Dana Gioia—the author of numerous volumes of poems, translations, literary criticism, and essays, as well as a book editor and lyricist—is one of the most important figures in contemporary letters. Having served as chair of the NEA, poetry editor of Italian Americana (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 “Poetry as Enchantment” 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’s beautiful collection, 99 Poems: New and Selected, 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’s wide-ranging career, 99 Poems strikes notes of gravity and humor, disappointment and wonder, skepticism and celebration, grief and joy.
The first section, “Mystery,” sets up Gioia’s lucid yet complex perspective. In the wistful poem “Insomnia,” the speaker contemplates mysteries such as “the murmur of property, of things in disrepair” and “the faces you could not bring yourself to love,” arriving at no epiphany but “The terrible clarity this moment brings, / the useless insight, the unbroken dark.” In “The Stars Now Rearrange Themselves,” the speaker considers that, alas, there are no guiding stars to rely on at the moment, and urges us to “look for smaller signs.” 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’t even look for too much meaning, but that we shouldn’t 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. But is there no higher, transcendent realm? In “All Souls’” the speaker asks us to imagine (as did Marx and John Lennon) that “there is no heaven and no hell,” while adding that even the spirit trapped in this unholy world is “disabled.” The poem “Maze without a Minotaur” describes a maze in which there are “no monsters but ourselves.” Indeed, the only monster in the poem “Monster” is described as “the thing I have created.” It appears that we are responsible for our own problems, values, actions, judgment, and vision.
Similar principles apply in the next section, “Place,” though the poet’s evocations of place involve polemical, social, and political commentary. “A California Requiem,” one of many poems about Gioia’s home state, concludes: “We could not…/ see the trees cut down for our view. / What we possessed, we always chose to kill.” Equally admonitory is “Most Journeys Come to This,” a poem about Italy, one of Gioia’s 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:
Leave the museums. Find dark churches
in back towns that history has forgotten,
the unimportant places the powerful ignore
where commerce knows no profit will be made.
This emphasis on the road less traveled is of course fitting for the itinerary of a poet (in fact, Gioia’s “The Road” 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, “if the vision fails,” there is perhaps nothing left to contemplate but:
the grim and superannuated gods
who rule this shadow-land of marble tombs,
bathed in its green suboceanic light.
Not a vision to pursue, and yet
these insufficiencies make up the world.
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’s more, if what “most journeys come to” is at best a vision of “the insufficiencies of the world,” just the shadow-realm of “the grim and superannuated gods,” is there any place left for the monotheistic God, or for any enduring higher power or purpose?
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 “Shopping,” the speaker takes on the role of a latter-day Jesus sardonically parodying the Beatitudes to critique American materialism: “Blessed are the acquisitive, / For theirs is the kingdom of commerce.” These godless values are inadequate. But unlike in “Most Journeys,” here even the resident deities are reduced to puns: “Redeem me…/ Mercury, protector of cell phones and fax machines.” Indeed, “Spending all my time, discounting all I see,” this speaker makes short work of even Wordsworth’s plaintive invocation to the spirits of pantheism, countering that “There is nothing but the getting and spending….” In fact, in “Prophecy,” Gioia invokes the Lord’s prayer as if to include the oracular mode itself in his list of misguided pretentions: “O Lord of indirection and ellipses, / ignore our prayers. Deliver us from distraction…// bless us with ennui and quietude…”
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 “Place” even includes a poem set in the Never-Never land of the airport. It concludes, “But nothing ever happens here.” It is hard not to hear an echo of Auden’s elegy to his own less skeptical predecessor, W.B. Yeats, in which Auden’s speaker insists that “poetry makes nothing happen,” a subject Gioia addressed in his 1991 AtlanticMonthly essay, “Can Poetry Matter?” 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 “progress,” after all, can entail overlooking deeper, quieter truths. At the close of this section, the speaker of one of Gioia’s newer poems concludes (perhaps echoing Eliot) that even a writer may get much further by staying where he is: “What a blessing just to sit still…,” he observes. “Let the dust settle on my desk. / No one needs to hear from me today” (“Progress Report”). And yes, writing about having gotten nothing done amounts to getting something done. But it takes the proper preparation.
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’s power. The poems in the section entitled “Imagination” are often about the lack thereof. They are also often archly meta-poetic. “My Confessional Sestina” is a hilariously clever putdown of writing workshop hackwork. And that word “Confessional” in the title is aptly mock-Catholic. It prepares us for the next poem, in which the title merges with the first line: “The Silence of the Poets / is something to be grateful for.” The playful poem that follows is about how money is not simply or unironically, as Stevens mused, “a kind of poetry” (“Money”). And the next poem, entitled “The Next Poem,” is in part about the disappointment a poet faces: “How much better it seems now / than when it is finally written.” What’s more, this section of the book is not without sociopolitical statements about how imagination can get us into trouble. Consider the end of “A Short History of Tobacco”:
The elders smoked and chanted in a trance.
The Mayans blew the smoke to the four corners
of the world. It was a gift from God—
profitable, poisonous, and purely American.
More intimate, personal explorations come to the fore in the section on “Remembrance,” where we find “Finding a Box of Family Letters,” about Gioia’s memories of his father. Even more challenging to easy faith are the poems inspired by the death of his infant son (including the moving “Planting a Sequoia,” and “Special Treatments Ward”). In “Majority,” which was written twenty years later, the speaker both imagines the maturation of that son and offers his farewell, without clarifying whether the “afterlife” he refers to is just a trope or something more.
Gioia is a master, rare in this day and age, of the narrative poem, as the “Stories” section bears out. “Haunted,” 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 “as if alive.” 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 “higher” realm exist in Gioia’s universe, or in ours?
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 clichés, as in this excerpt from “Film Noir,” a poem in the “Songs” section:
She’s married but lonely. She wishes she could.
Watch your hands! Oh, that feels good.
She whispers how much she needs a man.
If only he’d help her. She has a plan.
Their eyes meet, and he can tell
It’s gonna be fun, but it won’t end well.
He hears her plot with growing unease.
She strokes his cheek, and he agrees.
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’s work does at times strike transcendent chords. “Prayer” 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 “Vultures Mating.” Here the poet taps into a primal sense of religiosity, as in something out of D.H. Lawrence or Stanley Kunitz: “the buzzard or the princess, the scorpion, the rose— / each damp and fecund bud yearning to burst, / to burn, to blossom, to begin.”
“Love,” the last section of the book, closes with “Marriage of Many Years,” a subtler paean to what “happens beyond words.” Though (as the speaker of an earlier poem, “On Approaching Forty,” affirmed), everything passes away, love itself involves a language spiritual enough to express acceptance, thereby arriving at what is ultimately “learned by heart.” Here Gioia’s speaker eloquently celebrates this quiet mystery:
Let the young vaunt their ecstasy. We keep
our tribe of two in sovereign secrecy.
What must be lost was never lost on us.
Throughout the volume, in its ongoing push-and-pull between affirmation and doubt, Gioia’s work demonstrates mastery of many genres and forms, showing us how poetry can disabuse us of easy clichés 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.
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