Interview with Robert McPhillips
Conducted at General Foods, USA (White Plains, NY) December 12 and 16, 1991, revised March 1992. A comprehensive interview on childhood, Stanford, Harvard, poetic influences, business, and New Formalism.

Robert McPhillips: What was it like to grow up in Los Angeles in the 1950's and 1960's?

Dana Gioia: I was born and raised in Hawthorne, California - a working-class town set in the middle of Los Angeles' megalopolitan sprawl. The town was a mix of Mexicans and Okies with a few Irish to run the police and politics. Most people worked in the airplane factories for Hughes and Northrop. Hawthorne was extraordinarily ugly in the cluttered, haphazard way of factory towns, but it did have gorgeous Southern Californian weather, and the beach was only twenty minutes away. We were poor, but the weather was free. Since no one we knew had much money, we never considered ourselves underprivileged.

RM: What was your childhood like?

Gioia: I had a happy, solitary childhood. Both of my parents worked. My father was a cab driver and later a chauffeur. My mother worked as an operator for the phone company. I was left alone a great deal. I was raised in a tightly-knit Sicilian family. We lived in a triplex next to another triplex. Five of these six apartments were occupied by relatives. Sicilians are clannish folk. They trust no one but family. My grandparents rarely socialized with anyone who wasn't related. My mother (who had been born in Hawthorne from mainly Mexican stock) had to become more Italian than the Italians to fit in. All of the older people had been born in Sicily. Many of them spoke little or no English. Conversations among adults were usually in their Sicilian dialect. It was an odd childhood by mainstream American standards but probably not too unusual among immigrant families.

Living in New York now, I often hear people describe Southern California in the typical Hollywood cliches. These popular images of glitz and glamour have little to do with the working-class Los Angeles of my childhood, which was quite old-fashioned, very European, and deeply Catholic. No, "European" is the wrong word. Very Latin. The Sicilians blended very easily into the existing Mexican culture.

RM: Was Catholicism important to you?

Gioia: Catholicism was everything to me. Growing up in a Latin community of Sicilians and Mexicans, one didn't feel the Roman Catholic church as an abstraction. It was a living culture which permeated our lives. In parochial school, we attended Latin Mass every weekday morning, in addition to the obligatory Mass on Sunday; so for eight early years I went to Mass six days a week. The hymns we sang were still the classics of Medieval Latin liturgy. As altar boys, we learned all the ceremonial responses by heart. Our nuns scrupulously drilled us in liturgy, ritual, and dogma - which we tolerated - and recounted the flamboyant folklore of saints and martyrs - which we adored.

This world seems so distant now. The Second Vatican Council unintentionally killed it. Working-class kids in Los Angeles today do not have the benefit of this sectarian but nonetheless broadening and oddly international education. In my Catholic high school the Marianist brothers drilled us relentlessly in Latin and Theology. We worked our way through most of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas' arguments. We also read Horace, Catullus, Virgil, and Ovid. We even translated the bawdy and beautiful songs of the wandering scholars. I was in the last generation that experienced Latin as a living language. Some of my teachers had attended ecclesiastical colleges in which all instruction was done in Latin. This cultural heritage opened new worlds to kids like us whose everyday lives were otherwise so narrow.

RM: What was it like to go from this working-class, ethnic background to an elite university like Stanford?

Gioia: Going to Stanford was a great shock. I had never been around people my own age whose parents had gone to college. At Stanford I experienced the shock of meeting the children of America's ruling class. It took me years to sort out my own reactions. I was simultaneously impressed and repelled by the social privilege my fellow students enjoyed. I was also naively astonished at how little their education meant to them. I felt then, as I do now, that in the circle of my friends in a working-class Catholic high school there were more serious intellectuals than among my contemporaries at Stanford. Of course, I was then - and continue to be now - most naive of all in thinking that being an intellectual has some value.

RM: And yet you fit in fairly well as an undergraduate. Weren't you chosen as editor for Sequoia, the literary magazine?

Gioia: I did well at Stanford because I was so hungry to learn. I often took six courses a quarter rather than the recommended four. I was also hungry after my own kind. I wanted friends who were interested in the arts. I joined the staff of Sequoia, Stanford's literary magazine. As a junior I became the editor of this tottering enterprise. I took the magazine from bankruptcy to become the largest small magazine, if that doesn't sound like too much of an oxymoron, on the West Coast.

