skin warming at my touch. You are a language I have learned by heart. This intimate patois will vanish with us. It's only native speakers. Does it matter? Our tribal chance, our dances round, the fire performed the sorcery. We most required, they bound us in a spell time. Could not break. Let the young exalt their ecstasy. We keep our tribe of two in sovereign secrecy. What must be lost was never lost on us. And I want to, in, uh, for years I really had a secret boast that, you know, I was the only Catholic poet I knew that hadn't written a poem about the Virgin Mary. I translated poems about her, but I'd never written one. But you know, you. It's like the hound of heaven. You know, it catches up with you. eventually, and this is a poem where, in which she appeared halfway through and, and I realized it was about her. I'm from a city which is called the City or the Pueblo of our lady, queen of the Angels, that became, the, the city, of the angels, and now it's become la. and so I'm in a city that has forgotten its name. Even if you asked them, they would say, you know, the lady, you know, the city of our lady, queen of the angels, they would say, well, it's city of the angels, the city of the queen of the, they're not, not quite sure. and I also live in a city, which celebrates the um. Winning the World Series by looting and burning buses. But that's, uh, that's probably more common, uh, nowadays. but I live in a city where I would say 99% plus of the people can't tell you how Los Angeles was founded. They have no idea whatsoever. and, uh, I talk about this in the poem. The, uh, the city of LA was founded by really the, the people in the, the Spanish Empire of the New World. Nobody wanted, and so there was, uh, a group of people called re, the, the people of the Point, but the citizens. And it was 44 families. And the interesting thing about these families is that every one of them, was a mixed marriage. Uh, it was Indians, Spanish. Africans, you know, and basically, and even the, even the Spanish were from Majorca were from vast region, you know, that was, you know, sort of just this thing. And, and every couple was a mixed couple. And so from the very beginning, Los Angeles, was a city of the poor, of the outcast. and, and the mixed. And so I, I talk about this, this is a series of, I wrote a series of psalms in my last book. And this is, this is, is there anything, I don't think anything else that I need to tell you about it. The psalm to our lady, queen of the Angels, let us sing to our city a new song, A song that remembers its names and founders, Los Dore, the forgotten 44, who built their pueblo. Beside a small river, they named the river for the Queen of Angels Angeles. Poor. They were forced to the margins of empire. Dark dispossessed, not one couple. Pure let us praise the marriages and matings that created us desire swifter than democracy. In merging the races, Spanish, Aztec, African, and Anglo forbidden matches made holy by children. I praise myself, a mutt of mestizo and meno, the seed of exiles and violent men disfigured by the burdens they shouldered to survive. Broken or bent. Their boast was their suffering. I praise my ancestors. The un killable poor, the few who escaped disease or despair, the restless, the hungry, the stubborn, the scarred. Let us praise the dignity of their destitution. Let us praise their mother, URA. The lost guardian who watches them still for murals and medals, statues, tattoos. She has not abandoned her divided pueblo. She has been homeless with a hungry child, a refugee fleeing a brutal warlord. A mother, she held her murdered son. Her jewel is crowned with seven sorrows. Pray for the city that lost its name. Pray for the people too humble for progress. Pray for the flesh that pays for the prophet. Pray for the angels kept from their queen. Pray in the hour of our death each day in the southern sun of our desecrated city. Pray for us, mother of the mixed and misbegotten beside our dry river and the tents of the outcast poor. Thank you very much. Thank

Speaker 3 51:14

Please, please,

Speaker 2 51:19

if you keep that up, I'll take it seriously. Uh, now if I haven't misled you enough already, I'll be happy to answer questions and confuse you further. Okay. We have a, our first volunteer from the studio audience. Introduce yourself to us.

Speaker 4 51:36

Thank you. My name is Sean Dudley and I'm a Notre Dame grad and law school grad. thank you for a wonderful presentation. So it's Halloween and I have a question about ghosts. You said that your childhood culture was fine with the idea of ghosts and the souls of those that have gone before us. And I wanted to know what you thought as someone who has labored yourself at coming up with those words that are reaching toward the divine, like post said, but yet somehow salt also seemed to be you're a bystander of. Are you open to the idea of there being ghosts that are maybe even the ghost of your son that's, that's somehow inspiring you? Is there a muse? Is it just the Holy Spirit? Can you talk a little bit about how Catholicism works with that inspiration?

