Dana Gioia Defines the Enchantment in Poetry

Dana Gioia may be one of the most productive writers / poets working today. He has six poetry collections, seven essay collections, two translations (Italian and Latin), four opera libretti, 11 books for which he’s served as editor, and a contributor to several collections of essays and poems.  

He came to poetry indirectly – through a 15-year business career. Yes, he quit cold turkey, to focus on poetry and writing. He was associated with New Formalism, which in the 1990s was considered counter cultural (poetry with rhyme and meter, and narrative poetry, were considered rather passe). He was named poet laureate of California. He was chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts; he championed poetry during his tenure. The recipient of numerous awards and recognitions, he’s also received 10 honorary doctorates.

 

In short, Gioia is a presence In American poetry. And he’s in an ideal position to produce a collection of essays entitled Poetry as Enchantment. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Thursday Readings

 

The Norwegian Chesterton: A Brief Introduction to Sigrid Unset – David Deavel at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

“Moonlight, Summer Moonlight,” poem by Emily Bronte – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Elderflower – poem by David Whyte.

 

Poets on Translation: Otherwise the Same – Geoffrey Brock at Poetry.

“Christianity and Poetry” by Dana Gioia

Does poetry matter to your faith? 

Most Christians would likely be puzzled at the question even being asked. 

 

Poet Dana Gioia says it should matter. A lot.

 

In the essay “Christianity and Poetry,” first published 10 years ago, Gioia goes a lot further than saying it should matter. “It is an essential, inextricable, and necessary aspect of religious faith and practice.” It doesn’t matter that most Christians would find that statement absurd, he says, because it’s true. 

 

And then he considers the evidence. How did David pray to God? In poetry called psalms. How did Ruth respond to Naomi’s plea to go back home? In Poetry. The books of Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes are all poetry. So are the Song of Solomon and Lamentations (and the Psalms, of course). While he doesn’t specifically mention it, what is chapter one of Genesis but an oral poem of creation; God speaks the physical world into existence.

 

The gospels and epistles of the New Testament bear the imprint of poetry. The book of Revelation is a prose poem, he says. The Beatitudes are shaped by prophetic verse. Mary’s announcement of the Incarnation in Luke is a poem. Some scholars believe the Aramaic of the Lord’s Prayer is a poem. “When Jesus preached,” Gioia says, “he told stories, spoke poems, and offered proverbs.

 

Dana Gioia

Both Protestants, via modern translations of the Bible, and Catholics, via Vatican II, ground poetry out of Scriptures. The music and the mystery were deemphasized in favor of the strictly rational. And in the process, we forget, or deny, a key aspect of God.

 

Yes, it’s a startling essay, and it goes on for 32 pages. But the man makes a solid argument. To ignore the poetical nature of the Bible is to miss fully understanding it.

 

I came to poetry late. Yes, I was exposed to the poetry we all were in middle and high school, with a strong infusion of British poetry in college. But it wasn’t until I began writing speeches as a central part of my career that I began to take poetry seriously, as something that mattered.

 

And what I began to notice, because I was a church-attending Christian who read and studied on his own as well, was that the Bible was one of the most poetic books I’d ever encountered. It’s almost as if poetry is the language of God.

 

Gioia has published six poetry collections, several works about poetry, and a number of translations, including the recent The Madness of Hercules. He is a former poet laureate of California and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. He’s written four opera libretti and collaborated on many musical compositions. His awards include the American Book Award, the Poet’s Prize, Notre Dame’s Laetare Medal, the Aiken Taylor Award in Modern Poetry, and the Walt Whitman Champion of Liberty Prize, among others. 

 

Related: 

 

Dana Gioia and Meet Me at the Lighthouse: Poems.

 

Rediscovering Seneca: Dana Gioia Translates The Madness of Hercules.

 

Dana Gioia’s Pity the Beautiful: Poems.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

A paper manifesto – Elizabeth Stice at Current Magazine.

 

Editing: Scratch That, Try This Instead – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review. 

 

10° – artwork by Sonja Benskin Mesher. 

 

Churches at the City Boundaries: St. Andrew’s, Holborn – A London Inheritance.

 

The Great Beast – artwork by Jack Baumgartner at The School of the Transfer of Energy.

Rediscovering Seneca: Dana Gioia Translates "The Madness of Hercules"

I took two years of Latin in high school. Even (way back) then, Latin was a dying subject. Nine of us took Latin I. Five of us took Latin II. That was out of an all-boys public high school of 2,000 students. Our Latin teacher was passionate about the language; I can still vividly remember him almost bouncing as he paced in front of the blackboard, always holding a piece of chalk.  

I learned more about English grammar in my Latin classes than in any English class I took. I also unexpectedly learned about the history and literature of Rome. That was because we translated sections of the writings of famous Romans like Julius Caesar, Virgil, Cicero, and a Roman born in Spain named Seneca.

