DANA GIOIA: POET OF A COMMON WORLD
Dana Gioia with a Mexican folk statue of Saint Sebastian
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CONTEMPORARY POETRY belongs to a subculture … it is no longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life … it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group. These were some of the trenchant claims made by the American poet Dana Gioia in his book Can Poetry Matter? (1992). The comments released a storm of commentary and reflection, especially in England and the United States, a storm which has still not wholly abated.
What were the reasons for this narrowing of poetry to a small professional group? According to Dana Gioia, one of the main reasons lay with the artificial support for creative writing within universities. Ironically, this expansion in one confined area depleted its life in the larger community. It led, in the words of Gioia, to the superabundance of poetry within a small class and to a general impoverishment outside it. Without a place in the common culture, people became deprived of the spiritual challenge of poetry as well as the verbal charge of its formulation, while within the literary ghetto poetry was in danger of losing its way in a narcissistic maze of compliance, fashion and careerism.
WHAT IS THE ANSWER to the dilemma? According to Gioia, the poet must struggle to re-enter the public realm. This could involve many different moves: from reviving many of the traditional measures of poetry, to connecting with other art forms; from writing poetry which is vulnerable, un-ironic and deeply moving, to redefining the role of poetry in the life of society. All the answers involve a dramatic movement from a professional ghetto out into the common world. We need poetry for its linguistic energy as for its seminal insight. Gioia himself is part of an American movement called Expansive Poetry. The title alone indicates the nature of his life-affirming agenda.
But, always, the first responsibility of the poet is to write poetry and here Dana Gioia has made his own distinctive contribution. In three volumes of poetry he has established his own personal idiom. His style is deeply musical in cadence while remaining close to common speech. His themes range across the multiplicities of human experience, but many of the poems are quietly visionary and possess a spiritual core as hard and resonant as amber. He is drawn often to the spirit of place and to the unsentimental contemplation of the enduring grandeur of nature. Planting a Sequoia is a deeply personal poem about the death of his first son; Becoming a Redwood celebrates the power of the redwood "rooted for centuries" and "thickened with a hundred thousand days of light". This, indeed, is the kind of poetry that connects us to our common world and calls out for a common audience.
PETER ABBS, Poetry Editor www.peterabbs.co.uk
Aesthetic pleasure
WHY SHOULD ANYONE but a poet care about the problems of poetry? What possible relevance does this art form have to contemporary society? In a better world, poetry would need no justification beyond the sheer splendour of its own existence.
Children know this essential truth when they ask to hear their favourite nursery rhymes again and again. Aesthetic pleasure needs no justification.
But the rest of society has mostly forgotten the value of poetry. Anyone who hopes to broaden poetry’s audience faces a daunting challenge. How does one persuade justly skeptical readers that poetry still matters?
THE HISTORY OF art tells the same story over and over. As art forms develop, they establish conventions that guide creation, performance, instruction, even analysis. But eventually these conventions grow stale. They begin to stand between the art and its audience. Although much wonderful poetry is being written, the poetry establishment is locked into a series of exhausted conventions — outmoded ways of presenting, discussing, editing, and teaching poetry. Educational institutions have codified them into a stifling bureaucratic etiquette that enervates the art. These conventions may once have made sense, but today they imprison poetry in an intellectual ghetto.
It is time to experiment, time to leave the well-ordered but stuffy classroom, time to restore a vitality to poetry and unleash the energy now trapped in the sub-culture. There is nothing to lose. Society has already told us that poetry is dead. Let’s build a funeral pyre out of the desiccated conventions piled around us and watch the ancient, spangle-feathered, unkillable phoenix rise from the ashes.
Dana Gioia
PLANTING A SEQUOIA
All afternoon my brothers and I have worked in the orchard,
Digging this hole, laying you into it, carefully packing the soil.
Rain blackened the horizon, but cold winds kept it over the Pacific,
And the sky above us stayed the dull gray
Of an old year coming to an end.
In Sicily a father plants a tree to celebrate his first son’s birth
—
An olive or a fig tree — a sign that the earth has once more life
to bear.
I would have done the same, proudly laying new stock into my father’s
orchard.
A green sapling rising among the twisted apple boughs,
A promise of new fruit in other autumns.
But today we kneel in the cold planting you, our native giant,
Defying the practical custom of our fathers,
Wrapping in your roots a lock of hair, a piece of an infant’s birth
cord,
All that remains above earth of a first-born son,
A few stray atoms brought back to the elements.
We will give you what we can — our labour and our soil,
Water drawn from the earth when the skies fail,
Nights scented with the ocean fog, days softened by the circuit of bees.
We plant you in the corner of the grove, bathed in western light,
A slender shoot against the sunset.
And when our family is no more, all of his unborn brothers dead,
Every niece and nephew scattered, the house torn down,
His mother’s beauty ashes in the air,
I want you to stand among strangers, all young and ephemeral to you,
Silently keeping the secret of your birth.
BECOMING A REDWOOD
Stand in a field long enough, and the sounds
start up again. The crickets, the invisible
toad who claims that change is possible,
And all the other life too small to name.
First one, then another, until innumerable
they merge into the single voice of a summer hill.
Yes, it’s hard to stand still, hour after hour,
fixed as a fencepost, hearing the steers
snort in the dark pasture, smelling the manure.
And paralysed by the mystery of how a stone
can bear to be a stone, the pain
the grass endures breaking through the earth’s crust.
Unimaginable the redwoods on the far hill,
rooted for centuries, the living wood grown tall
and thickened with a hundred thousand days of light.
The old windmill creaks in perfect time
to the wind shaking the miles of pasture grass,
and the last farmhouse light goes off.
Something moves nearby. Coyotes hunt
these hills and packs of feral dogs.
But standing here at night accepts all that.
You are your own pale shadow in the quarter moon,
moving more slowly than the crippled stars,
part of the moonlight as the moonlight falls,
Part of the grass that answers the wind,
part of the midnight’s watchfulness that knows
there is no silence but when danger comes.
Dana Gioia
Both poems have been taken from The Gods of Winter published by Peterloo Poets