RM: What did you do on Sequoia? I know your association with the magazine was extensive.

Gioia: I had two stints on Sequoia. As I said before, I served as editor-in-chief for my last two years as an undergraduate. Then, a few years later, when I returned to Stanford for business school, I became poetry editor and did literary interviews. While in business school I also began writing book reviews for the Stanford Daily. They let me do long pieces about whatever new books interested me. In retrospect, I'm amazed by the freedom they gave me. I was able to write at great length about authors like Pound, Cavafy, Eliot, Montale, Nabokov, Rich, Burgess as well as younger poets. I wrote a review every other week for two years. I probably learned more about writing by reviewing for the Stanford Daily and by editing Sequoia than I did in my English classes. Writing for publication makes you very serious about what you are doing. Learning to put sentences together, to develop a line of thought, to select one good poem from a hundred mediocre submissions teaches you a great deal about literature. That sort of practical experience is invaluable to a young writer.

RM: What kind of courses did you take? What literary figures interested you most as an undergraduate?

Gioia: Although I was a voracious reader, literature mattered less to me at first than music. I came to Stanford planning to be a composer. After a short time with the Stanford Music Department, however, my passion for music was frustrated. I wanted to compose tonal music, but my teachers believed that tonality was a dead tradition. They ridiculed or dismissed as minor most of the living composers I admired - figures like Samuel Barber, Benjamin Britten, Michael Tippett, Walter Piston, William Walton, and Ned Rorem. I spent my sophomore year in Vienna studying music and German. I escaped to Europe because I was so disappointed intellectually in Stanford. I wanted to try something else. Luckily, the California State Scholarship, which helped pay my way through college, was also applicable to the Vienna program because it was administered by Stanford. In Austria my primary interest gradually shifted from music to poetry. By the time I returned to California I wanted to be nothing else than a poet. I had this change of heart in Austria for two reasons. First, I began recognizing the limits of my musical ability. Second, speaking German so much of the time somehow changed my relationship to English. I found myself writing poems in English, and spending much of my time reading poetry in English and German. My undergraduate career at Stanford fell into two parts. The first two years were spent finding my vocation, working from music through to literature. My second two years spent furiously trying to fill in the enormous gaps in literature and languages.

RM: What literary courses did you take after returning from Europe?

Gioia: My formal coursework at Stanford was less important to me than the books I read on my own, the private passions I fostered without any sensible academic supervision. My course curriculum seems to me, in retrospect, quite haphazard. I was terribly naive as a student. I had the mistaken impression that one took the courses that interested one most. What I soon discovered was that the only way to get an education was to seek out the best professors, regardless of what they were teaching. I was lucky as an undergraduate to have a couple of really terrific teachers, most prominently Herbert Lindenberger, who headed the Comparative Literature program at Stanford, and Diane Middlebrook, who has since achieved fame as the biographer of Anne Sexton.

RM: What did you study with Diane Middlebrook?

Gioia: I decided to do English honors, which meant that one took special courses and eventually wrote a long senior essay. My junior honors seminar was with Diane in which we read modern poetry - Stevens, Lowell, Dickey, and Roethke. She became a kind of informal advisor to me.

RM: Did you study a great deal of contemporary literature as an undergraduate?

Gioia: I attended college in northern California from 1969 to 1973, and I don't think that my development as a poet can be separated from this rather bizarre period of American literary history. For example, my freshman English composition teacher assigned us the following books: Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin, Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, Native Son by Richard Wright, Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan, and The Plum Plum Pickers by Eugene Barrio, a clumsy Chicano labor novel. A curious list for a class in composition. My first survey course in American literature assigned us Robert Creeley, Robert Bly, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, and Amiri Baraka. So I was never able to think of Beat poetry as non-academic or revolutionary. By 1971, it was already canonized as part of the Stanford's approved version of American Literature. Coming to maturity as a writer in the California of Haight- Ashbury, one was engulfed in waves of fashion. I found myself resisting. My literary sensibility tends to be contrarian. Had I grown up in a period when people wrote sonnets and villanelles, I would probably have gone off to Black Mountain College.

RM: How did you move from studying contemporary American literature to reading earlier writers?

