{"id":1072,"date":"2017-03-04T18:21:53","date_gmt":"2017-03-04T18:21:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/?p=1072"},"modified":"2017-03-04T18:21:53","modified_gmt":"2017-03-04T18:21:53","slug":"the-achievement-of-dana-gioia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/2017\/03\/the-achievement-of-dana-gioia\/","title":{"rendered":"The Achievement of Dana Gioia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dana Gioia, 99 Poems: New and Selected<\/strong><\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Minneapolis, Minnesota: Graywolf, 2016. 194 pages<\/p>\n

(This review was written in the fall of 2016)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Dana Gioia\u2014the author of numerous volumes of poems, translations, literary criticism, and essays, as well as a book editor and lyricist\u2014is one of the most important figures in contemporary letters. Having served as chair of the NEA, poetry editor of Italian Americana<\/em> (1994-2003), and Poet Laureate of California, he has long sought to bring poetry and poetry appreciation to a wide audience. As his 2015 essay \u201cPoetry as Enchantment\u201d suggests, he, like Blake, Rilke, Pound, and Stevens, sees poetry in light of the central role it once played in public life: as a means of addressing our basic cultural and spiritual predicament. Gioia\u2019s beautiful collection, 99 Poems: New and Selected<\/em>, can serve as a perfect introduction to his poetic work as a whole. It attests to the range and sophistication of his forms and themes. Organized into seven thematic sections, each incorporating work from the poet\u2019s wide-ranging career, 99 Poems<\/em> strikes notes of gravity and humor, disappointment and wonder, skepticism and celebration, grief and joy.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The first section, \u201cMystery,\u201d sets up Gioia\u2019s lucid yet complex perspective. In the wistful poem \u201cInsomnia,\u201d the speaker contemplates mysteries such as \u201cthe murmur of property, of things in disrepair\u201d and \u201cthe faces you could not bring yourself to love,\u201d arriving at no epiphany but \u201cThe terrible clarity this moment brings, \/ the useless insight, the unbroken dark.\u201d In \u201cThe Stars Now Rearrange Themselves,\u201d the speaker considers that, alas, there are no guiding stars to rely on at the moment, and urges us to\u00a0\u201clook for smaller signs.\u201d Have we abandoned our natural, inborn sense of wonder, as the Christian theologian Paul Tillich admonished us not to? Taken as a whole, the poems in this section suggest that we perhaps shouldn\u2019t even look for too much meaning, but that we shouldn\u2019t overlook the realm of the compromised and seemingly insignificant either, as this sphere is a haven of sorts, where the last sense of mystery lies.\u00a0But is there no higher, transcendent realm? In \u201cAll Souls\u2019\u201d the speaker asks us to imagine (as did Marx and John Lennon) that \u201cthere is no heaven and no hell,\u201d while adding that even the spirit trapped in this unholy world is \u201cdisabled.\u201d The poem \u201cMaze without a Minotaur\u201d describes a maze in which there are \u201cno monsters but ourselves.\u201d Indeed, the only monster in the poem \u201cMonster\u201d is described as \u201cthe thing I have created.\u201d It appears that we are responsible for our own problems, values, actions, judgment, and vision.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Similar principles apply in the next section, \u201cPlace,\u201d though the poet\u2019s evocations of place involve polemical, social, and political commentary. \u201cA California Requiem,\u201d one of many poems about Gioia\u2019s home state, concludes: \u201cWe could not\u2026\/ see the trees cut down for our view. \/ What we possessed, we always chose to kill.\u201d Equally admonitory is \u201cMost Journeys Come to This,\u201d a poem about Italy, one of Gioia\u2019s ancestral homelands. In this piece, which updates the wisdom of the classical Latin eclogue, we are advised not to buy into the commercial tourist itinerary or agenda:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Leave the museums. Find dark churches<\/p>\n

in back towns that history has forgotten,<\/p>\n

the unimportant places the powerful ignore<\/p>\n

where commerce knows no profit will be made.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This emphasis on the road less traveled is of course fitting for the itinerary of a poet (in fact, Gioia\u2019s \u201cThe Road\u201d clearly references the Frost poem). Here the speaker is also commenting on the road of cultural materialism. He urges us to seek out alleys and listen through windows for the sounds of native Italian speech, then to enter a dark obscure chapel. But there we will not necessarily see the light. Instead, \u201cif the vision fails,\u201d there is perhaps nothing left to contemplate but:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

