Dana Gioia Birthday Broadcast 12/24/03Jack FoleyThis is Jack Foley. Today is poet Dana Gioia’s birthday, and I want to celebrate it by making today’s program a kind of birthday present.Dana Gioia, current chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, was born almost exactly at mid-century, December 24, 1950. As many listeners know, December 24 is the vigil of the nativity of Christ. It is also the memorial day of three female saints--two Romans and one Germanic. The first, Emiliana, was niece of Pope Felix and daughter of Saint Sylvia. It is said that Emiliana spent so much time kneeling in prayer that her knees and elbows were arthritically locked in that position. She and her pious sister Saint Thrasilla lived as hermits in their father’s house. Thrasilla received a vision of Saint Felix III, an ancestor, who encouraged her to leave this vale of tears. A few days later, she did just that, dying on Christmas Eve. A few days after her death, Thrasilla appeared in a vision to Emiliana, who followed her sister on the eve of Epiphany. Saint Irmina was daughter of Saint Dagobert II, king of the Franks, and the Anglo-Saxon princess, Matilda. Irmina was betrothed at the age of 15 but her husband died on her wedding day. She became a nun and founded a Benedictine convent. Like Emiliana and Thrasilla, Irmina died a virgin. Of mixed heritage--his father was Sicilian, his mother Mexican and Native American--Dana Gioia came into a world in which saints and ritual mattered and in which births were celebrated. In a recent article in the Catholic magazine Commonweal, Gioia is quoted as saying that “Art is one of the ways we can call people back into the church.” The arts, Gioia suggests, have always been congenial to the Catholic world view because Catholicism is a faith which believes that transcendent truths are incarnated”: The sacraments are models of this. They are outward signs that symbolize an inward turn of grace. The Catholic, literally from birth, when he or she is baptized, is raised in a culture that understands symbols and signs. And it also trains you in understanding the relationship between the visible and the invisible..At fifty-three, Gioia has much to look back upon and much to look forward to. He has already accomplished enough for the entire lifetime of lesser souls. His most recent book of poetry, Interrogations at Noon, won the American Book Award. He has three new books: California Poetry From the Gold Rush to the Present, which Gioia co-edited with Chryss Yost and Jack Hicks; The Misread City: New Literary Los Angeles, which Gioia co-edited with Scott Timberg; and Barrier of a Common Language: An American Looks at Contemporary British Poetry, a book of essays. On today’s show you are going to hear Dana Gioia reading his poem, “The Homecoming,” published in his 1991 book, The Gods of Winter. I won’t comment on the poem except to say that, though it is obviously a dramatic monologue--something spoken not by the poet himself but by an invented character--it is nevertheless a kind of “autobiography” turned round and backwards: not what Gioia is but what he isn’t; not the good man--the man of good intentions--but the evil man, the diabolical, the shadow self without whom the good man has nothing to define himself against. Dana Gioia is far from being the “speaker” of his poem, yet on today’s show you will hear him speaking it. I wrote this about Gioia’s opera libretto, Nosferatu--a Dracula story: 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. 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 the world of art, if not in life (as Baudelaire says), “toute énormité fleurit comme une fleur”: “every outrage blossoms like a flower.”It's important that the central character of “The Homecoming,” hoping for freedom, explicitly rejects the possibility of writing in favor of action. What he discovers is that his longed-for freedom doesn't come from that route. The poet does precisely what the character doesn’t do: write about such things rather than act them out; thus the writing, unlike the character’s guilt-ridden actions, can be cathartic, a bringing of such feelings into the light, where they can be seen and dealt with. The poem makes it clear that the character’s choice is the wrong one: it is only in the realm of art that énormité fleurit, outrage blossoms. It is only there that such perceptions are seen, not as possibilities of action but as material of consciousness, aspects of an ongoing self-awareness which has the courage to reach into the “dark.” If the world into which Gioia was born was one in which “saints and ritual mattered and in which births were celebrated,” the world of his central character is one in which rituals are constantly transgressed and the occasion of birth is anything but one of celebration: rather, he is the child given away, the “unloved child.” In a sense, at Christmas every child is the Christ child, the divine manifestation to which gifts are given. Gioia’s protagonist is anything but the Christ child: he is something closer to the vampire who is the central character of the poet’s opera libretto, Nosferatu. “The Homecoming” contains many issues which are always important at Christmas--family, mother, home. All these are seen, not in a sentimental way, but from the point of view of the outcast; they are affirmed not directly but indirectly. Toute énormité fleurit comme une fleur. And now, “The Homecoming,” written and spoken by Dana Gioia and published in his 1991 book, The Gods of Winter. Happy birthday, Dana. Welcome home.
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Jack Foley