Gioia: Before college, I had what, in one sense, was a very bad literary education. I never had a historical survey of either English or American literature. I had not read most of the major British or American poets. In high school I had never studied Chaucer, Milton, Pope, Gray, Blake, Byron or many others (although we did do half a dozen plays of Shakespeare). I was, however, extraordinarily fortunate to have had teachers who communicated both the pleasure and personal value of literature. Although my education was academically inadequate and historically lopsided, it was psychically valid. When I came to college, I discovered Ezra Pound's ABC of Reading. That book filled me with determination to learn as much as possible about poetry in English and foreign languages. I systematically tried to fill in my gaps as an undergraduate. But going to college in the early 70's, one was always hit with the notion of relevance - "relevance" usually being defined as what one's teacher felt was morally correct and timely. The situation seems farcical in retrospect. I wanted to read the classics, and my teachers encouraged me to pursue the latest trends. I found reading Horace more relevant to me personally than reading Allen Ginsberg. Even in 1970 Ginsberg seemed dated in a way Horace did not - at least to a teenager living in a world of extraordinary personal and sexual freedom. Relevance is always subjective. Each writer, each reader develops somewhat differently, and people will find in great literature relevance of their own without trying wildly to be up to date. Being up to date, to misquote Oscar Wilde, is America's oldest tradition.

RM: When did you read the ABC of Reading?

Gioia: I had never heard of Ezra Pound before I came to Stanford. Pound was not allowed in the American high school anthologies of the 50's and 60's because of his indictment for treason. My best friend from high school, Jim Laffan, who knew much more about literature than I did, showed up at Stanford one weekend with a paperback copy of Pound's ABC of Reading. I remember noticing the serious, bearded author on the cover, and I listened to Jim spout all sorts of fascinating generalizations about literature, which he had discovered in this book. I asked to borrow it. I read and reread that book for the next two years and started reading through all of Pound's work. Pound shamed me into learning French, which I immediately started when I returned from Vienna, as well as teaching myself standard Italian, and keeping my Latin more or less current. Pound did American literature an invaluable service by reminding us that poetry is an international art.

RM: Did reading Pound's ABC of Reading change your personal reading list or did it make you seek out different types of courses to take beyond contemporary literature?

Gioia: It did both. I consciously took courses in earlier periods to broaden my education with writers like Chaucer or the Elizabethans because of Pound's suggestions. I also audited a Dante course. I've always been comfortable learning on my own, and even when I was taking five or more classes in a single quarter, I still found time to do outside reading. This ability to work on my own proved my salvation in later years.

RM: Did Pound influence you to study comparative literature in graduate school?

Gioia: My Poundian bias made me feel, possibly unjustly, that comparative literature was the only adequate way to study literature. When I applied to graduate school, I applied only to comparative literature programs. At that point I planned to be a professor of literature who also wrote poetry. The few living poets I had seen - Edgar Bowers, Kenneth Rexroth, Christopher Middleton, Donald Davie - had all been professors. I had never really known a poet, only caught passing glimpses at a reading or a lecture.

RM: Did you take any poetry writing courses as an undergraduate?

Gioia: I did not take creative writing classes as an undergraduate. In fact, I had a certain unfair prejudice against creative writing. The writing majors at Stanford didn't seem to me as serious as the literature students. I looked on writing courses as a kind of self-indulgence. It never occurred to me that one needed classroom instruction to write poetry. I concentrated on learning literature and foreign languages, while writing poems on my own.

RM: Journalists and critics often compare you to Wallace Stevens. Has Stevens influenced you as a poet?

Gioia: Stevens' importance to me has been two-fold. First, he demonstrated that it was possible to work in business and develop as a serious writer. You have no idea how important - psychologically and spiritually - Stevens and Eliot were to me in my mid-twenties. I had left the university for business. I knew few writers, and those few were all based in the academy. I didn't even know of a living writer who worked in business. I felt immensely isolated. Coming home alone each night after ten or twelve hours at the office, I had to find not only the energy to write but also the conviction that it was possible. One needs a great deal of faith to work for years without any external encouragement. Stevens and Eliot became my patron saints. I'm sorry to phrase it in such Catholic terms, but that's the way my mind works. Second, Stevens has represented a standard of artistic integrity to me. Stevens wrote only what he believed in. He stayed away from the literary marketplace. He never courted fame or popularity. He trusted poetry absolutely. He achieved this absolute integrity at great human cost. I don't envy or admire that side of him, but his personal isolation doesn't diminish the value of his artistic example.

RM: But did Stevens influence you stylistically or thematically?

