Dana Gioia on Poetry, Death and Mortality

Dana Gioia: It’s good to be back.

Dana Gioia: Yeah. Let me show you–this is a picture, actually, of the entrance of the Lighthouse. It is an actual nightclub–a rather shabby one–that’s in Hermosa Beach, California, just outside of Los Angeles. Anybody who is a huge jazz fan will know this nightclub, and this is a poem that takes place there. Everyone in the poem, except me, is dead. I’m talking, actually, to my closest friend, growing up–my cousin, who died at 39. This is a place we went together. So, it’s really a poem to him. I’ll mention a lot of names in the poem: Chet, Cannonball, Stan, Jerry. These are the names of famous jazz musicians: Cannonball Adderley, Chet Baker, Art Pepper. Don’t let them disturb you. The name of the house band at the club was the Lighthouse All-Stars.

Meet me at the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach,
That shabby nightclub on its foggy pier.
Let’s aim for the summer of ’71,
when all of our friends were young and immortal.

I’ll pick up the cover charge, find us a table,
and order a round of their watery drinks.
Let’s savor the smoke of that sinister century,
perfume of tobacco in the tangy salt air.

The crowd will be quiet–only ghosts at the bar–
So you, old friend, won’t feel out of place.
You need a night out from that dim subdivision.
Tell Dr. Death you’ll be home before dawn.

The club has booked the best talent in Tartarus.
Jerry, Cannonball, Hampton, and Stan,
with Chet and Art, those gorgeous greenhorns–
The swinging-masters of our West Coast soul.

Let the All-Stars shine from that jerry-built stage.
Let their high notes shimmer above the cold waves.
Time and the tide are counting the beats.
Death the collector is keeping the tab.

[The above is the poem as printed in the book. As spoken, Gioia substituted “The club” for “The crowd” in the first line of the third stanza and “beat” for “beats” in the last stanza. Note that in this Transcript, as much as possible, we have used printed versions of poems rather than the versions spoken from memory.–Econlib Ed.]

Dana Gioia: Tartarus. I said, “The club has booked the best talent in Tartarus.” Tartarus is the lowest region of kind of the classical, the Greco-Roman Hell. So, it’s the underworld. I have no idealistic notions of where these jazz musicians have ended up. They’re in the underworld and they’re not even the higher echelon. But, I liked that line: “The club has booked the best talent in Tartarus.”

Dana Gioia: Yeah, well, is Cerberus lives in Tartarus–

Dana Gioia: I think he guards the guards the gate to it.

There’s one other allusion in the poem I should probably point out at. It’s–I love to steal great lines and play with them. And, at this visionary moment in W.B. Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium,” where he imagines these holy men and that are kind of in the gold mosaic of a wall, he calls them “The singing masters of our soul.” And so I have “the swinging masters of our West Coast soul.”

Dana Gioia: But, anyway, I stole part of that line, but I think I made it my own.

Dana Gioia: Yeah, well that’s exactly what I want. I want it to be a kind of faint allusion. I believe that really great poetry just necessarily, unavoidably plays off all the poetry that’s been written. Because if I’m reading you a new poem, you’ve had a lifetime of experience. And so, you take that experience and you just don’t repeat it, but you play with it and you honor the listeners’ lifetime of experience. I’ve got a kind of a novel beat. I’m playing with a different rhythm, but I’m playing with all sorts of things there, because you try to make every line interesting.

Dana Gioia: Yeah.

Well, this one actually I probably changed one line–

Dana Gioia: Do you have-yeah, it could be. It was interesting, I was listening to Bob Dylan last night, a live concert from 1966, and I noticed he played with his lines; and I liked that. I said, ‘That’s what oral performance is.’

Dana Gioia: But, this is one, I made a couple of adjustments in the last part of the proofs.

Dana Gioia: But, it’s–an oral text is like jazz. It always has a little bit of room. But, I recited it from memory. The–

Dana Gioia: Yes. Well, he grew up next door to me. We were in this little enclave of Sicilian immigrants, and we were the two kids that went to college. He actually was a dentist. He got a brain tumor. He had two small kids. But, growing up I saw him every day. We went to the same school, the same church, same high school. We hitchhiked the beach together. So we were like brothers. And, I thought that he needed a night out.

That sounds odd. Let me be really clear about this, Russ. I believe in a metaphysical realm of existence. Now, it could be external or it could be entirely internal, but I believe there’s a continuity between the living and the dead. I pray for my parents. I lost a son, when my first son died. So, I carry the dead with me. I still talk to my mother; and she talks back. I would consider it an impoverishment for me to lose my son, my dad, my mother, my cousin, my many friends. That–it’s odd. It’s very un-American. Americans tend to say, ‘You shouldn’t think about death. Oh, that’s morbid.’ But, I don’t think it is at all. I think it makes my life more interesting.