the grim and superannuated gods<\/p>\n

who rule this shadow-land of marble tombs,<\/p>\n

bathed in its green suboceanic light.<\/p>\n

Not a vision to pursue, and yet<\/p>\n

these insufficiencies make up the world.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This landscape is beautifully rendered in all its familiarity and unfamiliarity. But is this new kind of postcard enough to coax a broad audience off the tourist route? What\u2019s more, if what \u201cmost journeys come to\u201d is at best a vision of \u201cthe insufficiencies of the world,\u201d just the shadow-realm of \u201cthe grim and superannuated gods,\u201d is there any place left for the monotheistic God, or for any enduring higher power or purpose?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

What we can clearly see is that the templates and sources Gioia relies on are rather insistently (and often ironically) Christian, and that those religious echoes account for much of their appeal. In the poem \u201cShopping,\u201d the speaker takes on the role of a latter-day Jesus sardonically parodying the Beatitudes to critique American materialism: \u201cBlessed are the acquisitive, \/ For theirs is the kingdom of commerce.\u201d These godless values are inadequate. But unlike in \u201cMost Journeys,\u201d here even the resident deities are reduced to puns: \u201cRedeem me\u2026\/ Mercury, protector of cell phones and fax machines.\u201d Indeed, \u201cSpending all my time, discounting all I see,\u201d this speaker makes short work of even Wordsworth\u2019s plaintive invocation to the spirits of pantheism, countering that \u201cThere is nothing but the getting and spending\u2026.\u201d In fact, in \u201cProphecy,\u201d Gioia invokes the Lord\u2019s prayer as if to include the oracular mode itself in his list of misguided pretentions: \u201cO Lord of indirection and ellipses, \/ ignore our prayers. Deliver us from distraction\u2026\/\/ bless us with ennui and quietude\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Gioia can sound like Auden, relying on irony, formal discipline, and tonal restraint to preclude the kind of language that could be construed as self-involved, overblown, or in any way demagogic. The section on \u201cPlace\u201d even includes a poem set in the Never-Never land of the airport. It concludes, \u201cBut nothing ever happens here.\u201d It is hard not to hear an echo of Auden\u2019s elegy to his own less skeptical predecessor, W.B. Yeats, in which Auden\u2019s speaker insists that \u201cpoetry makes nothing happen,\u201d a subject Gioia addressed in his 1991 Atlantic<\/em> Monthly<\/em> essay, \u201cCan Poetry Matter?\u201d There, and in the eponymous book that followed, he critiqued what he saw as an academic predilection for exclusivist and obscurantist approaches to writing and writing about poetry. But he by no means denied that more lucid poetry can have something to teach us. Our modern preoccupation with external \u201cprogress,\u201d after all, can entail overlooking deeper, quieter truths. At the close of this section, the speaker of one of Gioia\u2019s newer poems concludes (perhaps echoing Eliot) that even a writer may get much further by staying where he is: \u201cWhat a blessing just to sit still\u2026,\u201d he observes. \u201cLet the dust settle on my desk. \/ No one needs to hear from me today\u201d (\u201cProgress Report\u201d). And yes, writing about having gotten nothing done amounts to getting something done. But it takes the proper preparation.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Is the path of quiet contemplation necessarily that of imagination? Though he preaches perceptivity and reflectiveness, Gioia often seems to question Romantic and Transcendentalist notions of the artist\u2019s power. The poems in the section entitled \u201cImagination\u201d are often about the lack thereof. They are also often archly meta-poetic. \u201cMy Confessional Sestina\u201d is a hilariously clever putdown of writing workshop hackwork. And that word \u201cConfessional\u201d in the title is aptly mock-Catholic. It prepares us for the next poem, in which the title merges with the first line: \u201cThe Silence of the Poets \/ is something to be grateful for.\u201d The playful poem that follows is about how money is not simply or unironically, as Stevens mused, \u201ca kind of poetry\u201d (\u201cMoney\u201d). And the next poem, entitled \u201cThe Next Poem,\u201d is in part about the disappointment a poet faces: \u201cHow much better it seems now \/ than when it is finally written.\u201d What\u2019s more, this section of the book is not without sociopolitical statements about how imagination can get us into trouble. Consider the end of \u201cA Short History of Tobacco\u201d:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The elders smoked and chanted in a trance.<\/p>\n