Gioia: Not all literary influences are best measured by comparing texts. Stevens has profoundly shaped my poetry in ways that are mostly invisible on the page. He reminded me that a poet is free to do what interests or delights him - no matter what the literary or ideological fashions of the times. In that sense, perhaps, Stevens contributed paradoxically to my conviction that form and narrative needed to be brought back into American poetry. His influence was more spiritual than stylistic or intellectual. I have, however, always admired Stevens sheer verbal extravagance - exactly those features which Donald Davie can't abide. Stevens' overabundant diction and quirky elegance have occasionally given me the courage to exploit the possibilities of the language. Stevens reminds us that poetry should not be ashamed of being magnificent.

RM: Who are the poets who have most influenced you?

Gioia: There are several kinds of influence, and it is important to distinguish among them. First, there are the writers whom one imitates at the beginning. Nowadays, many young poets - at least in America - begin by imitating their teachers. That isn't altogether bad if your teacher is Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop or John Crowe Ransom. But with a mediocre master, such imitation may stunt a young poet's growth. My early models all came from books. I have been reading poetry as long as I have been reading, but I'm not sure the enthusiasms of my childhood like Poe and Kipling have influenced me as much as the writers I embraced in late adolescencewhen I was beginning to think of myself consciously as an artist. Those early "singing masters of my soul" were Auden, Eliot, Pound, Rilke, and Graves. I often think, however, that a young poet isn't influenced so much by poets as by individual poems. In that sense, I was fascinated with particular poems by many other writers like Wilfred Owen, Archibald MacLeish, Elizabeth Bishop, E. E. Cummings and Randall Jarrell.

There is another kind of influence, however - namely writers whose ideas and examples shape one's sense of what it means to be a poet. At different stages of my life there have been poets to whom I have looked as spiritual examples. They have helped me lead my life. Stevens, Eliot, Rilke, Auden, and Jeffers have all been important to me as spiritual guides at particular times in my life.

RM: Did any poets influence your technique?

Gioia: I have consciously studied the verse technique of a great many poets, especially Yeats, Eliot, Auden, and Frost. But the single most influential experience I had was in my early twenties when - God help me, I'm not kidding - I scanned every line in half a dozen major plays by Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Webster. I wanted to learn the secrets of blank verse from the poets for whom it was a living spoken art rather than a codified written form. I learned some valuable lessons about how poetry is heard from those masters, observations I have never seen in any book in prosody. I patterned much of my own verse technique on those poets. I was amused when a conservative critic attacked my prosody as too loose. Augustan critics made the same complaints about Elizabethan dramatists.

RM: I presume you hadn't been East before studying at Harvard. Was Harvard a different type of experience for you from being at Stanford?

Gioia: The most important thing to remember about my earlier years was how naive I was. I had virtually never been outside of California except for my brief stint in Vienna. (Even when living in Vienna, I didn't have enough money to travel much and see Europe.) I had never been to New England before I arrived at Harvard. I had imagined Cambridge to be an idyllic New England town. You can imagine my horror when I arrived in Harvard Square expecting a tranquil village green only to discover a dilapidated subway stop in the middle of a traffic circle. Yet Harvard was the most exciting intellectual experience I had in my life. Harvard was the first time I had ever been in a milieu of serious writers and intellectuals. But my two years at Harvard were also extraordinarily lonely. I was quite poor. My first year I lived in a dilapidated basement studio on a dead-end alley. The squalor was unbelievable. My life became like something out of Dostoyevsky's Notes From the Underground. I also suffered a serious back injury and fractured a vertebrae of my spine. I didn't receive proper treatment, so during most of my time at Harvard I was in constant pain. I wasn't psychologically strong enough to deal with this protracted injury. There was a point when I grew suicidal. But, as awful as they are to live through, suffering and isolation do clarify your life. During this time I learned what was most important to me. I clung to poetry as a means of sanity.

RM: You've published a memoir of Elizabeth Bishop with whom you studied at Harvard. You and she became friends, then corresponded afterwards. What kind of influence did Bishop have on you?