Dana Gioia: Yeah, I’m very tribal. But when I think of what poetry is, I think of myself as an artist; and I’m coming into a conversation that has gone on since the beginning of human history. I mean, actually it predates history because poetry predates writing. I come into this conversation which is going on and it’s going to continue on after I’m gone. If I’m a great poet, I can expand the conversation or refine it.

And, I realized after awhile, that’s how I think of life. I’m part of this genetic human continuity that goes back to ancestors I can’t even imagine. But, I did know my grandparents, my parents, and my children. There’s a continuity between life and death, between generations. We see it in genetics and we see it in the personalities and the values and the experiences. So, if you say, ‘Move on,’ I’ll say, ‘Okay, I’ll move on. But, I’m taking them with me.’

Dana Gioia: Well, at one–it’s in The Real Thing where Stoppard also talks about–he’s thinking about writing, and I think it’s actually even about writing a poem. He’s talking in comparison to, I think, a cricket bat and about how the refinement of the shape and the swing and things like this. That’s what a poet is doing. The reward is to have your words mouthed by children not yet born. That struck me as absolutely the highest honor in poetry–is to have people outside of your narrow time band that see something of value in what you’re doing.

You know, when I was a young, ambitious writer at Stanford and Harvard and imagining how I’d make my mark, I had this very English-department notion of what a poem is, and it’s relationship to the great tradition and the history of ideas. But, nowadays, I think of what a poem is, is this instrument of language that you create, that is one-half a game and one-half a kind of spiritual exploration. But, the highest thing that you can do is to be useful, is to have these words be useful to people in the dilemmas of their actual lives. If you’re lucky, they will find uses for your poem that you don’t even imagine.

But, I had a very odd thing where I wrote a poem and I had people talk about it in a totally different context. And I read the poem, and I realized it applied to that context equally. In fact, I rather liked that as much as I liked my own. Because, poems are like children. Once they’re out of the house, they do things that you didn’t imagine and you may not approve of. But, what you’re trying to do is to make them able to lead independent lives.

I know that sounds very odd, but once my poems are published, I’m simply one of the readers. I probably may be the best-informed reader, but if they belong anywhere at all, they belong in the language, into the readers of the language.

Dana Gioia: What came to me, I was–there was an artist, a very fine artist, and he was collaborating with another artist. They were making this extraordinary book–this huge, large folio[?] of books–with prints of jazz musicians. And, they got the idea that they would ask my brother, Ted Gioa–who was probably at this point, if not the most famous jazz writer in the world, he’s certainly the best-selling jazz writer in the world–if he would write prose and I would write a poem. And I told him, I said, ‘You know, I’ve written one or two poems about jazz, but I can never write a poem that is necessarily any good.’

And I began thinking about it and thinking about it. And then I realized it wasn’t going to be about jazz. It was going to be about a world that jazz created. And my cousin’s ghost came to me, as it were; and I thought about going there to him. And then suddenly the poem became possible, because it was–if the poem doesn’t come out of an inner urgency, and I realized that we had done this together and we had–sort of: Jazz itself was simply part of the total human experience that we had. Once I brought my cousin Phillip into the poem, the whole poem became alive. And, I knew that it was all the ghosts.

If you love music, if you love literature, most of the people you are reading are dead. Most of the people you’re listening to are dead. I just read a novel by Iris Murdoch. I’ve been listening to Arthur Rubinstein play the piano. I’ve been listening to Joan Sutherland sing. These are these people that in some cases I overlapped with their lifetime, and some I might not even have overlapped at all.

And so, once again it’s part of this–there’s a pursuit they have in German University, it’s called Geistesgeschichte–history of the spirit. I always loved that, this notion that you’ve got the history of the visible world, but you’ve got this thing that’s somewhere between the history of ideas and the history of human consciousness that you’re studying. That’s what any artist does, I think, is to live in the history of the spirit, which means that you have to take the things of the spirit seriously.

Dana Gioia: I would go out with him. We’d go out to dinner, we’d go out to a club, we’d go to the beach; and the two of us did things together. And so I think of us, not in the gloaming, but in the roaming.

But, when you’re talking about your father quoting the poem–my mother used to quote poems. She was a Mexican American woman of no great education. But, I think poetry did two things. I think it’s exactly the same with your dad, because I think it’s one of the human purposes of poetry. Poetry simultaneously makes us notice things or allows us to see things with fresh eyes. Your father would go out into the snow and he would be able to, in a sense, to see it with a kind of innocence and a kind of freshness. But, also, it allows you to recapture emotions that are somewhat difficult.

