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This
review was published in Italian
Americana. More reviews by Jack Foley are available on Foley's Books, part of The Alsop Review.
|
Review Interrogations
at Noon
If only Italian-Americans like Dana Gioia would stay still it would be possible to categorize them. Both Gioia’s supporters and his detractors have a tendency to simplify his intellectual positions—simply in order to be able to deal with them. A critic of my acquaintance was furious with me when I called Gioia a “futurist”: “He couldn’t be a futurist,” the critic fumed: “He’s a formalist, he’s retro!” Known for his ground-breaking 1991 essay, “Can Poetry Matter?,” which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, and for his defense of a group of poets labeled “New Formalists,” whose work can be found in the anthology, Rebel Angels (1996), this native Californian has recently stirred up even more dust in a 9000-word article which appeared in The Ruminator Review’s Winter 1999-2000 issue: “Fallen Western Star: The Decline of San Francisco as a Literary Region.” That article, along with various responses positive and negative, will appear from California-based Scarlet Tanager Press in the forthcoming The “Fallen Western Star” Wars. Gioia is surely interested in formal modes—Interrogations at Noon is proof of that—but, as Cole Porter (another “formalist”) once said, “If you want a future, darling, why don’t you get a past?” Gioia may be “retro,” but he is retro in the interests of something which has yet to come into being. T. S. Eliot knew very well when he wrote “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1917) that the only genuine way to move forward is to look differently at what has gone before. “The available tradition,” writes Gioia in “The Poet in an Age of Prose,” “is not a fixed entity but a dynamic concept. It changes—and indeed must change—not only from generation to generation but also from audience to audience.” Gioia, more than other poets of his generation, is questioning (“Interrogations” at Noon). Indeed, the title of his most famous critical essay is a question: “Can Poetry Matter?” In “Fallen Western Star” Gioia asserts that the challenge for Western writers “is not only to find the right words to describe our new and complex experience”
Thinking undoubtedly of Gioia’s reputation for fierce critical debate, one reviewer complained of the “mildness” of Interrogations at Noon. One wonders whether the reviewer bothered to read passages like these:
Not for nothing is Gioia’s poetry haunted, here and elsewhere, by the word “dark”:“darkness” appears in the passage from “Descent to the Underworld” which I have quoted but that same poem also has “At first the way is not / Entirely dark” and
“Dark” is of course precisely the opposite of “noon”—and Italians are frequently represented as a “dark” people. Someone remarked about the great French singer/songwriter Georges Brassens that what he wrote was inevitably either “tender” or “against.” These passages are irretrievably “against”—specifically against what Gioia calls in his introduction to Robert McDowell’s The Diviners “our upbeat age”: “Most unhappiness and failure cannot be corrected,” Gioia writes, and adds that this is “an uneasy insight that is an anathema to our sentimental, upbeat age.” “I’m interested in darker subject matter,” he says in The Irish Review. Sicilian, Mexican and Native American in his ethnic roots, he refers to himself as a “Catholic” writer:
What stands in “question” in Gioia’s work is the entire material world. You begin to understand this poetry only when you realize that, here, everything is at stake. Gioia is a “Catholic” poet who does not believe in God, yet who nevertheless sees “the end of the world” in every sensuous detail around him. “Dissonance,” not harmony, is the primary fact of his “fallen world.” This is the title poem of the book:
Reading such
lines you suddenly begin to see where this book is coming from, how
suddenly relevant to it is the figure of Charles Baudelaire—another
“dark,” “doubled” Catholic whose self-contempt
made for magnificent poetry. (“The Voyeur” transforms
the supposedly happily married man, “the loyal husband,”
into “the missing man,” the man eyeing his own wife as
if he were a voyeur, “one whom locks and windows keep away.”)
One of the advantages of Gioia’s “formalism” is that it allows him to place deep personal experience—here, heart-rending experience—within a form which, while deeply moving, simultaneously allows both writer and reader to maintain a sense of esthetic distance. Gioia’s language never strays very far from common speech, but it is an essential element of this passage that we realize that we are reading a poem, not hearing a father’s cry of pain. As in Baudelaire, however “dark” the subject matter, the poet’s skill, his formal mastery, is also to be noticed. In this, Gioia’s work is slightly reminiscent of the work of W.H. Auden—a poet whom he admires and whose formal mastery is absolutely stunning. (Yvor Winters is relevant here as well.) Indeed, this esthetic distance—“Metamorphosis” is written in a carefully-composed blank verse—also allows the poem to have resonances beyond the personal. Gioia has two healthy children. From a purely personal point of view, he might have included them in his poem. In choosing to write only about the child he lost—and lost fourteen years ago—he is perhaps hinting at the historical death of another “child”: the Christ child who disappears. This historical perspective is at the very center of “A California Requiem,” a wonderful, rich, visionary poem which gathers together most of the book’s themes. Gioia’s protagonist walks “among the equidistant graves / New planted in the irrigated lawn.” The speaker is aware of the various ironies of that “irrigated lawn”—keeping the grass “alive” in this place of death. “My blessed California,” he comments, “you are so wise. / You render death abstract, efficient, clean. / Your afterlife is only real estate....” He turns to go but suddenly hears voices, “faint but insistent.” “We claimed the earth,” say the voices,
Kenneth Rexroth remarked about Weldon Kees—a poet about whom Gioia has written eloquently—that he “lived in a permanent and hopeless apocalypse.” So too do these dead. If “noon” in the title poem suggests the full light of a revelatory and unsentimental self-consciousness, here noon nearly murders: “We are like shadows the bright noon erases.” The poem concludes with the voices’ final words:
The Christ child, too—the ultimately “unnameable” manifestation of divinity—is “killed” and it is not at all clear to what extent (if any) he has “returned.” “A California Requiem” unites the horrors of history with the personal losses explored in other poems, so that finally we cannot separate the two. Reading its concluding lines, one remembers Gioia’s remark, “Most unhappiness and failure cannot be corrected.” At the same time, however—and despite the book’s thematic bleakness—Interrogations at Noon is bound and determined to give us pleasure, which, indeed, it does. The book has some very funny light verse, including one roman à clef piece, “The Archbishop,” whose central character is, I suspect, Harold Bloom. There is also a delightful parody of Tennyson’s Maud—Gioia’s addition to Eliot’s Book of Practical Cats—and some beautiful songs, three from Nosferatu, the opera Gioia wrote in collaboration with composer Alva Henderson. There are translations of the young Italian poet, Valerio Magrelli. There is even a rip-snorting version of the Roman playwright, Seneca, “Juno Plots Her Revenge”:
As in Auden,
the kinds of poetry in this book are deliberately varied
and wide-ranging.
Interrogations at Noon is a book about risk, sacrifice, loss, and the limited triumph of words. What does it tell us about the way we are living here, now, in America?
Or, more quietly, in the beautiful concluding poem of the book:
It is not joy but “the tears of things,” “lacrimae rerum,” that this utterly compelling book deals with. It is the year 2001, and there is much to weep for. |