Gioia: My first year at Harvard I took standard academic courses in French, German and English literature. I learned a great deal; I worked very hard. But I knew no other writers and had almost no close friends. During my second year, however, I was fortunate to meet Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Fitzgerald as well as two younger writers, Alexander Theroux and Robert Shaw. These individuals were extraordinarily important to me. They were the first dedicated imaginative artists I had ever really known. Elizabeth Bishop was less important to me as a writer than as a friend. When I studied modern American poetry with her at Harvard, her reputation was in eclipse. My advisor, a noted literary theorist, scoffed at the notion of my taking a class with her. He told me bluntly that her course would be a waste of my time. Luckily, I ignored his counsel. There were only five of us in Bishop's course on modern poetry. Harvard students did not consider her a literary celebrity like Robert Lowell or William Alfred. Almost immediately, Bishop and I struck up a relaxed and rather intimate friendship. We would go off to tea after class. Our talk was almost never about poetry, but about other things that we liked in common - music, novels, cats, flowers, travel. Bishop was a remarkably strict, indeed often discouraging teacher. She covered any work we submitted with corrections and suggestions, but she was extraordinarily encouraging to me. She believed in me both as an aspiring critic and a poet to a degree which no one had before. Her encouragement was entirely private. I never asked her for any help in the literary world, but her unsolicited personal endorsement came at a crucial time since I had just made the decision to leave academia for business.

RM: Your relationship to Bishop seems a bit like Bishop's own relationship with Marianne Moore, who was notorious both for her generosity in reading her early drafts but also with a kind of real strictness in suggesting revisions. Do you see any parallel between that relationship and yours with Elizabeth Bishop?

Gioia: My relationship with Elizabeth Bishop was neither as longstanding nor as intimate as hers with Marianne Moore. But she did hammer into me the notion that every line one writes must be relentlessly considered, revised, and perfected. Every essay or translation I gave to her - because hers was not a course in creative writing - she would return to me scrupulously copy-edited and covered with suggestions for revisions, expansions, and deletions. Her example came at a crucial time because I, like all graduate students, was being encouraged by my other professors to write in a formal academic style. Bishop insisted that I write clearly, intelligently, and unpretentiously. I quickly realized that one had to make a choice between writing for the academic profession or writing for the common reader. I have chosen to write for the common reader. But the common reader, as both Samuel Johnson and Virginia Woolf remind us, does not mean an unintelligent reader.

RM: You also studied with Robert Fitzgerald, the classicist and poet. What type of influence did he have on you?

Gioia: Robert Fitzgerald was the single most important influence I had as a poet. Once again, his influence was not so much encouragement to write in a particular style or about particular subjects. Rather, Fitzgerald's influence was of writing to the highest standards with a knowledge of tradition and a respect for the craft of poetry. Quite by accident, I ended up taking two courses with him simultaneously my second year at Harvard. The first was a course called, in the inimitable Harvard way, "Studies in Narrative Poetry." We read Homer, Virgil, and Dante. In order to be admitted to the course you had to be able to read at least two of these writers in the original. Everyone in the class but me was an expert philologist. I squeaked by with reasonably good Latin and minimal standard Italian. It was a wonderfully intimate and enthusiastically learned course. We did close textual analyses of selected passages from each author and tried to build a general notion of the epic tradition that bound the poems together. At the same time, I took another graduate course from Fitzgerald called "The History of English Versification." I enrolled assuming it was a class in historical prosody. To my astonishment, I discovered that, in addition to all of the historical and theoretical reading, we were also expected to write a verse exercise each week in whatever meter we were studying. Fitzgerald did not ask us to write a poem - only to produce verse which scanned and made sense. These exercises were the most valuable learning I had as a young poet. I had always written in both free and metered verse, but my formal work was halting and uncertain. Versification is a craft which one can learn more quickly and better from a master than by oneself. Under Fitzgerald's tutelage I learned in practical terms how the traditional meters worked. Fitzgerald also provided an important personal example. He had come to teaching later in life. He had worked as a journalist, had served in the Navy during the Second World War, and had spent years as a writer in Italy where he first translated Homer's Odyssey. I saw in him a representative man of letters, a person who had dedicated his life to poetry, who had done some of the finest translations of the Greek and Latin classics in English. He was also warm, gracious, and very funny.

RM: You dedicated the title sequence of your first book Daily Horoscope to Robert Fitzgerald. I take it that the poem is not directly based on your relationship with him. It's one of your most sophisticated works and yet it has gotten very little critical attention.

Gioia: I consider my sequence, "Daily Horoscope," one of my best poems, but I suspect that many people find it intimidating. The two critics who have written on it at length tried to interpret it as an elegy for Robert Fitzgerald. The sequence, however, was published while Robert was still alive, so it certainly was not intended as an elegy. I dedicated it to him because he was my most valuable teacher as a poet, and I had come across a wonderful passage in the Inferno in which Dante saluted Virgil as his master and teacher in poetry. I put those lines as an epigraph under the dedication to Robert, not realizing that by quoting the Inferno, some critics would then read the sequence as a Dantescan poem about the afterlife. Perhaps it can be adequately read that way. That was not, however, the way I intended it.