The Mayans blew the smoke to the four corners<\/p>\n

of the world. It was a gift from God\u2014<\/p>\n

profitable, poisonous, and purely American.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

More intimate, personal explorations come to the fore in the section on \u201cRemembrance,\u201d where we find \u201cFinding a Box of Family Letters,\u201d about Gioia\u2019s memories of his father. Even more challenging to easy faith are the poems inspired by the death of his infant son (including the moving \u201cPlanting a Sequoia,\u201d and \u201cSpecial Treatments Ward\u201d). In \u201cMajority,\u201d which was written twenty years later, the speaker both imagines the maturation of that son and offers his farewell, without clarifying whether the \u201cafterlife\u201d he refers to is just a trope or something more.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Gioia is a master, rare in this day and age, of the narrative poem, as the \u201cStories\u201d section bears out. \u201cHaunted,\u201d which is in free verse, though with the discipline of blank verse punctuated with internal slant-rhymes, seems to be about the memories of a loved one. The speaker has an encounter with a middle-aged ghost who undresses like a lover, her chemise billowing \u201cas if alive.\u201d But the speaker is a monk. Then again, this monk is telling his story in a bar as he pursues nothing more than an earthly life. Does a \u201chigher\u201d realm exist in Gioia\u2019s universe, or in ours?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The poet plays masterfully with many such story genres, unspooling his lines with Audenesque clarity and wit. But ironically, the stories are often about something missing. Perhaps all of our plots amount to a pile of clich\u00e9s, as in this excerpt from \u201cFilm Noir,\u201d a poem in the \u201cSongs\u201d section:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

She\u2019s married but lonely. She wishes she could.<\/p>\n

Watch your hands! Oh, that feels good.<\/p>\n

She whispers how much she needs a man.<\/p>\n

If only he\u2019d help her. She has a plan.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Their eyes meet, and he can tell<\/p>\n

It\u2019s gonna be fun, but it won\u2019t end well.<\/p>\n

He hears her plot with growing unease.<\/p>\n

She strokes his cheek, and he agrees.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

For all its clever irony, and for all its bemoaning of the vacuity of wide-spread approaches to everyday life and art in the modern world, Gioia\u2019s work does at times strike transcendent chords. \u201cPrayer\u201d adopts the rhythms of the Christian prayer so effectively that, in the end, despite the provisos it encompasses, it seems to express a kind of faith. And, with its thematic paradoxes and strains of Anglo-Saxon sound structure, there is something thrilling and otherworldly about \u201cVultures Mating.\u201d Here the poet taps into a primal sense of religiosity, as in something out of D.H. Lawrence or Stanley Kunitz: \u201cthe buzzard or the princess, the scorpion, the rose\u2014 \/ each damp and fecund bud yearning to burst, \/ to burn, to blossom, to begin.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cLove,\u201d the last section of the book, closes with \u201cMarriage of Many Years,\u201d a subtler paean to what \u201chappens beyond words.\u201d Though (as the speaker of an earlier poem, \u201cOn Approaching Forty,\u201d affirmed), everything passes away, love itself involves a language spiritual enough to express acceptance, thereby arriving at what is ultimately \u201clearned by heart.\u201d Here Gioia\u2019s speaker eloquently celebrates this quiet mystery:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Let the young vaunt their ecstasy. We keep<\/p>\n

our tribe of two in sovereign secrecy.<\/p>\n

What must be lost was never lost on us.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Throughout the volume, in its ongoing push-and-pull between affirmation and doubt, Gioia\u2019s work demonstrates mastery of many genres and forms, showing us how poetry can disabuse us of easy clich\u00e9s while helping us to make deeper sense of the world and our lives. By subjecting our faith and our understanding to the standards and challenges of both tradition and innovation, Dana Gioia could be said to lend compelling and enduring shape to the human struggle for meaning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dana Gioia, 99 Poems: New and Selected. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Graywolf, 2016. 194 pages (This review was written in the fall of 2016)   Dana Gioia\u2014the author of numerous volumes of poems, translations, literary criticism, and essays, as well as a book editor and lyricist\u2014is one of the most important figures in contemporary letters. Having served […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1072"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1072\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1077,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1072\/revisions\/1077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}