The Highest Honor in Poetry

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Roxanne Jones: "The highest honor in poetry is to have your words mowed by children, not yet born" She says a poem can be one half game and one half spiritual exploration. But the highest thing that you can do is to be useful, she says. And if you're lucky, they will find uses for your poem that you don't even imagine. 'Once my poems are published, I'm simply one of the readers,' writes Jones.

When he was a child, poet Dana Gioia's mother would come home from a long day of work and recite poems while she cleaned. It was a way, he realized later, for her to express the feelings she didn't want to describe directly, and to vent her sorrows without burdening her son. This, he believes, is what makes poetry so compelling: It's the secret language of emotions, a bit of magic that gets us through the day. Listen as Gioia speaks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about poems, mortality, and loved ones who died too young. Gioia also explains the fundamental role of allusions in poems, and how--if they’re really good--they have the power to summon the dead.