RM: How did you intend the sequence to be read?

Gioia: I don't believe that a poet is the best judge or interpreter of his own work. A poet knows things that aren't in the text, and, blinded by his own intentions, often misses things which are there. I know, or think I know, my intentions in writing "Daily Horoscope." How well those ambitions are realized in the first text is not for me to judge. The only observation I would make about the poem is to explain its title. I borrowed both the title and the style of the sequence from the horoscope columns you find in most daily newspapers. I was fascinated by the way astrologers addressed their readers in the second person and used the most intimate tone possible to tell what will happen to "you" each day. I also loved the way these columns create a brooding sense of mystery and danger. They tell you what to do and what to avoid. I decided to use that style in a lyric poem, and slowly it grew into a sequence. It was my intention that all of the poems were spoken to a single protagonist in the course of a single day from morning to night, but that intention may not be apparent to anyone but the author in the actual printed text.

RM: When I first read the poem, it reminded me of John Ashbery's work. I know another poet who feels the same way. I've always admired the sequence, but it remains pleasingly elusive, like much of Stevens' or Ashbery's poetry. Do you want to comment on the resemblance?

Gioia: "Daily Horoscope" may remind some readers of Ashbery's work, but I had read virtually nothing of Ashbery's when I wrote it. I suspect the elements in "Daily Horoscope" you noticed come from my debt to European Modernist poetry, a tradition Ashbery and I both share. My own poetry draws on two somewhat contradictory traditions. One part comes out of the Anglo-American tradition of writers like Auden, Hardy, Jarrell, Larkin, and Kees, a sort of novelistic type of poetry. The critics who have written about my work with the greatest enthusiasm usually respond most deeply to this side of my sensibility. But there is another side to my work which comes out of European High Modernism. "Daily Horoscope," to the degree that it is written in any tradition, comes out of the Modernist lyric as exemplified by poets like Montale, Rilke, Benn, and Valery. Perhaps this European heritage makes the poem puzzling to critics who are more attracted by the Anglo-American aspects of my work.

RM: It seems to me that the other work closest in tone to "Daily Horoscope" is your translation of Montale's Mottetti. I have been struck by how different the poetry that you translate from the Italian is from most of the poetry that you write in English.

Gioia: Surely the great joy of translation comes from making a beautiful but alien poem your own. Why translate an author similar to yourself? As a translator, I am drawn to poets with whom I feel a deep imaginative sympathy but who also seem mysteriously foreign. Translation is a way of reconciling those opposite reactions. The period of literature which exercises the greatest fascination on me is European Modernism - not just in Italian but also in German and French (which I can read) as well as in Russian, Greek, and Spanish (which I don't know). How wonderful it would be to read Mandelstam and Akhmatova in the original! I have been besotted with Modernist poetry since my teens. I think my own poetry is permeated with Modernist elements, but they are not the conventional ones, so readers don't necessarily recognize them as such.

I also believe that the first half of the 20th Century was the greatest period of American poetry, that Modernist poetry is perhaps the high point of all American literature. The incredible cluster of talent, which began with E. A. Robinson and ran through Frost, Jeffers, Eliot, Pound, Cummings, Williams, Stevens, and up through Crane, Ransom, and Tate, was an unrivaled period in American poetry.

RM: But some critics would argue that your poetry rejects Modernism.

Gioia: My poetry is shaped by Modernism but not imprisoned by it. I have tried to assimilate what is still useful to an artist, but I am writing poems for today, not for Paris in 1913. Modernism is dead. Its historical moment has passed. Although it still influences what any serious American poet hopes to do, it is no longer a viable tradition. Of course, there is a group of poets and critics who pretend Modernism is still the vital mainstream. They desperately try to perpetuate the theory that the avant-garde remains a living force. To me, being avant-garde in the 1990's is a kind of antiquarianism. The central task for poets in my generation is the perennial challenge of reinventing poetry for the present moment. We must find a way to reconcile the achievements of Modernism with the necessity of creating a more inclusive and accessible kind of poetry. There are many ways to accomplish this, and I don't claim that my own approach is either the only or even the best way. But I do believe that the best new poetry will go beyond Modernism.