Speaker 2 52:23

Well, it's a complicated question'cause you're asking about the supernatural realm of existence. Let me say a very simply, I don't believe in ghosts, but I saw one. and, uh, so that just, you know, and, and it's both are true. When I was a, I, my Aunt Felicia, who a beautiful woman, mother of four children, often babysat me and she died of cancer when I was probably six or seven. And after her death one night, she came into my room and I knew I was awake. I wasn't sleeping. I hadn't asked for the visitation. She came, she stood beside me. I saw she was okay. She saw what I was okay. And then she left and I was awake the whole time. And so I told my parents and. They said, well, did she say anything? And I said, no, she didn't say anything. So they, oh, don't, don't worry about it then, you know? Uh, and my Mexican grandfather had, had been visited by the ghost of his brother once, and it was not an uncommon experience. Now, I've not, you know, I, I've talked to a Dominican theologian about this once, and he says, well, you know, he says, if this happens, you shouldn't, you should not try to engage the con the ghost in conversation. He gave me a very compelling theological argument. So if I ever see a ghost again, I'm gonna keep my mouth shut, unless it's my Aunt Felicia, which I'll say, long time, no see. but I, I, I believe in the supernatural. I, I pray for my dead. I talk to my parents. In my mind, I believe in the continuity of this world and the next, so I'm an, I am from the 13th century. Yes, but it was a good time, you know, uh, there's a lot to learn from the 13th century. So anyway. Did, oh, sorry. I didn't, I should play. You, you can be next, but ladies first. Okay,

Speaker 3 54:19

thank you. I was, uh, it stood out to me when you said, when you were the poet, Lori of California, that you went to all, 50 counties, I think it was 58, 58 counties,

Speaker 2 54:30

which ranged from Los Angeles, which has 10 million people to Alpine, which has 1400.

Speaker 3 54:37

And uh, I wondered if you could recall a time during that journey that just really stood out for you, and, uh, was meaningful in terms of connecting and maybe bringing poetry alive or helping it make sense to maybe people who might not have had that access? Lemme describe

