The Achievement of Dana Gioia

he title of this talk, "The Achievement of Dana Gioia," sounds a little as though Dana Gioia's "achievement" were over, finished. We usually deal with the "achievement" of dead writers such as Robert Frost or T.S. Eliot. Perhaps we should say instead, "The Continuing Achievement of Dana Gioia"; perhaps even—since he is still a young man—the possible future achievement of Dana Gioia.

Since childhood, Dana Gioia has certainly been an achiever. "In my childhood milieu," he writes in his essay, "Lonely Impulse of Delight"—the title is from Yeats' "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death"—

reading was associated with self-improvement. I suppose this uplifting motive played some role in my intellectual pursuits, but my insatiable appetite for books came mostly from curiosity and pleasure. I liked to read.. I liked to study and investigate subjects that interested me...My interests changed and developed year by year.

He describes himself lying in bed and reading while his brother slept:

Once we were in bed, [my parents] never forced us to turn off the lights—one of their countless kindnesses. Consequently, every night I read in bed, often for hours. When I remember my childhood reading, I see myself in Sears and Roebuck pajamas propped up under the covers devouring The Circus of Dr. Lao, The Time Machine or The Lost World while my younger brother Ted sleeps in the twin bed beside me. I usually kept the next book I planned to read on my nightstand—not so much as an incentive to finish my current selection but simply to provide anticipatory pleasure.

One thinks of him, not only as a child but as an adult, as continually awake, at the service of a consciousness (embodied initially in books) which is always prodding him to one more thought, one more new idea. "Even as a young boy," he writes, "I had trouble falling asleep."

Dana Gioia is certainly the only member of the Bush administration consistently to receive good press—even ecstatic press—and that in itself is no mean achievement. His enormous energy and his boundless sense of creative possibility—his sense of play—matched with his good sense, his practicality, have made him a magnificent chair of the National Endowment for the Arts. We all know this and are grateful. That too is an achievement. It is also of some importance that, though he is no priest, a public intellectual of Gioia's stature is speaking to a predominantly Protestant country from the point of view of Catholicism—not from the ordinary sense of Catholicism, perhaps, but from the point of view of Catholicism nonetheless. Hispanics, Italians, the Irish—all are predominantly Catholic people, and it is their voices that we can find echoed in his. Even further, he is a Westerner speaking to a country in which the principle sources of power—both cultural and political—tend to reside in the East: "I am Latin," he writes in "Fallen Western Star,"

(Italian, Mexican, and American Indian) without a drop of British blood in my veins, but English is my tongue. It belongs to me as much as to any member of the House of Lords. The classics of English—Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, and Keats—are my classics. The myths and images of its literature are native to my imagination. And yet this rich literary past often stands at one remove from the experiential reality of the West. Our seasons, climate, landscape, natural life, and history are alien to the world- views of both England and New England. Spanish—not French—colors our regional accent.. The world looks and feels different in California from the way it does in Massachusetts or Manchester—not only the natural landscape but also the urban one. There is no use listening for a nightingale among the scrub oaks and chaparral. Our challenge is not only to find the right words to describe our experience but also to discover the right images, myths, and characters. We must describe a reality that has never been fully captured in English.

Gioia is also famous for his criticism, which is always articulate, provocative, intelligent, and passionately conceived. His essay—and then later the book—Can Poetry Matter? was a kind of trumpet blast of a new sensibility which had many important things to say and which—amazingly—was defending rhyme and meter in an intelligent, even compelling way. When recently I was putting together a collection of my essays, I discovered that almost all my best pieces referred to Gioia in some way. I didn't always agree with him, of course, but the effect he had on my thought was clearly far-reaching and profound. One could write a long essay on Gioia the critic. But, as is often the case with poet/critics, Gioia's criticism arises out of issues which inform his poetry. It is Dana Gioia the poet—the man of ideas who is also the man of emotions—that I wish to speak of today. Gioia's criticism is of considerable cultural importance—and it is beautifully written—but it is in poetry that his deepest achievement lies. In talking about his poetry I will move perhaps overly freely in and around various of Dana Gioia's books. I assume that most people in this room are familiar with them.

I once remarked upon the number of times the word "dark" appears in Dana Gioia's poetry; it is almost omnipresent. One finds it for example in the concluding lines of "Insomnia":

The terrible clarity this moment brings,
the useless insight, the unbroken dark.

Elegy and loss are important themes in this poet's work, but have you noticed how often violence enters Dana Gioia's poetry? His most recent book of poetry, Interrogations at Noon, has these lines via Seneca:

Now, servants of the underworld, begin!
Let my voice shake the deepest pit of hell
And wake the Furies, daughters of the Night.
Come to me sisters, with your hair aflame,
With savage claws. Inflict your punishments.

