Abstract
This article discusses Dana Gioia's poetics of place in its intersections with the author's multiple diasporic legacies (Italian, Mexican, mestizo), which he often refers to as ‘Latin’. It explores the forms of cultural poiesis that has been fashioned by the Californian environments of diaspora and the role played by nature and the environment in the linguistic and literary dialogue resulting from the cultural transitions between America (both the USA and Mexico) and Italy. Gioia's ecopoesis is read as an aspect of the poet's ongoing engagement with public culture and commitment to preventing the decline of poetry's cultural importance. It restates his effort to reconnect poetry with the everyday lives of a wider and diverse reading public, stressing the importance of getting to know one's own specific locale more deeply. Gioia's environmentally oriented poems can thus be comprised within ‘a new third wave of ecocriticism, which recognizes ethnic and national particularities and yet transcends ethnic and national boundaries’ (Adamson and Slovic). Their transcultural vision crosses the frontiers separating the different cultures synthesized by the author's Latin self-identification and represents a crucial space for negotiation and imaginative creation tapping into the language of poetry to find ways to actively address our urgent environmental crises.
Since the publication of his first collection of poems, Daily Horoscope (Gioia, 1986), there have been several labels applied to Dana Gioia's work, the most frequent being that of ‘New Formalist’ 1 as a result of his use of metrics and, sometimes, rhyme. 2 An eclectic poet whose works have been praised as significant contributions to the renewal of formal and narrative poetry in the USA, Gioia has won critical recognition, such as the American Book Award for his collection Interrogations at Noon (Gioia, 2001) and the Poets’ Prize, which he won twice, for The Gods of Winter (Gioia, 1991) and 99 Poems: New & Selected (Gioia, 2016). His work as a poet, however, has been at times overshadowed by the critical debates in which he has engaged in defence of form and tradition in contemporary US poetry, such as the one raised by ‘Can poetry matter?’ (Gioia, 1991), 3 the essay that gave Gioia fame as an intellectual and polemicist and established him as a major voice in contemporary letters. 4
Notwithstanding such renown, Gioia's verse has not been analysed in any extensive way through the lens of what appears to be a consistently relevant topic in his writing, namely the role of place and the environment in shaping the subject's identity and the poet's voice. From this perspective, I explore Gioia's poetics of place in its intersections with the author's multiple diasporic legacy, equally discernible throughout the six collections he has published so far and which has largely gone unnoticed in the numerous accounts of Gioia as a poet, translator, anthologist, librettist and public intellectual with a prominent role in the US literary world – a neglect that has only recently started to be addressed. 5
On his relationship with his native California, Gioia has stated that he believes ‘it is essential for some writers to maintain their regional affinities. To speak from a particular place and time is not provincialism but part of a writer's identity. It is my pleasure and my challenge to speak from California’ (Gioia, 2004a: 159). Aside from the 18 years spent in the northern suburbs of New York City, where he worked as a manager for General Foods, 6 and the years spent in Washington, DC, from 2003 to 2009, following his appointment as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Gioia has always lived in California. 7 He returned there in 1996 – a move that represents more than a relocation or a shift in his vocation; it granted him the possibility to reconnect with ‘the personal traditions and geography that played such a distinct role in shaping his poetry on the page’ (Meyer, 2003: 120).
