Poet Dana Gioia starts a new stanza
Poetry is often removed from the life experience of the general population. An accomplished poet with an academic pedigree is no novelty, but look for one grounded in real-world experience and they come in twos and fews. Dana Gioia — winner of the 2002 American Book Award, a USC professor, author of five collections of poetry, editor of many anthologies, opera librettist, former National Endowment for the Arts Chairman — is just such a writer.
“I write for the general reader,” said Gioia, 61, at his USC office. “At Harvard I was trained to be part of a literary vanguard that has almost killed the English language: a cadre of academics writing for no one and only publishing for their careers. There’s a whole industry of poetry books that nobody reads.”
He’ll read from his new collection, “Pity the Beautiful” (Greywolf Press) at Vroman’s Books in Pasadena on Monday. Gioia’s work elevates the reader, even as it digs into life’s muck. “The Angel With the Broken Wing” concludes:
For even the godless feel something in a church,
A twinge of hope, fear? Who knows what it is?
A trembling unaccounted by their laws,
And an ancient memory they can’t dismiss.
A reader doesn’t need an advanced degree to decipher it.
The son of a Sicilian cab driver in Hawthorne, populism is no pose for Gioia. Adjacent Inglewood — equally working class, yet more bountiful in its civic revenues — was glamorous to him. “We had a neighborhood theater,” he recounted, “but most of the time when I wanted to go to a movie, I went to one of the Inglewood theaters. And I spent many hours writing at the Inglewood Public Library. I did my first mature work there.”
What drew him to poetry? “My mother was a Mexican woman,” he said, “of a generation whose school children memorized certain poems. She would recite these stanzas around the house. Poetry always had an audible, musical component for me.”
Reminded of the adage that all art aspires to the state of music, Gioia said, “That’s absolutely true. I always read, but I went to college thinking I was going to be a musician.”
Though he had a master’s degree in comparative literature from Harvard, Gioia returned to Stanford and got an MBA. He worked for a number of years for General Foods, and wrote on his own time — a period he views with mixed feelings. “It cost me something,” he specifies. “I traded my youth and energy, but I had to be practical. It limited my time as a writer but it gave me complete freedom; I could take as much time on a poem as it needed.”
Gioia served as NEA Chairman from 2003 to 2009. He innovated a number of programs that connected art with the populace: Shakespeare in American Communities, Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, the NEA Jazz Masters awards, American Masterpieces and Poetry Out Loud.
“Walt Whitman said, ‘To have great poets you need great audiences,’” said Gioia, who won his American Book Award for “Interrogations at Noon.” “I made sure that California had a certain amount of arts funding for every single district — some of which had never had any arts money before.”
Gioia and his wife Mary recently sold their Sonoma home and moved to South Pasadena. “Most of my old friends in Southern California now live in Pasadena,” he said. “We like our neighborhood because we can walk to almost everything.”
He sees the Vroman’s reading as his debut, of sorts. “I’ll be reading and speaking about my work,” he continued, “but Monday night will be my formal introduction to Pasadena.”
KIRK SILSBEE writes about jazz and culture for Marquee.
What: Poet Dana Gioia, signing copies of “Pity the Beautiful.”
Where: Vroman’s, 695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena
When: Monday, 7 p.m.
Contact: (626) 449-5320, vromansbookstore.com, graywolfpress.org