Speaker 2 54:55

one, one event. I went to Madera, California, which is a farm town. I can say this publicly because I am no longer, an official. when I was poet worried of California, I made it a point. Uh, in terms of all the things I do not to visit Berkeley and UCLA and Stanford and all the places which have lots of poetry, What I went to were public libraries, uh uh, and, you know, towns that, you know, basically had no, no, you know, this really no cultural life, it seemed to me that's what one should do. Everywhere I went, I did things. I never gave a reading by myself. I would always find local writers and we would do it in his community. And Poetry Out Loud. If you know that program, the National Recitation Poetry Recitation contest, I would find, the county winners and I'd bring these high school kids, to come in and, and recite. which was great because their parents liked that. It kept the poems fresh. It was terrible for me'cause they're always much more appealing to an audience than I was. but, you know, one has to take these risks in art. So I came to Madera County, which, really hadn't had a poetry reading in anybody's memory. We were in the public library and the local arts person. There was a, a Mexican fellow, he didn't speak any English who would come there, who was making these steel sculptures, in his yard of dragons and unicorns and the minar and all the neighbors began to complain about him. So the arts council brought their members over and they bought a couple of them. And so they had, were just installing a gigantic red Minot tar. I mean, it must have weighed two tons. It was great. You know, kids were crawling all over it. And it was in the, the foyer of the library. So he was there, didn't speak any English, and I asked if we could invite the boys, or they called them the cadets from the local, basically juvenile prison. So we had the cadets there. All the women of the library had baked an unbelievable number of. Of cakes and cookies and cupcakes. We had the local community and most of them were people that worked on farms. so I read, we had this girl that was the local homeschooled, local winner of poetry out loud. my, the BBC was doing a documentary, uh, at that point. And my direct, my producer was a poet. So I had, I had him come up without any, any warning to recite a poem. and, then I said, well, let's, I noticed that the cadets were only allowed to take one cookie. they were growing boys. So I said, well, now we'll take another dessert break. And so we, you know, let, so they went down and chowed down. They sat down. So then I turned to them and I said. One of you is a poet, who is he? And they said, oh, no, no, no, no. I said, no One of you's a poet who is, oh, no, no, no, no. And I says, I'm not gonna stop until you tell me who it is. And then they all go, Luis, Luis. So I said, Luis, come up here. And it, and he was, you know, his officer was kind of mad at me'cause I'd already let them like eat probably a month's sugar ration. and so Louis came there and did this rap and it was great. And then, we began then a woman from the audience who was, you know, you know, from Peru, you know, we talked to her and I said, well, do you wanna recite a poem? So she rec reside a poem. And then I was asked, the best question I've asked, asked two great questions in the tour. The first one was in a town where we had the entire school, which went from kindergarten to high school, which is only about 20 kids. It was tiny town. And I, best question maybe was, was. What is your birthday? And so one of the easy questions I could ask, I said, Christmas Eve, which caused great dis, you know, thing. Then it was followed by and what's the name of your cat? And so those were great questions. But in Madera had I think really the best question. Big guy in the back said, you know, I want to ask you a question. I'm not sure if it's the question, but, uh, I wonder if you could answer this. You know, I, I, uh, work on a farm and a bunch, you know, a bunch of us boys, we all work there and we, you know, we see each other every day. And they, one of our fellows, uh, writes poems every now and then. And, you know, he'll say, we wrote a poem. We'll say, well, you wanna say it to us and say, we will say it to us. And we like it.'cause you know, it's usually about something that's happened to us. And it's, and it's, it's it, we like it. And I, I've been wondering about this. Is it possible for somebody without an education to write poetry? And so I won't give them the full answer, but I said, well, you know, the earliest poems we have are written by shepherds. And cattle herders. Uh, there's something about living the life on the earth, which is the basis of poetry. And so what you're seeing, you know, working on this farm and this ranch that you're on is basically the world of David, the world of the Greek poet. Hes, see, it, it, you know, it's the, it's the, the landscape which is always nurtured poetry. And so I liked talking to people, uh, that hadn't been formed as it were in academic study because they bought different set of needs to things. And, uh, no matter what town I went, no matter how small it was, it had poets, it had singers, and it was, it was a, a privilege and a pleasure to, to work with them. So now we'll have you your long, delayed question.

Speaker 5 1:00:24

Uh, firstly, I just wanna say thank you. I really enjoyed the talk and the poems. my, you talked about how you left academia and you seem to be doing quite well. and then,

Speaker 2 1:00:34

well, I must add that, you know, my parents neglected to give me the private income I so richly deserved. Uh, and so, you know, I had to make it up, make it along the way, but, you know, you can work, you know, and, and you can

Speaker 5 1:00:48

ah,

Speaker 2 1:00:49

get, you get paid occasionally.

Speaker 5 1:00:51

Good to know.

Speaker 2 1:00:52

I, sorry, I don't mean to No. To throw you off your game.

Speaker 5 1:00:56

Okay. Uh, so you're doing well. And then you made the switch to only write poetry privately, and then later on publish it. Was that the choice to go and only write privately? Was that difficult? Was that obvious and easy? Could you tell me more about that?