Michael Dana Gioia was born in 1950 in Hawthorne, in the industrial suburbs southwest of Los Angeles, an area that has been a recurring subject of his verse and is the focus of his latest collection, Meet Me at the Lighthouse (Gioia, 2023). His origins are Italian on his father's side (Sicilian, as he often points out, for his family immigrated from Castellammare del Golfo, in the province of Trapani, at the turn of the 20th century, and gradually moved westward), Mexican and Indian on his mother's. Having inherited the legacy of migration from both sides of the family, Gioia is especially prone to recognizing the inconsistencies and limitations of someone who must respond to the ‘antagonistic demands of language and experience’, as he states in the essay ‘On being a California poet’ (Gioia, 2004a), in which his paradoxical position becomes apparent: I am a Latin without a drop of British blood in my veins, but English is my tongue. It belongs to me as much as to any member of the House of Lords. The classics of English—Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Keats, and Tennyson—are my classics. The myths and images of its literature are native to my imagination. And yet this rich literary past often stands at one remove from the experiential reality of the West. […] This situation presents the poet with a paradox. Although English is our language, it remains at some deep level slightly foreign to our environment—like an immigrant grandparent whose words and concepts don’t entirely fit the New World. (Gioia, 2004a: 157)
In a reversal of the terms and roles that usually define the migratory process, in this passage it is the English language that, transplanted to the West, acts like ‘an immigrant grandfather’, always somehow out of place and out of time in the New World. The California poet must therefore learn to live with this slippage and situate himself in the gap that inevitably arises between the experience of the West and the ‘foreign language’ that is supposed to describe it. By self-identifying as a California poet, Gioia summarizes the complexity of his Italian, Mexican/mestizo heritage and a working-class upbringing characterized by extraordinary linguistic and cultural diversity – a rich mixture of European, Latin, Native, Asian and North American culture. Surrounded by relatives who spoke a Sicilian dialect, he grew up in a neighbourhood inhabited mostly by Mexicans and Dust Bowl immigrants and attended Catholic schools at a time when Latin was still the language of the Mass:
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Babel was my hometown. I was raised in thirteenth-century L.A. in a Spanish-speaking neighborhood by Italian immigrants and assimilated mestizos who worshipped in Latin in a city whose official language was English. Latin was not a dead language; it was simply the one reserved for sacred things – like singing – in a place full of competing dialects. […] Old words brought over from an old world were my daily reality. (Gioia, 2019: 212)
The experience of marginality of those who grew up in a place considered, both in reality and metaphorically, to be in the ‘South’ is also related to the battle that Gioia has been waging for decades, along with other poets and intellectuals, for the enfranchisement of the flourishing literature of Southern California (identifiable with the Los Angeles area, which has never enjoyed the literary and cultural prestige accorded to San Francisco) from the authority still represented by the cultural industry and the critical environment, institutions and journals in cities like New York and London. The result is a poor understanding of this literature, which remains ‘half-colonized’ (Timberg and Gioia, 2003: xiii), as Gioia writes in the introduction to the eloquently titled anthology The Misread City, co-edited with the late Scott Timberg; hence his commitment to (re)discovering or re-evaluating neglected, non-canonical California writers, 9 his fieldwork as California Poet Laureate and the collections and anthologies that he has co-edited on the subject. In the introduction to California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present, which Gioia coedited with Chryss Yost and Jack Hicks, he states that ‘California itself now constitutes a separate and distinct literary region—one that can only be understood by reading works by writers whose imaginations have been shaped by the state's unique geography, history, and culture’ (Gioia, 2004b: xxv). Significantly, ‘geography’ comes first in Gioia's list among the influences that shape a poet's imagination (as he learned from Elizabeth Bishop, who was his teacher at Harvard 10 ). These circumstances, he maintains, distinguish California writing not only from the traditional regions of American literature (New England, New York, the South and the Midwest) but also from other parts of the West and Southwest. The main reason for this difference, in his view, resides in the profound influence of Mediterranean and Catholic culture on Californian literary sensibility, testified by toponyms such as Sacramento, Los Angeles and San Diego and by the presence of Spanish, “a constant transformative element in California poetry, which colors the regional language not only in place names like El Segundo, Sierra Nevada, La Mirada, and Palo Alto but in the vocabulary needed to describe the local world, like canyon, rancho, arroyo, mesa, and adobe” (Gioia, 2004b: xxv).
In discussing the unifying features that characterize English-language California poetry, Gioia considers them neither stylistic nor aesthetic, since ‘[i]n general terms, California poets tend to have a genuine reverence for the natural landscape along with an anxiety, not always consciously articulated, about its Indian and Spanish past as well as its current human despoliation’ (Gioia, 2004b: xxvii). In his introduction to Best American Poetry 2018, he observed that: the nature poem had become the major vehicle for political meditation and protest. The bright innocence of Walt Whitman's American Eden has been overtaken by Robinson Jeffers's dark prophesy of rapacious modern civilization. The natural world is no longer a secure source of joy and renewal for poets; it is a matrix of anxiety about human despoliation and ecological apocalypse. The text may be nature, but the subtext is environmental disaster. (Gioia, 2018: xxxi)
It is in this same vein that several of his poems can be read.
Only recently have ethnicity and the environment started to be studied as aspects of US identity. As is well known, nature writing, the literature of environmental crisis and ecocriticism have been for a long time predominantly white and Anglo-American. Anthony Lioi remarks that the assimilation into middle-class whiteness after the Second World War has obscured the difference between immigrant groups (Ashkenazi Jews, southern Italians, the Irish) and groups present during the phase of nation-building. For Native Americans, African Americans, Chicanos and Anglo-Americans, the creation of the USA was ‘a shared, if agonistic, experience’: the conflicts of Emancipation, the Indian Wars and the annexation of the Southwest ‘coincide with the creation of “nature's nation” in the narrative of Manifest Destiny, the new multicultural history, and even the environmentalist narratives of industrial devastation and the opposite conservationist vocation’ (Lioi, 2009: 141). For immigrants whose influx peaked in the early 20th century, the question of participation in these ‘racialized histories of nature’ remains open. Following Lioi's lead, and taking Gioia as a case in point, the subsequent pages will explore what new forms of cultural poiesis have been fashioned by the Californian environments of diaspora, by the interchange between old and new immigrant worlds. What role do nature and the environment play in the linguistic and literary dialogue resulting from the cultural transitions between America (both the USA and Mexico, in this case) and Italy?