RM: The poets that you list as part of the Anglo-American Modernist movement is much broader than the standard academic canon. Most academics would exclude writers like E. A. Robinson and Robert Frost. They would see them, and Jeffers also, as traditional poets who happened to be writing during the Modernist period.

Gioia: Our father's house has many mansions. Modernism was a complex and inclusive movement. Any definition of American Modernism that does not include Frost or Jeffers is an inadequate one. Let me give you an example. If you took Frost's narratives in North of Boston, which was published in 1914, and compared them to the short stories that were written about rural America at that time, you would find in Frost's poetry a startling compression, an unnervingly cold realism, and an absolutely Modernistic sense of the narrator. I've always wondered if Ernest Hemingway did not develop his notion of the short story by reading North of Boston. In some respects he and Frost are amazingly similar. Jeffers's obsessive and powerful use of violence, sexuality, and myth is also quintessentially modern. No one could have written with that force and that raw candor before 1920. In that way, Jeffers's poetry parallels D. H. Lawrence's prose. So to reduce American Modernism to a certain stylistic school such as that of Williams or Stevens or Eliot is a gross and untenable simplification. I wonder if the most valuable parts of Modernism today may be those less acknowledged aspects like Frost and Jeffers rather than the Poundian or Williamesque traditions which have already been so well-mined.

RM: That brings us around to the question of the New Formalism. You've been identified with a movement in American poetry called the New Formalism. Would you care to give a definition of the New Formalism?

Gioia: One can't define New Formalism without discussing the origin of its name. New Formalism was a term given by unfriendly critics in the mid 80's to the young poets who had begun writing in the forbidden techniques - rhyme, meter, and narrative. The name was intentionally reductive and uncomplimentary because these critics felt American poets should not write in rhyme or meter. The name New Formalism inadequately describes, a genuinely vital movement by a group of poets of my generation. Our work has several similarities. We write in rhyme and meter, though not usually exclusively in rhyme and meter. At least half of my poetry, for instance, is written in free verse. Secondly, many of us are interested in reviving narrative poetry - not autobiographical stories, but stories about other people. Thirdly, we differ from what one might call the New Critical poets, the post-war academic formalists, in that we consciously borrow elements from popular culture. We often appropriate style, subject matter, and even whole genres from popular culture. And our work is less self-consciously intellectual and academic than some of those writers. We believe that writing can be intelligent without being pedantic. We are trying to regain for poetry both a variety of techniques, which had been forgotten in the free-verse era, and a kind of public voice which in some ways has been lost.

RM: What other poets share this aesthetic with you?

Gioia: There are a number of poets whom one might classify as New Formalists, not all of them equally good. My short list of the best poets would include R. S. Gwynn, Charles Martin, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, and Timothy Steele. Each of these poets is different, but what they have in common is an impressive sense of formal accomplishment. They have created a new kind of music by mixing contemporary speech and formal meters. Every line works. That is what it is all about - mastering the lines. These poets are consciously using the line, and the stanza, as musical elements in their poetry. R. S. Gwynn, who is a Southerner, writes very much out of popular literature. He has a poem called "Among Philistines" which retells, brilliantly, the Samson story from a suburban American perspective. Charles Martin is a writer who is very conscious of his Modernist roots, and his poetry plays with Modernist paradigms with verve and ingenuity. Gjertrud Schnackenberg bears the strongest resemblance to an formalist of the older generation, but her poetry has an emotional accessibility and gorgeous musicality which seems both personal and new. Timothy Steele is an accomplished lyric poet, who writes in the plain style, but in a direct and memorable way, which I greatly admire. There are other poets one might mention like Paul Lake and William Logan or narrative poets like Robert McDowell and Andrew Hudgins. These poets share a sense of concentration and musicality. They write with a sense of tradition, but without being burdened by tradition.

RM: Recently I've read a book by a young academic critic on Post-Modernist poetry, which concluded with an attack on New Formalism. Specifically, he attacked Gjertrud Schnackenberg's poem "Supernatural Love" - which I think is an exquisite poem - by comparing it to a poem by Allen Tate. He said both poems were filled with certain determinate images and that once you figure out those images, the poem's meaning is exhausted. Poems not self-consciously composed in "open" forms are denied canonic Post-Modern status.