Speaker 2 1:01:14

Well, it was both, um. It was a humiliation to me constantly to be with my friends who were writers and professors, and they said, well, what are you writing? What do you publish? You know? And I said, well, I'm not publishing right now. Which I knew to them meant that I was getting rejected by editors I was sending it to. They could not believe I wasn't sending it. So, and I just, you know, I felt that, you know, you, eating crow is not a bad diet for a few years. and so I did that. And to be honest, I would not have started publishing for probably more years. Had not someone I know forced me to make a submission. Uh, and, uh, I kept being asked by the editor of the Hudson Review, whom I had met, he said, well, send me some poems. And I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, but I never did. And he asked me again and again and again. So, and finally he said, look, you have to promise me you gonna send me poems. And it'd been seven years since I, so I sent him. some poems, and usually takes up, I don't know, two years for your work to appear in the Hudson Review. These appeared at the big, at the start of the next issue, and he took seven poems. and then I'm, I'm making this up. The phone rang and it was the editor of the Howard Moss, the editor of the New Yorker, who said, why didn't you send these poems to me? And I didn't wanna publish in the New Yorker because nobody in my office read the Hudson Review, but they did read The New Yorker, and I didn't want anybody I knew I worked with to know I as a poet. So I didn't send him. And then I, so I had this, another joke of this editor of the New Yorker phoning me and writing me to send him poem. I'm the only poet in the country that didn't do it. So finally I gave him one and he published it. And then I was relieved because I realized that nobody in my office. Read anything but the cartoons in the New Yorker. Um, so and so then I felt free to lead a literary life. But, you know, uh,

Speaker 3 1:03:14

thank you.

Speaker 2 1:03:14

I dunno if that was what you were asking, but that's what, that's what had happened. It was so, I mean, it's a weird career. You can learn nothing from my example really. But I do think what, if you're searching for yourself, you have to go into the wilderness for a while. You have to be alone with your own thoughts, your own dreams, your own fears. you have to be plagued by the devil. You have to pray. And with luck, then some kind of clarity emergence. And that's what I did. I think I'm, I'm told I can only do one question. Is that true? Only one. Um, Justin is being very firm. So Ava, thank you. Uh, I'm sure yours was the best of the evening, but we won't be able to hear it so.

Speaker 6 1:03:53

Thank you very. Thank you very much. introduce

Speaker 2 1:03:56

yourself.

Speaker 6 1:03:57

I'm Joseph Browns Berger. First I have to say that, I'm also Castella Maze. My grandfather was a chair Ofo from Castella Ma del Gfo.

Speaker 2 1:04:04

Oh.

Speaker 6 1:04:04

but we ended up in New York. But, my

Speaker 2 1:04:08

noi you know, we, we were, my grandfather came to New York and then went to Detroit, and then when he was wiped out and the depression started over in Los Angeles. So we were in, in, in what is now called Soho.

Speaker 6 1:04:19

Incredible. so my question is about like this idea of cultures that you mentioned, um, and how kind of this old medieval culture is, is, you know, dead now and we've got this new culture. and it seems like the church has always kind of, thrived by redeeming cultures that, you know, have a lot of problems and then the church comes in and somehow sanctifies that culture and makes it more fully what it is. And so one of the things I was wondering is, what's one way that, Catholic poetry and writing and, you know, art in general, can sanctify something about our culture and make it what it was meant to be?

Closing Thanks and Reception

Speaker 2 1:04:55

Well, I don't think the purpose of secular poetry is to sanctify, it's to clarify, it's to remember, it's to cherish. the church is reformed and revitalized not by its institutions, but by its saints. Uh, without the saints. We would be lost. And that's why the secular press will mock anyone who is, uh, is saintly. I mean, while, while they'll even attack Mother Teresa. But we look to the saints, for the examples of heroic virtue and literature, poetry especially operates in the same way we look to the great poets as men and women who have whatever the cost achieved, a kind of clarity, precision, and beauty. I don't think you can improve much on Dante's definition of poetry, which most people think is just silly'cause it's so simple things that are true. In words that are beautiful. And so the purpose of the artist is to discover the beauty that we exist in at any moment. Because often what we see doesn't seem to us to be beautiful, but the artist will find the perspective from which we can see the beauty, which is to say that we can connect the forms of things with the meaning of things. And I love Marianne's definition of Beau's power to radiate the secrets of existence onto the intelligence. I think that's a great goal for an artist, but I would say we take second place to the saints. Thank you so much.

Speaker 1:07:05

Thank you friends, and thank you to Dana for those insightful remarks and lovely poetry. Friends, please know you are welcome to stay here with us for a reception that will begin just here as we continue our conversations, and we'll look forward to seeing you tomorrow when our sessions resume at nine o'clock. So goodnight everyone. Thank you.