Gioia traces his love of literature to the maternal branch of his family. He has frequently mentioned his mother's passion for declaiming poems as a precocious and powerful influence on his love of poetry. Dorothy Ortiz, a telephone operator who worked night shifts, took great relish in reciting by heart Poe's ‘Annabel Lee’, as well as verses by Tennyson, Longfellow, Ogden Nash and other English authors popular in her own time.
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Equally important in Dana's developing literary and artistic sensibility was the legacy of a sailor uncle, Theodore Ortiz, who died in a plane crash in 1955 while he was serving in the merchant marine, bequeathing Dana's parents a formidable library of classics in different languages, records and musical scores collected during his travels. This absent uncle, who would shape the poet's future life, became the first ghost in Gioia's family lore – his books were passed on to Dana as repositories for tradition, for the comfort and certainty that literature has always offered the solitary and dreamy child that he was. The poet pays homage to his memory in the elegy ‘Night Watch’, in which he figures his uncle's sense of homelessness at sea as not unlike his experience of ‘America’, where the ‘half-foreign, half-familiar’ sounds of words suggest a feeling of existential displacement that, as we shall see, is a recurring motif in Gioia's poems:
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I think of you standing on the sloping deck […]. Leaning on the rails, looking eastward to America across the empty weeks of ocean, how carefully you must have planned your life, so much of it already wasted on the sea, the vast country of your homelessness. Macao. Vladivostok. Singapore. Dante read by shiplamp on the bridge. The names of fellow sailors lost in war. These memories will die with you, But tonight they rise up burning in your mind Interweaving like gulls crying in the wake, Like currents on a chart, like gulfweed Swirling in a star-soaked sea, and interchangeable As all the words for night – la notte, noche, Nacht, nuit, Each sound half-foreign, half-familiar, like America. (Gioia, 1991: 5)
In his cowboy poem, The Ballad of Jesús Ortiz, Gioia describes how his maternal great-grandfather, Jesus ‘Jake’ Ortiz, a Mexican from Sonora, worked as a vaquero moving between the Mexico-U.S. borders before settling down, getting married and taking a job as a saloon keeper in Lost Cabin, Wyoming. Gioia first heard the story as a 10-year-old child from his grandfather, a second-generation cowboy, and later confirmed it with the assistance of the Wyoming State Librarian, who supplied him with newspaper articles and government documents that substantiated the grandfather's tale (Zheng, 2021: 235). Written in rhymed quatrains meant to be read or recited aloud, the poem climaxes with Ortiz's murder, around 1910, by a resentful, racist cowboy. At the end of the poem, Gioia describes how his widowed great-grandmother watched Gioia's grandfather and great-uncle ride away to become cowboys themselves to support the family. First appearing in the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2017 and then in a fine printing edition with Providence Press in 2018, the ballad is included in Meet Me at the Lighthouse, which is dedicated to the memory of the three generations of Gioia's Mexican forebears, Jesús Ortiz, Francisco Ortiz and Theodore Ortiz. The epigraph exhorts: ‘Let us praise the dignity of their destitution’ (Gioia, 2023: n. p. n.).
On his first trip to Italy in November 1970, at not even 20 years old, Gioia recalls the perception of the similarities between the California territory and Sicily that he had learned from his paternal grandfather (who died that very year). Born in 1892, Filippo Mariano Gioia had worked on merchant ships since he was a young boy – from Sicily he had landed in New York at the beginning of the 20th century and, from there, sought his fortune, first in Detroit and then in the West, with a new migration caused by the Great Depression: My Sicilian grandfather worked on merchant ships as a teenager. In his old age he told me that when he saw the coast of California from his ship, it reminded him of Italy. Although he came first to New York (and lived in Soho as a greengrocer), he eventually made his way to Los Angeles in the Great Depression. When I first went to Italy in the fall of 1970, I had the same powerful impression – this was a landscape that felt, despite all the differences, familiar.