 

Seneca, or Lucius Annaeus Seneca (the Younger), was a Stoic philosopher, poet, playwright, satirist, and, surprisingly, advisor to the Roman emperor Nero. To Seneca’s credit, he was more influential with Nero in the first five years of emperor’s reign; eventually, accused of involvement in a conspiracy to assassinate Nero, Seneca did what many well-known and suddenly-out-of-favor Romans did and committed suicide. I once thought this was a rather extreme practice, but suicide meant the individual’s estate would remain with the heirs and not be confiscated by the state. And the times were such, and the emperors were such, that most of the best people ended up doing that.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Poets and Poems: Dana Gioia and "Meet Me at the Lighthouse"

Flashback to 20 years ago: I had a cousin who’s about 15 years older than I am. Out of the blue, she began calling. I had become the keeper of the family Bible, and she needed information from the family records section. Several phone calls ensued. I was slightly tickled at how ardent she was about pursuing family history. Years later, I understood. I was doing the same thing, chasing down certain death notices, military listings, and cryptic notices left by others on Family Search and Ancestry.com. (And when did I join those web sites?) 

You reach a certain age, and certain things become more important than they once were. This is not unusual; in fact, it’s a common development once you reach you 60s. Art becomes more important. So does great literature (the stuff that’s lasted). And genealogy, as if we need to know where we came from before we become just another record in the family Bible.

 

Ask Dana Gioia (1950-). Better still, read his new poetry collection, Take Me to the Lighthouse: Poems. It’s not a nostalgic collection; Gioia is too clear-eyed a poet to start looking backward and remembering only the good parts. But it is a collection about family, about memory, about growing up, and about what once was but is no longer.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Poets and Poems: James Matthew Wilson and “The Hanging God”

I found poet and writer James Matthew Wilsonin a short reference on a blog, short but glowing, as in, “You need to read Wilson’s new poetry collection, The Hanging God.” I went looking, found more references, and landed at Amazon. Click.

Wilson is an associate professor of Literature and Religion in the Department of Humanities and Augustinian Traditions at Villanova University. He’s both a poet and poetry critic. He writes for several publications, many but not all on the conservative side of the political spectrum, unusual because that’s not where you find most poets today. He’s published in The New Criterion, Front Porch Republic, the Hudson Review, the Raintown Review, The Weekly Standard, Dappled Things,and other literary and political journals. 

He’s published eight books, including a poetry collection, Some Permanent Things; The Catholic Imagination in Modern American Poetry(2014); The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking(2015); and The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Western Tradition (2017). 

The Hanging God, published in 2018, is his second collection of poetry.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

“The Gospel in Gerard Manley Hopkins”

Virtually none of his poetry was published during his lifetime. The major poems he did submit were rejected. He abandoned what could have been a privileged position at Oxford to become, much to his family’s horror, a Catholic. He was dogged by physical ailments. After he became a Jesuit, he was assigned to teach and preach, and he was not particularly successful at either. He finally landed at a Catholic university in Dublin, founded by Cardinal John Henry Newman, and after a few years came down with typhoid because of the contaminated water pipes. And there he died.

In 1917, a friend who had dutifully kept as many of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ (1844-1889) poems as he could published a volume of them, to generally little to no notice. In 1930, a second edition was published, and Hopkins’ poetry became something of a sensation, influencing W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Geoffrey Hill, and Seamus Heaney, among others. His place in the poetic pantheon has remained fixed since then, and what is clear about the poet is how much his faith is wrapped up in his poems.

The Gospel in Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by Margaret Ellsberg and with a fine introduction by California Poet Laureate Dana Gioia, focuses on Hopkins’ faith, and how it inspired and shaped. Editor Ellsberg does this in two ways. She provides informed summaries of the major developments in his life and work, and she includes the poet’s poems, journal entries, letters, and even sermon excerpts to provide the context.

What emerges is a whole and holistic picture of Hopkins and his poetry, and the central role played by his faith.

Margaret Ellsberg

First is the consideration of some of the larger themes in Hopkins’ life and poetry The theme of nature, for example, is very strong, nature that is an expression of God. In fact, Ellsberg sees this as his “greatest greatest” among English poets – “his appropriation to nature to establish religious meaning.” He would see “inscapes” or patterns that “fastened him to God.”

Ellsberg then moves to some of the specific works. His first major poem was “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” an extended consideration of a shipwreck in which five Catholic nuns (among many others) drowned. Discussed are an overview of the event itself and how Hopkins approached it, and then the content and form he used to create the poem. Supplementing this are the letters he wrote to friends describing what he was working on.

This format continues for the consideration of his other poems, using both the editor’s narrative and Hopkins’ own writings about what he was doing. The full texts of the poems considered are included.

Ellsberg received her Ph.D. degree from Harvard University and teaches English at Barnard College. She has also published Created to Praise: The Language of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Oxford University Press, 1987)and is an editor at Slapering Hol Press. 

What the reader gets with the format and approach of The Gospel in Gerard Manley Hopkins is the understanding of Hopkins’ faith in his poetic work, how the poems were written, and what was going on in his life and vocation. The net result is a wonderful introduction to the man and his poetry.