And the concluding two stanzas of his brilliant poem, "The Homecoming," from The Gods of Winter are first, an ecstatic affirmation of violence—a giving in to it—and second, a disillusioned movement away from it. The word "dark" appears in the first stanza; the word "darkness appears in the second. Interestingly, the first phrase of the first stanza, "I felt a sudden tremor of delight," comes close to Gioia's description of his childhood reading as "a lonely impulse of delight." (The books read by the protagonist of "The Homecoming" as a young man are essentially the same books Gioia read as a young man.)

"The Homecoming" is a dramatic monologue spoken by a man who has just escaped from prison; at the conclusion of the poem, the man murders his foster mother. His reaction to the murder is,

I felt a sudden tremor of delight,
a happiness that went beyond my body
as if the walls around me had collapsed,
and a small dark room where I had been confined
had been amazingly transformed by light.
Radiant and invincible, I knew
I was the source of energy, and all
the jails and sheriffs could not hold me back.
I had been strong enough. And I was free.

But as I stood there gloating, gradually
the darkness and the walls closed in again.
Sensing the power melting from my arms,
I realized the energy I felt
was just adrenaline—the phoney high
that violence unleashes in your blood.
I saw her body lying on the floor
and knew that we would always be together.
All I could do was wait for the police.
I had come home, and there was no escape.

The second stanza, beginning "But as I stood there gloating," is a point-by-point refutation of the first stanza. If "I was free" in the first stanza, in the second "there was no escape." If "I was the source of energy" in the first stanza, in the second stanza "the energy I felt / was just adrenaline—the phoney high / that violence unleashes in your blood."

Gioia clearly wishes us to feel that the protagonist's experience of "Radiance" and "invincibility" is a false form of true mystical experience: that it "was just adrenaline." Yet don't the lines as we initially experience them feel like a genuine evocation of a mystical state?

True, it is violence which causes this feeling of radiance and invincibility, but isn't there something about that passage which is utterly convincing? Aren't all mystical states temporary? Doesn't even the highest of mystical states involve a rush of "adrenaline"? Gioia writes in "A Lonely Impulse of Delight" that he "found spiritual sustenance ...in The Lives of the Saints, especially in its vivid accounts of legendary hermits and martyrs."

What is the theme of violence doing in the consciousness of this most gentle of men, whom I have never once heard raise his voice in anger? Freudian notions of "repression" and the violence with which repressed contents sometimes announce themselves are of course relevant here. Like Freud, Gioia understands the mind to be a deeply divided entity. "I like writing poems that have a surface which executes one shape and a sub-text which executes another," he writes in The Irish Review. From this point of view, the "I" who says "I was free" represents deep- seated desires which the protagonist has suppressed and which are "let out"—freed—in a cathartic moment; this "I" is "Mister Hyde." But there is more to it than that. That we live in a violent nation and in an extremely violent historical period will come as no surprise to anyone in this audience, and in part the violence of Gioia's poems is an expression of this greater societal violence. (As a child, Gioia says, he lived in a "violent" neighborhood.)

But I would suggest that the violence we encounter in Gioia's poetry goes beyond Freudian or sociological categories. It is the violence of thought itself. Imagination, feelings of radiance and invincibility, announce themselves to Gioia in a profoundly disturbing, alienating way. They thrust him out, away from community, into what he calls in "A Lonely Impulse of Delight" "odd behavior," "secrecy," "the pattern of a double life," into behavior which is—as he writes— "clearly excessive, indeed almost shameful": "Not able to control this passion," he says, "I needed to hide it." This is his poem, "Country Wife"—the title perhaps echoes Frost's "The Hill Wife"—from Daily Horoscope. Each stanza of the poem is a triolet:

She makes her way through the dark trees
Down to the lake to be alone.
Following their voices on the breeze,
She makes her way. Through the dark trees
The distant stars are all she sees.
They cannot light the way she's gone.
She makes her way through the dark trees
Down to the lake to be alone.

The night reflected on the lake,
The fire of stars changed into water.
She cannot see the winds that break
The night reflected on the lake
But knows they motion for her sake.
These are the choices they have brought her:
The night reflected on the lake,
The fire of stars changed into water.

In the famous crossing-the-Alps passage of Wordsworth's The Prelude, Imagination is first seen as a negative force:

Imagination—here the Power so called
Through sad incompetence of human speech,
That awful Power rose from the mind's abyss
Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps,
At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost....