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The lack of experience with or direct memory of the country of his ancestors means that it must be reimagined and reconstructed through a second-degree memory – that is, filtered through the memory of the grandfather, to whom the poet would dedicate his first volume of Italian poems in translation, Poems of Italy (1985). Transformation and even non-recognition, then, are constitutive elements of this experience of Italy; not so much nostalgia as the desire to understand how one's heritage has been shaped by that diasporic experience. Perhaps to change its destiny. This is evident from the lines sketched in an unpublished youthful composition, in which the speaker's immigrant identity, revealed by his name, comes to assume a fateful power in his mind: Like any immigrant, I notice names. Not given names, the ones we call each other but family names the ones as unpronounceable as mine like genes which may decide how we will die. (Gioia, 1965-2015, Box 2: n.p.n.)
Such a deterministic vision is not unusual in Gioia's poetry. Over the years, he has increasingly turned to exploring dark and unfathomable sides of the human soul; a vision that makes him an author, according to some, not ‘American’ enough, more naturalistic, perhaps closer to the Southern Gothic of another Catholic author such as Flannery O’Connor. Indeed, Catholicism represents an element of cohesion among the different legacies that make up the identity of a ‘Latin’ writer that Gioia claims for himself: ‘I am a Latin Catholic – a mixture of Italian and Mexican’, he has stated (Snyder, 2021: 133). This aspect is addressed by David Mason (2015) in his interpretation of what he calls Gioia's ‘inner exile’, and by Janet McCann (2009), who traces Gioia's ‘contemporary metaphysics’ back to Catholicism. Even the translation from Latin of the first act of Seneca's Hercules Furens (first published in 1992 and reissued in a new, revised and expanded, edition in 2023)
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is the result of an identification experience that Gioia had some time earlier, as he reported in an interview: My family had a stoical view of existence. You bore your sorrows quietly. When I read Seneca and Marcus Aurelius in college, I felt an immediate sense of recognition. Their voices sounded like my Sicilian uncles and grandfather. Stoicism is the Mediterranean and Mexican worldview. (Snyder, 2021: 133)
Classical and Mediterranean elements can be identified throughout his varied literary productions (poetry, essays, translations, opera libretti). Even the (‘new’) formalism embraced at the outset of his career, far from being the symptom of ‘Eurocentric blindness’,
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seems rather the sign of a profound awareness of the lyric's layered, pregnant history and its current relevance. Gioia's vision is cognizant of the successive dense stratifications of words and forms generated over the centuries and is alert to the possibilities of pursuing both tradition and meaningful innovation in contemporary poetry. The theme of displacement, as well as the classical motif of ruins, informs several poems in Daily Horoscope (Gioia, 1986), his first collection of poems, which Gioia dedicates to his parents, Michael Gioia and Dorothy Ortiz, with the first verse of Guido Guinizelli's song ‘Al cor gentil ripara sempre Amore’. These poems can be read as meditations on the interplay between opposites, between reality and ideal, business and poetry, gravity and desire, with the former ‘always greater’ than the latter, as the last compelling line of ‘The Burning Ladder’ reads. The lyric self's sense of frustration and inadequacy can be interpreted as a common condition of the contemporary world (in the author's case related to being a Californian transplanted to New York); as an experience related to being a poet making a living in the business world, and as a condition stemming from his being an American of Italian and Mexican descent making his way in an alien environment, in terms of both class and ethnicity. The first trip, from Los Angeles to Stanford University on a scholarship, Gioia remembers as the farthest away, because he was leaving the world of the working class and his immigrant family for an unfamiliar milieu, and one in which he would never truly feel at home. In general, Daily Horoscope is characterized by a balanced coexistence of these opposites. In the first section, which is also the most autobiographical, Gioia celebrates his homeland. ‘California Hills in August’, his most anthologized poem, is a portrait of the arid landscape characteristic of that region's summer, presented from the dual perspective of an East Coast resident (what Gioia himself has been for more than 15 years) and a native Californian, as we read in the last stanza, who alone can manage to perceive its sweetness: And yet how gentle it seems to someone raised in a landscape short of rain – the skyline of a hill broken by no more trees than one can count, the grass, the empty sky, the wish for water. (Gioia, 1986: 4)
The powerful concluding image evokes the drought feared by so many southern Italian emigrants – a similarity recognized by Felix Stefanile, who wrote to Gioia in a 21 May 1985 letter, ‘Your California poem, [is] especially beautiful, the language, that “wish for water.” It sounds a lot like the Italy I once knew’ (Gioia, 1985-2015: Box 71, Folder 3). Inevitably, it is also a landscape that foreshadows the environmental emergency caused by drought and wildfires in the following years.
