Dana Gioia

Summary: A collection of poems reflecting memories of people from several generations as well as the places of Gioia’s life.

I’ve suggested to others wanting to begin reading poetry to find an anthology and notice whose poetry you like and explore those poets further. Here, I am following my own advice, having encountered and liked Dana Gioia’s poetry in an anthology. And in this case, it was good advice. There was so much I connected with in these poems.

Many of these are about memories, typified in the opening and title poem, “Meet Me at the Lighthouse.” He recalls an old nightclub, on a foggy pier, speaks to an anonymous friend who has died, urging him to meet him there for one night of listening to some of the greats in jazz–Gerry Mulligan, Cannonball Adderly, Hampton Hawes, Stan Getz, Chet Baker, and Art Pepper. Who of us hasn’t remembered places like this and ghosts of our past and wished for ‘one more time?”

In “Three Drunk Poets” he recalls the crazy things we do in our youth. In this case, he recalls a night where, with two other poet friends in a small town, they challenged each other to keep walking until they ran out of remembered poems. They ran out of city lights before they did poems, with a coyote joining the recitation. At that, they turned around.

“Tinsel, Frankincense, and Fir” evokes memories of the Christmas season. Like many of us, his decorations are old and carry memories of Christmases past–and the ghosts of family.

Gioia evokes other ghosts. One is of an uncle, Theodore Ortiz, who joined the U.S. Merchant Marine, serving until his early death. Another is of the life and death of his great grandfather, Jesus Ortiz, and of the two boys who followed him as cowboys.

He writes several poems about Los Angeles. “Psalm and Lament for Los Angeles” paraphrases Psalm 137, setting it in the demolished places of his childhood. He asks, “What was there to sing in a strange and empty land?” His lament recalls the feelings of revisiting my home town of Youngstown and missing so many of the places of my youth–my house, my school, my church, the department store where both my father and I worked.

He also recalls the hot summer nights and the passions of the flesh so near the surface while another poem recalls the missed chances of romance.

In the final poem, “The Underworld,” Gioia joins the ranks of poets who chronicle a descent into hell. He alludes to Virgil, Dante, Senecas, Christopher Marlowe, Yeats, and T.S. Eliot. He concludes with “Disappointments” what was not there. He captures the nothingness that the Bible calls the “outer darkness.”

I found that there was a lot I could connect with in Gioia. Perhaps what I like as a relative neophyte at reading poetry is the accessibility of what he writes. Familiar verse structures and rhyme schemes. A story line. Perhaps as well in this collection, his remembering provokes my own. He recalls what is both sweet and sad in life and reminds us of how often these come together.

Now to find more of his work!… (more)