It’s taken me a lifetime to understand my family. I think at every age, I thought I understood them; but the older you get, the more insight you got. Both of my parents worked. I used to do housework with my–we were always working, we were always working. Not a bad training for somebody. But my mother and I–we would come in and she’d come in from[?] a job, and we had to clean the house. And, while we cleaned the house, she would often recite poems. Some of the poems I liked, some of them I didn’t. But, I realized–really, it was after her death–that those poems were ways of her being able to reveal emotions, reveal desires, reveal memories that she didn’t really want to go to directly. One of her favorite poems was Annabel Lee:

It was many and many a year ago,
   In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
   By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
   Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
   In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love–
   I and my Annabel Lee–
With a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven
   Coveted her and me.

When my mother was reciting this, it was beautiful to me. It put me in a trance. It cast the necessary spell that a poem does of arresting your attention, relaxing your emotions and memories, and creating a special kind of temporary space of heightened feeling and perception.

And that’s what I was lost in. But, what she was really communicating to me was this sadness that she carried about most of her life, from the fact that her mother had died when she was very little, and she had a difficult father, to say the least. And that her favorite brother had died at a very early age–you know about that from Studying with Ms. Bishop in her–and so my mother had these sorrows that she only with difficulty kept under control. This allowed her to vent those things, in a sense, without burdening her kid.

And so, I think that poetry is this secret language of emotion that is very powerful. It’s not an intellectual art, really. People think of it as so intellectual, so difficult. It’s a very everyday magic that allows us to get through the crap we have to get through.

Dana Gioia: Especially, my Mexican grandfather only went to fourth grade. I asked him why he had to quit. He said, ‘Well, when my father was murdered, my brother and I had to become cowboys.’ They were in Lost Cabin, Wyoming. I wrote a poem about this in the book called “The Ballad of Jesus Ortiz.” But, he was a cowboy, a Mexican cowboy with a fourth grade education, sort of bilingual. And, he knew dozens of poems by heart, because cowboys would sit around the fire and they would recite poems. They would sing songs, and they would tell stories.

And so, I look at this thing, and that’s why I have never believed what I was taught at Stanford and Harvard, that poetry was an elite, intellectual form of language. It can be that, because poetry simply is a special way of using words so that they are heard and read in a special way. And you can do anything you want in poetry. But, the bulk of great poems have been works that are pretty accessible to any alert, intelligent person, which I think is a substantial amount of humanity.

It was sort of funny–as you know, I wrote, years ago, an article called, “Can Poetry Matter?” It was published in the Atlantic Monthly. And to the astonishment of everyone, including myself, it generated more mail than any article in the history of the Atlantic Monthly. And they didn’t even put it on the cover. But it got hundreds and hundreds–and this is when people actually had to write letters.

And there was many of them that were there, but my favorite of all the letters–that came from people in the military, everything else-was a woman who was on a ranch. She said that she had three sons and poetry was always important to her. And she sacrificed a lot to get her kids educated, and it disappointed her that poetry didn’t really matter to any of her sons. Then she said–the thing that really struck me, she goes–she’s always loved poems and she knows many by heart. She goes, ‘Some days I stand at the sink, and a poem is the only thing that gets me through the day.’ I just love that image, because our sorrows tend to come in the ordinary moments of our lives. Poetry is a kind of magic to turn a sorrow into a memory–a memory of value–or, a sorrow that triggers, and you can recapture the emotions that led you to that person or whatever. But, I do–that person or that place–to your own mortality.

Dana Gioia: Puccini will do it.

Dana Gioia: I have two sons, and the older one I used to take to the opera all the time, because I was a reviewer at that point, music reviewer. My wife, she’d like to go once or twice a season. And so I’d take my son, and he loved going because he was going to San Francisco or to Washington or into New York, and we’d have a very nice dinner and we’d do it. He doesn’t listen to opera. The younger one, who I never took, he likes opera. So, maybe there was some osmosis there.

Dana Gioia: But, I fell in love–I loved classical music, but I didn’t like opera because I think it was the language barrier and the period barrier. I was actually a student in Vienna, and there was an American girl who was also there, and I think Sue had a crush on me, and she was an attractive girl, but a little difficult, I thought. She said she wanted to buy tickets to La Bohème. And we went, and I think she was assuming that we would go to the opera and fall in love. And I did fall into love, but with Puccini. I listened to La Bohème, and it was like, ‘Where has this been all my life?’

Then I started going standing room to the opera. I sat with Sue, and I began to go once a week, twice a week. By the time I was ending the Vienna, I was going three or four nights a week, because you could do standing room for 60 cents. I developed a bankruptingly expensive habit for the United States, which is one of the reasons why I’m glad I was a reviewer and later the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, because they gave me great tickets for free.

Dana Gioia: Now, Russ, you probably think you’re going off-topic, but you’re not, because poetry and song, were the same art. If you go back to Latin, what’s the word for poem? It’s carmen like the name of the operatic title character. A carmen is a song, it’s a poem, it’s a magic spell, and it’s a prophecy. That’s because they’re all interrelated. The prophets were poets. You look at the prophetic books of the Old Testament, they’re in verse, because verse is the medium–poetry is the medium for prophecy. [More to come, 35:18]