Like a palimpsest, the parched and inhospitable archetypal landscape of ‘California Hills in August’ shines just below the surface of other poems in the collection, even those ostensibly set on the East Coast (Daily Horoscope revolves around this East–West dialectic), like ‘In Cheever County’ or ‘Eastern Standard Time’. In the latter, the speaker is a Californian who is ‘feeling out of place / […] a stranger to the darker seasons, / walking through the end of an Eastern fall. / […] unable to feel at home in a landscape / so suddenly transformed’ (Gioia, 1986: 9–10). Then, looking at the leaves ‘dry, brown, curling on themselves, / […] sweeping across the numbered rows, / arranging and rearranging themselves, / some only to swirl up and fly away, / others to scratch along the asphalt[,]’ he becomes aware that: They are alive! Swarming in movements only they can understand. And suddenly I realize the obvious: that even this parking lot was once a field. A field sloping to the valley where now the Interstate is running. How much older they are, the leaves just fallen tracing out these shapes from memory. (Gioia, 1986: 11)
The poem's 27 unrhymed enjambed couplets reproduce both the fragmentation and the rhythmical regularity of a white-collar worker's life in a suburban milieu (on which the title also puns), where the black asphalt of parking lots is ‘lined symmetrically by rows / of identical, bare-branched trees – tonight / more of an idea than a landscape’ (Gioia, 1986: 9). An unexciting view that becomes the subject of a sudden transfiguration into ‘a vast blueprint vandalized by autumn’ (Gioia, 1986: 9) lays the ground for an epiphany in which the leaves turn into living creatures whose voluntary movement is governed by a logic only they can understand. Further still, and despite being the most impermanent and deciduous elements in the autumnal setting, the leaves become the repositories of a memory of the place predating human intervention on the land.
A sense of exile and nostalgia, of an impossible though longed-for return, characterizes Gioia's early poems of place giving voice to the experience of an author keenly perceptive of geography and ‘questions of travel’, as a transplanted Californian, but also – and chiefly – as an heir to an older migration: The notion of exile has always been present in my life. I was raised in an immigrant family in an immigrant neighborhood. There were Italians, Mexicans, Cubans, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Chinese around me every day. Almost everyone's family had been forced to leave their homeland by poverty or persecution. Even the native-born Americans had mostly fled the Dust Bowl. Everyone had come seeking a new life – at the cost of an old one. Exile was never an abstraction. It was our common background. (Snyder, 2021: 132)
Daily Horoscope is traversed by a concern with memory, with fragments of a past that resurface at the most unexpected moments and then vanish again and with an equally elusive and unknowable landscape. Like the one depicted in ‘Song from a Courtyard Window’, a place the two protagonists of the poem ‘had never seen before, nor had imagined, / a bitter landscape that two thousand years / of pastoral could not obscure or soften: / a wide dry field under the sun at noon’ (Gioia, 1986: 60) that resembles the one evoked in ‘California Hills’ and has the effect of producing a comparable revelation,
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however momentary, on the lyric self: What did the vision mean? We did not ask. It was where the voice had brought us, nothing more, and while the voice was there we did not wonder that a bare field, scorched by a hot wind. from between mountains, could make us forget everywhere and everyone else. Or why before we questioned it, it should be over. […] The distant hills become drearily familiar. Other voices, the usual ones, start up behind us. A moment's pause, then nothing more. And yet Wasn’t this the purpose of our listening: to sit in the same place with our eyes open and know that we have moved? That finally we’ve woken up into the place from which we’ve always woken out of, that strange place that's always changing, constantly drifting between the visible and invisible, that place that we must stumble onto […]. (Gioia, 1986: 61)
Like Gioia, these travellers can read the Italian landscape because they recognize it, despite their being strangers and regardless of the mutability of the place, its constant fluctuation between the visible and the invisible (an oscillation that evokes fundamental ethnic identity issues 17 ). Above all, they recognize its inevitability (‘that place that we must stumble onto’) and, instead of focusing on its art and culture, the speaker describes this landscape in the terms of the American West, as rough, parched, impervious and austerely beautiful.
The poem is part of a section entitled ‘Journeys in Sunlight’ in which the author thematizes the Italian landscape and the experience of emigration in a sequence of five poems that represent a unique instance, in terms of consistency and focus, of Gioia's open treatment of the Italian theme. Although in the following volumes he chooses not to make the Italian or Italian American subject matter the centre of his work, references to Italy and Mediterranean culture punctuate the author's subsequent production, in a constant dynamic of attraction and estrangement, in which the ethnic sign alternately surfaces and is submerged.