But the force's "strength / Of usurpation" transforms itself into sheer vision:

The light of sense
Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed
The invisible world...
Our destiny, our being's heart and home,
Is with infinitude, and only there...

The great achievement of Dana Gioia's early life must have been the tempering of this impulse, the discovery of ways in which this ambiguous, violent, sleep-preventing wildness of consciousness could be used to good purpose, "the fire of stars changed into water." As "The Homecoming" demonstrates, "energy" is a violence which may result in the most appalling events. Yet, as Blake says—and as Gioia's poetry often demonstrates—energy is also eternal delight. Words are a place in which this violence—this power of imagination—can find a home, yet, as he writes in Interrogations at Noon, "So much of what we live goes on inside," "The world does not need words." Form is a tempering device, and if Gioia is a formalist, he is a formalist whose stanzas burst with a Romantic understanding of consciousness and the poet's role. He opens Interrogations at Noon with a quotation from Flaubert:

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

One of the great tenets of American Puritanism is the notion that choosing is an unqualified good: it is what affirms us as human. (The great poem of Puritanism, Milton's Paradise Lost, is all about a wrong choice.) Dana Gioia's work is alive with choices which are not quite made—or, if made, made in the context of elegy rather than triumph, so that the thing chosen against retains some power. His work is a way of giving "local habitation and a name" to forces which exist in pure darkness and which simultaneously energize and threaten; indeed, the poet's task is precisely to retain the energy and to diminish the threat. Gioia quotes Ovid: "The gods have their own rules." His Nosferatu sings,

I am the image that darkens your glass,
The shadow that falls wherever you pass.
I am the dream you cannot forget,
The face you remember without having met.

I am the truth that must not be spoken. (My italics)

Gioia's opera Nosferatu is a deliberate affront to what the poet calls in his introduction to Robert McDowell's The Diviners "our sentimental, upbeat age." It is an assertion, as he says in that essay, of "the contradictory impulses at the center of the human heart." At the same time, however, Nosferatu is, precisely, an opera—an example of an art which deliberately combines music, drama, and poetry, an art which is, to use a word Gioia uses, "integrative." We do not walk out of the theater feeling that we have confronted the horrific contradictions of human nature. Rather, we feel released, purified even. Though the "material" of Gioia's work is violently contradictory—good vs. evil, light vs. darkness—its mode is persistently "integrative." "Poetry," Gioia writes in The Irish Review,

comes from a point in our past when we understood our own experience without separating our minds from our bodies, our logic from intuition and imagination....

Gioia's assertions about "the new narrative"—"The new narrative must tell a memorable story in language that constantly delivers a lyric frisson"—and about opera—"While the structure of opera is narrative, its power is lyric"—are really assertions about the need for myth. It is only through a mythological construction that "the contradictory impulses at the center of the human heart" can be expressed, and the myth that is closest to Gioia's hand is the myth of Catholicism. Dracula is that myth turned round and darkened, just as the protagonist of "The Homecoming" is a kind of saint or hermit in reversal. There is a line in one of the poems in Interrogations at Noon, "A California Requiem," which is almost a description of the concluding scene of Nosferatu: "We are," Gioia writes, "like shadows the bright noon erases." Our lives are brief, fleeting, shadow-like. Yet the beauty of the "holistic" mythological construction, which combines the personal with the impersonal, the lyric with the narrative, gives us a tentative, problematical, fragile "immortality."

In Gioia's work there is always a secret world which intrudes itself upon the daylight world of ordinary consciousness. In "A Lonely Impulse of Delight" he asserts that "every true reader has a secret life, which is...intense, complex, and important...Our inner lives are as rich and real as our outer lives, even if they remain mostly unknowable to others." And he writes in the beautiful concluding poem of Interrogations at Noon,

What we conceal
Is always more than what we dare confide.
Think of the letters that we write our dead.

Dana Gioia's energies extend in an extraordinary number of directions, and his poetry often circles around the notion of rediscovery—even, at times, of resurrection. Yet the elegiac is always at work as well. One sometimes wonders why a man named Joy writes poems of such sadness. At the core of his work are not only themes of the Romantic Imagination or violence or "the contradictory impulses at the center of the human heart"; at the core of his work are what Virgil called "lacrimae rerum," "the tears of things." Nosferatu is a villain, yes, but he is not only a villain: he is the secret hero of the play. And like everything else—like us—he vanishes. It is Dana Gioia's achievement to tell us these things in a way which is profound, funny, compelling, and always—like violence—provocative. He gives us the "fire" not as it is in itself but as it is reflected in the deep water of a poet's consciousness.