Dana Gioia

I just finished Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture (1992/2002) by Dana Gioia.

Anybody who reads contemporary poetry or even is thinking about reading contemporary poetry should read the title essay, conveniently available at this link [PDF].

Gioia starkly outlines an artistic field that has decayed. There are more schools, magazines, grants, and awards than ever for working on poetry in the USA, but American poets mainly write elliptical, egotistical lyric poems, and show more honest appraisals of poetry are almost impossible to come by.

Gioia lays out a solemn decree to write good poetry criticism, and makes good on it in the fourteen pieces that follow. He gives elegant readings of poems, particularly when it comes to favorites like Robinson Jeffers, Weldon Kees, Howard Moss, and Donald Justice. These are all really important discoveries for me. Donald Justice, for example, generates poems out of previous poetry, including nursery rhymes as in "Counting the Mad:"
This one was put in a jacket,
This one was sent home,
This one was given bread and meat
But would eat none,
And this one cried No No No No
All day long.

This one looked at the window
As though it were a wall,
This one saw things that were not there,
This one things that were,
And this one cried No No No No
All day long.

This one though himself a bird,
This one a dog,
And this one thought himself a man,
An ordinary man,
And cried and cried No No No No
All day long.
The explanation for this poem is quite basic, but it's still fun to hear Gioia say it: "The harmless market-day adventures of five childlike pigs become a nightmarish tour of an insane asylum."

Equally fun are the withering, but balanced, critiques of James Dickey's collection Puella, Margaret Atwood, and especially Robert Bly:
Bly's weaknesses as a translator underscore his central failings as a poet. He is simplistic, monotonous, insensitive to sound, enslaved by literary diction, and pompously sentimental. Morever, these are not accidental faults. They are consequences of his poetic method and they are exacerbated by his didactic impulse.
In other short pieces on the long poem, new formalism, business and poetry, Gioia strays too much from reading poems, revealing a tendency to repeat himself. Even still, Gioia's essays are as clear as SAT reading samples, each with an easy to grasp thesis.

I want to write like this, making clear, reasonable claims about the directions of art, with incisive readings of poems guiding my way. show less

Summary: A collection of poems reflecting memories of people from several generations as well as the places of Gioia’s life.

I’ve suggested to others wanting to begin reading poetry to find an anthology and notice whose poetry you like and explore those poets further. Here, I am following my own advice, having encountered and liked Dana Gioia’s poetry in an anthology. And in this case, it was good advice. There was so much I connected with in these poems.

Many of these are about show more memories, typified in the opening and title poem, “Meet Me at the Lighthouse.” He recalls an old nightclub, on a foggy pier, speaks to an anonymous friend who has died, urging him to meet him there for one night of listening to some of the greats in jazz–Gerry Mulligan, Cannonball Adderly, Hampton Hawes, Stan Getz, Chet Baker, and Art Pepper. Who of us hasn’t remembered places like this and ghosts of our past and wished for ‘one more time?”

In “Three Drunk Poets” he recalls the crazy things we do in our youth. In this case, he recalls a night where, with two other poet friends in a small town, they challenged each other to keep walking until they ran out of remembered poems. They ran out of city lights before they did poems, with a coyote joining the recitation. At that, they turned around.

“Tinsel, Frankincense, and Fir” evokes memories of the Christmas season. Like many of us, his decorations are old and carry memories of Christmases past–and the ghosts of family.

Gioia evokes other ghosts. One is of an uncle, Theodore Ortiz, who joined the U.S. Merchant Marine, serving until his early death. Another is of the life and death of his great grandfather, Jesus Ortiz, and of the two boys who followed him as cowboys.

He writes several poems about Los Angeles. “Psalm and Lament for Los Angeles” paraphrases Psalm 137, setting it in the demolished places of his childhood. He asks, “What was there to sing in a strange and empty land?” His lament recalls the feelings of revisiting my home town of Youngstown and missing so many of the places of my youth–my house, my school, my church, the department store where both my father and I worked.

He also recalls the hot summer nights and the passions of the flesh so near the surface while another poem recalls the missed chances of romance.