The connection with the land of the ancestors resurfaces in The Gods of Winter, also presided over by a genius loci, as announced in the epigraph, a quote from the poet John Haines, ‘I think there is a spirit of place, / a presence asking to be expressed’. California, the colours and spaces of the western environment that the poet imagines not unlike Sicily, feature prominently in several poems. In the elegy ‘Planting a Sequoia’, one of the author's rare overtly autobiographical works, however, this connection appears subverted. According to the peasant ritual common in Sicily and in other regions of Southern Italy, fathers plant an olive or fig tree for the birth of their first son. In this case, instead of the olive tree, the protagonist plants a sequoia, ‘the native giant’ of California, and instead of celebrating the birth, as we discover in the third stanza, the ritual commemorates the untimely death of his four-month-old son:
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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 one 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. (Gioia, 1991: 10)
This centuries-old tree will not bear fruit but is a fitting memorial because, unlike the short life to which its birth is linked, it will be destined to outlive the family and its descendants: 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. (Gioia, 1991: 10)
The poet's transposition of this Italian custom onto US soil marks an inevitable detachment from his ancestral culture and becomes evidence of the transformations and adaptations required by the experience in/of the new place. An instance of that ‘aesthetic of real presence’ according to which “[a]isthesis, the sensory experience of the divine in or as a creature, founds ethnesis, the production and renewal of culture. The idea of the Mediterranean peasant and her/his offspring as closer to nature is not so much displaced as revealed to be an alternate origin for civilization itself” (Lioi, 2009: 142).
Not only has the Western landscape been a subject of Gioia's poetry from the beginning, 19 but several of his poems also feature California's urban and natural environment and fauna as protagonists, not simply as setting or secondary characters or reflections of the human character's thoughts and feelings. In such environmentally oriented texts, “[t]he nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history [… and] [t]he human interest is not understood to be the only legitimate interest” (Buell, 1995: 7–8).
The speaking subject is on equal terms with animals and the natural world in the sonnet ‘Pardon Me, Pilgrim’, dedicated ‘To a luna moth’, in which the other-than-human protagonist, closely observed (‘Your broad wings marked with two ferocious eyes’), reveals an autonomous intentionality that is unintelligible by its human neighbour, who cannot but conclude: Yet still I wondered what had brought you here So late when I, too, wandered aimlessly. But mute with wonder, how could I inquire The secrets of your lunar embassy? (Gioia, 2023: 6)
In ‘Vultures Mating’, the sensuousness of nature is evoked from an objective point of view that uncovers the inextricability of death and desire in the life cycle. In lines that evoke Baudelaire's ‘carcass’,
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a female vulture is observed as she sits ‘[o]n the branch of a large dead tree / […] stinking of carrion’. Her ripeness ‘with the perfume of her fertility’ attracts a flock of wooing males, ‘stretching their wings, inflating their chests, / holding their red scabrous head erect’ (Gioia, 2016: 50). In the last two stanzas, the perspective widens to comprise the world: The stink and splendor of fertility arouses the world. The rotten log flowers with green moss. The fallen chestnut splits and drives its root into the soil. The golden air pours down its pollen.
The sense of a brimming ripeness is conveyed through the alliteration of the b sound in the poem's concluding lines: Desire brings all things back to earth, charging them to circle, stretch, and preen – the buzzard or the princess, the scorpion, the rose – each damp and fecund bud yearning to burst, to burn, to blossom, to begin. (Gioia, 2016: 50)
Gioia's poems often depict the environment as ‘a process rather than as a constant or a given’ (Buell, 1995: 8). Likewise, the rain is attentively observed and celebrated in its self-sufficient life cycle in the second stanza of ‘The Litany’, one of Gioia's most compelling poems (and one of his most metrically innovative, as it modulates in and out of blank verse): This is the liturgy of rain, falling on mountain, field, and ocean – indifferent, anonymous, complete – of water infinitesimally slow, sifting through rock, pooling in darkness, gathering in spring, then rising without our agency, only to dissolve in mist or cloud or dew. (Gioia, 2001: 10)
The poetic ‘I’ appears in communion with or even becomes part of his surroundings in ‘Becoming a Redwood’, where a silent speaker is immersed among the animals and vegetation inhabiting a hill on a summer night. As the hours pass, he finds himself able to understand the language of crickets and toads, and, standing still, gradually comes to imagine the perception of a stone (depicted as a sentient being in its own right – an identification also noticeable in ‘Sea Pebbles: An Elegy’
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) and almost sense the pain of the grass as it sprouts from the soil: 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 paralyzed 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. (Gioia, 1991: 55)
If the redwoods remain ‘unimaginable’, beyond his capacity for identification, by the end of the poem an almost disembodied speaker (a ‘pale shadow’ of his former self) has eventually merged with his/its surroundings: 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. (Gioia, 1991: 55–56)
However, the vision of ecological integration, as Bate (2001: 149) argues, is perforce disrupted by language, which is itself a symptom of humankind's apartness from other species and of our consequent power to destabilize ecosystems: ‘Ecopoesis knows that things have a life, but it also has to recognize that it can only communicate that knowledge in the form of propositions by using the divided Cartesian language’ (Bate, 2001: 199) of subject (‘You’) and object (‘all the other life too small to name’), as in this case. The role of ecopoesis is to engage imaginatively with the other-than-human; it is ‘an attempt to transform into language an experience of dwelling upon the earth’ (Bate, 2001: 199–200).
The abuses and despoliation of the natural landscape for profit are the focus of an earlier poem, ‘Rough Country’, which hails the harshness of the Western landscape (as in ‘California Hills’) to denounce the increasing commodification of the land, and compellingly advocates for preservation: Give me a landscape made of obstacles, of steep hills and jutting glacial rock, where the low-running streams are quick to flood the grassy fields and bottomlands. A place no engineers can master – where the roads must twist like tendrils up the mountainside on narrow cliffs where boulders block the way. Where tall black trunks of lightning-scalded pine push through the tangled woods to make a roost for hawks and swarming crows. And sharp inclines where twisting through the thorn-thick underbrush, scratched and exhausted, one turns suddenly to find an unexpected waterfall, not half a mile from the nearest road, a spot so hard to reach that no one comes– a hiding place, a shrine for dragonflies and nesting jays, a sign that there is still one piece of property that won’t be owned. (Gioia, 1991: 23)
In ‘A California Requiem’, the speaker's perfunctory visit to a cemetery becomes the occasion to address ironically, in quatrains of iambic pentameters, his ‘blessed California’, where death is rendered ‘abstract, efficient, clean’, and the afterlife ‘is only real estate’. Until ‘faint but insistent’ voices detain him (Gioia, 2001: 20): ‘We lived in places that we never knew. We could not name the birds perched on our sill, Or see the trees we cut down for our view. What we possessed we always chose to kill. […] ‘Forget your stylish verses, little poet – So sadly beautiful, precise, and tame. We are your people, though you would deny it. Admit the justice of our primal claim. ‘Become the voice of our forgotten places. Teach us the names of what we have destroyed. […] ‘We offer you the landscape of your birth – Exquisite and despoiled. We all share the blame. We cannot ask forgiveness of the earth For killing what we cannot even name’. (Gioia, 2001: 20–21)
A new kind of poetry is needed to become the voice of ‘forgotten places’, as well as the awareness that ‘we all share the blame’ – we are all implicated in the earth's despoliation (‘human accountability to the environment’ is indeed at the heart of these poems’ ‘ethical orientation’ (Buell, 1995: 8)). Learning the names of all the elements that make up our places, then, becomes crucial – not to claim the earth but to ‘hear her claim’ (Gioia, 2001: 21). The topic of the unfamiliar language
22
(a common experience for Americans of Italian descent, like the impossibility of reconstructing family history and a past that can only be imagined or guessed at) returns in ‘Words’, the opening poem of Interrogations at Noon: The world does not need words. It articulates itself in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted. The fluent leaves speak only the dialogue of pure being. […] (Gioia, 2001: 3)
23
Here the inability to name the mineral elements in the native environment implies a loss of reality and thus of memory because: […] the stones remain less real to those who cannot name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica. To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper – metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember. […] (Gioia, 2001: 3)
24
Once more, language affirms the organic world even though the latter ultimately remains unfathomable and indifferent, for all its beauty. As Jay Parini had anticipated, for authors like Gioia, ‘Nature is no longer the rustic retreat of the Wordsworthian poet in flight from “false refinements.” Nature is now a pressing political question, a question of survival’ (Parini, 1993: xv). The dystopian images cropping up in his nature poems, rather than reverting to an idealized pastoral world, or succumbing to romanticized discourses, articulate an aesthetic of eco-crisis.
Gioia's ecopoesis adds a new facet to the poet's ongoing engagement with public culture and his commitment to preventing the decline of poetry's cultural importance. More specifically, it restates his effort to reconnect poetry with the everyday lives of a wider and diverse reading public, stressing the importance of getting to know one's own specific locales more deeply. He stated as much in a TED Talk entitled ‘A Sense of Place’ (TEDx Talks, 2012): ‘It is often when you are being most specifically local that you become most universal’. The inherently transnational sense of place/locality of Gioia's work elicits awareness of the need to reconnect with and take care of both the community and the environment in which the poet belongs. 25 On the other hand, it is precisely by focusing on the local that the poet can reach out to the global (this is also evident in the essays that Gioia has devoted to poets such as Robinson Jeffers and William Everson, who have drawn inspiration from the California landscape and whose creativity has been influenced by the region's ecosystem).