In the final poem, “The Underworld,” Gioia joins the ranks of poets who chronicle a descent into hell. He alludes to Virgil, Dante, Senecas, Christopher Marlowe, Yeats, and T.S. Eliot. He concludes with “Disappointments” what was not there. He captures the nothingness that the Bible calls the “outer darkness.”

I found that there was a lot I could connect with in Gioia. Perhaps what I like as a relative neophyte at reading poetry is the accessibility of what he writes. Familiar verse structures and rhyme schemes. A story line. Perhaps as well in this collection, his remembering provokes my own. He recalls what is both sweet and sad in life and reminds us of how often these come together.

Now to find more of his work! show less

"A poem is an interruption of silence, whereas prose is a continuation of noise."
Billy Collins




Best American Poetry 2018 edited by Dana Gioia is this years edition of David Lehman's yearly poetry anthology. Gioia is an internationally acclaimed and award-winning poet and former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. He received a B.A. and an M.B.A. from Stanford University and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. Gioia has published four full-length collections show more of poetry, as well as eight chapbooks.

This years edition features seventy-five poets as well as a short biography of each. Lehman opens the collection with his state of poetry address. The New Yorker still publishes poetry. David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, explains:

Poetry is arguably, in some compressed and magical fashion, the highest form of expression, the greatest devotion we have to our most intricate invention, language itself.

That pretty much explains poetry and its importance to language and expression. Even so, poetry seems to have lost the common reader and many uncommon readers. Poetry seems to be on the fringe of literature even among those who attend universities for degrees in literature. I am surprised at the number of people in the field who have not read major poets. Like Lehman, I have also become concerned at the number of "internet sensations" who have published "poetry" in the form of short platitudes or trite cliches. Perhaps, like Lehman hopes, these are gateways to real poetry, but they seem more likely to be saying "I would love poetry if it were not poetry."

This collection, as Gioia mentions, contains a wide variety of poetry: prose poetry, sonnets, free verse, but no internet sensations. The internet has skewed the popularity of poetry. YouTube readings reach millions of people instead of twenty sitting at a coffee shop reading. Poetry Slams and other events see many more people online than in person. Poetry is getting out, but not always in the traditional means. The poetry section at a Barnes and Noble is smaller than the particle physics section (not really, but close). Traditional poetry media seems to be fading. Poetry magazine has two apps. One that has the magazine and another with a poetry database and a fun "find a poem" feature. Jennifer Benka at the Academy of American Poets emails out daily poems. Poetry is still getting out, but it may not always be in book form. Television has even picked up poetry. Rugged Sheriff Longmire read John Donne, and Breaking Bad used Walt Whitman's "When I heard The Learn'd Astronomer." Apple and Volvo have turned to poetry in their advertisements.

Not all is good though. Universities are churning out advanced degrees but not hiring. Adjunct positions are replacing tenured positions to save money. Even so, poets are adapting. No longer are new poets the young professors but baristas, bookstore clerks, professionals, and people from all other walks of life. Technology has allowed more people to publish outside of academia, and social media helps get the word out to a vast audience. Poetry is not dying but merely adapting to the new environment.

This year's collection presents Gioia's favorite poems. The poetry is varied and even contains a haiku-like poem -- Joyce Clement's "Birds Punctuate the Days." Dick Davis presents "A Personal Sonnet," keeping alive the old form of poetry. David Manson's "First Christmas in the Village" presents imagery and new experiences in a traditional form. Mike Owens rounds out the collection by taking on social and mental health issues in his "Sad Math."

What is lacking in this year's collection is a clear-cut theme except, perhaps, the variety of poetry itself. The poetry is arranged alphabetically by the poet's name and not by topic or form; there is no build up or a traditional closing poem that helps connect the collection together. All the poems in the collection were new to me, and with the variety, I can say not all of them were equally liked in form or content. This year's selection was made special by the insight given by both Lehman and Gioia and the poetry used to support their premise. Best American Poetry 2018 is a win for American poetry. show less

Some really nice stuff, I thought it trailed off at the end--the "stories" section struck me as just that, unremarkable stories cut up into lines of poetry. I didn't think the last two sections, "songs" and "love" were as strong as the rest of the book either, though the final poem was the best in the book. Not a lot of poets write rhymed poetry, which makes the book as a whole special.