As we have seen, trees play a major role in some of his most well-known poems, together with other non-human presences that are recurring subjects in his work. Especially over the last decade, Gioia has also been actively committed to salvaging native trees both in the Sonoma Valley (an area devastated by the Kincade fire in 2016) and in the Los Angeles area, where he lives. All the oaks he replanted are native to California, except for one that comes from Italy, which he observes is ‘the sort of oak that would have grown on Horace's Sabine farm. It likes it in California. And it reminds me, in several different ways, where I came from’.
26
Of this Italian oak that thrives on the California soil, he has further noted: I brought that oak from Italy for three reasons: 1. to remind myself I was a poet of Latin lineage—Italian, Mexican, and Catholic—that went back to the Romans. 2. to honor my father—Horace's father was a freed slave who used all of his money to have his son educated. My dad had very little but used it all for his children's education. 3. to remind myself that my house—the first house I’d ever lived in—was my Sabine farm, my escape from the noisy and distracting capital. I had just left New York and had decided not to live in either LA or San Francisco. I was entering a strange and new life in the country, as the place was when I first saw it twenty-nine years ago.
27
This tree thus fittingly epitomizes the process of transculturation that is at the core of Gioia's oeuvre. The poet's mixed ethnic identity requires constant adjustments and reformulations and makes him a representative subject of the provisional and discontinuous experience of those who stand at the crossroads of different cultures. In its wide range of forms, subjects and tones, his work seems particularly apt to illustrate the importance of reconfiguring ethnic identity not as a heritage ‘to be circumscribed, delimited, and defended in the name of genetics or cultural “authenticity,” but as a dialogic formation traversed by the tensions and dynamism of yesterday and today – and prefiguring those of tomorrow’
28
(Izzo, 2017: 24). Rather than recalling one or more supposed origins, Gioia's poetry celebrates the difference that the poet himself embodies, as the Whitmanesque ‘Psalm for Our Lady Queen of the Angels’ illustrates: Let us sing to our city a new song, A song that remembers its name and its founders— […] Poor, they were forced to the margins of empire, Dark, dispossessed, not one couple pure. Let us praise the marriages and matings that created us. Desire, swifter than democracy, merging the races— Spanish, Aztec, African, and Anglo— Forbidden matches made holy by children. I praise myself, a mutt of mestizo and mezzogiorno, The seed of exiles and violent men, Disfigured by the burdens they shouldered to survive. […] I praise my ancestors, the unkillable poor, The few who escaped disease or despair— The restless, the hungry, the stubborn, the scarred. Let us praise the dignity of their destitution. […] Pray in the hour of our death each day In the southern sun of our desecrated city. Pray for us, mother of the mixed and the misbegotten, Beside our dry river and tents of the outcast poor. (Gioia, 2023: 30–31)
In Gioia's ‘activist identification with his birth city, Los Angeles, and his city's and forebears’ ethnos’ (Geok-lin Lim, 2023: 21), poetry matters; it connects place, diasporic identities, social justice issues and the environmental crisis epitomized in the last stanza by ‘our desecrated city’ and ‘our dry river and tents of the outcast poor’. Poems such as ‘Psalm for Our Lady Queen of the Angels’, ‘Psalm and Lament for Los Angeles’ (Meet Me at the Lighthouse) and ‘A California Requiem’, among others in Gioia's canon, can be comprised within what Joni Adamson and Scott Slovic have termed ‘a new third wave of ecocriticism, which recognizes ethnic and national particularities and yet transcends ethnic and national boundaries’ (Adamson and Slovic, 2009: 6–7). Gioia's works thus seem to be especially relevant to investigating how texts create feelings of geographical belonging, and how these feelings can be mobilized to jump scales, from local to national, to global. Their transcultural vision crosses the frontiers separating the different cultures synthesized by the author's Latin self-identification and represents a crucial space for negotiation and imaginative creation. A further step towards connecting human history and geography, allowing ‘landforms and languages to interact in a reciprocal and unfolding dynamic’ (Dassow-Walls, 2011: 860), and tapping into the language of poetry to find ways to actively address our urgent environmental crises. Within the complex and delicate web that holds together culture and the environment, ‘poiesis in the sense of verse-making is language's most direct path of return to the oikos, the place of dwelling, because metre itself – a quiet but persistent music, a recurring cycle, a heartbeat – is an answering to nature's own rhythms, an echoing of the song of the earth itself’ (Bate, 2001: 76).
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the Huntington Library for an Andrew W Mellon Foundation fellowship that allowed me to consult the papers and complete works of Dana Gioia housed in their collections.