Gioia: This critic looks at poetry as a puzzle, and he esteems only those puzzles he cannot solve. The major problem of contemporary poetry is that it has become the slave of contemporary criticism. Criticism values texts that generate critical discussion. I, however, subscribe to the quaint and discredited opinion that poetry is an art which is not created primarily for critics. There are enduring masterpieces of poetry about which very little of interest can be said in criticism. Critics have a tendency to overpraise what they can talk about and to ignore wonderful works about which not much can be said. For years, Thomas Hardy's reputation as a poet languished because he wasn't very interesting for critics of a certain generation to discuss. It is not coincidental that Hardy's reputation was revived largely by poets - by Auden, Larkin, Davie, Ransom, and Reeves. The most influential Anglo-American criticism now concerns itself mainly with theoretical issues. If it addresses contemporary poetry at all, it is often to make an ideological analysis. Consequently, one often finds voluminous discussions of contemporary poems of minimal artistic merit. Randall Jarrell complained that he lived in an age of criticism, but he hadn't seen anything compared to today. Some of this current criticism is interesting, but it does not have a great deal to do with what matters to me as a poet or as a reader.

RM: This leads us around to your own criticism. The first piece I ever read by you was a critical piece on John Cheever. What attracted to me about the article was that it was written in a clear and personal style. I read it at a time when I was finishing an extremely academic dissertation. It came as a revelation to me that there were young critics writing seriously about literature in a non-academic way. I subsequently discovered that you had written a series of critical essays not from within the academy but while being a businessman at General Foods.

Gioia: One of the major problems of American poetry today is that most poets have abandoned criticism. If one goes back several generations to the early Modernists, most of them were also accomplished critics. Even if they wrote criticism as irregularly as Robert Frost or Robinson Jeffers, they could still write lucidly and compellingly about poetry. And the central poet-critics - Eliot and Pound - rank among the greatest critics in the English language. The next generation - Blackmur, Winters, Ransom, Tate - not only continued this tradition but also helped transform the academic study of literature, as did their students, the generation of Jarrell, Berryman, Schwartz and Shapiro. Ironically, once poets entered the academy to teach creative writing, they began to write less criticism. Donald Justice once commented that while teaching literature develops a critical mind, teaching creative writing somehow does not. He has bemoaned the failure of his generation to produce many distinguished poet-critics. In my own generation, there are few poets of note who take writing criticism seriously. Consequently, for the first time in this century, American poets have conceded critical discourse on contemporary poetry to literary theorists and academics. I don't mean to belittle academic scholarship or criticism. I only insist on making a distinction. The concerns of an academic will by definition be different from the concerns of an imaginative writer. Academic critics write for their professional colleagues. Poets write for their real and potential readers. Those are two different undertakings. Academic criticism arises out of studying the past whereas criticism by artists emerges from a vision of the future. Criticism by poets has historically educated and nourished a broader audience.

I have taken my role as a critic seriously. I have worked hard to find the right tone to discuss poetry responsibly, intelligently, but accessibly. One does not compromise a critical essay by writing it for general readers. I have probably impeded my reputation as a critic by writing in a public idiom and by discussing figures outside of the contemporary canon. A young critic can make a reputation much more quickly by writing conventionally on well-known figures than by becoming an advocate for worthy but forgotten writers. What's the point of writing another essay saying the same things on the same writer? Why write unless one has something new to say? I'm not interested in writing on major figures, unless I have a dissenting opinion. Since I have made my living in business, I have complete freedom to write only about what interests me in the way which interests me. Consequently, I've devoted a great deal of critical energy and research to some forgotten or misunderstood figures, like Weldon Kees or Robinson Jeffers. I believe Kees is a major poet, although he appears in no literary histories and few anthologies.

RM: You've been the primary advocate of Weldon Kees of our generation. You've written several essays on his work and edited the selected stories. What attracts you to Kees? His work seems so different from yours.

Weldon Kees

Gioia: What is the use of art, if we can't admire writers different from ourselves? From the moment I read Kees's work, I felt that I had come across a master. There were so many things to admire in Kees's work. First, he was able to get all kinds of heterogeneous material into his verse. His poetry was equally informed by Shakespeare and the movies, by jazz and Joyce, and yet he put them together in an exciting and satisfying whole. Second, Kees was a relentless experimentalist. He invented at least a dozen new poetic forms, most of which he used only once or twice. Usually when we talk of experimental poets, we talk about poets who leave us interesting messes, poems which are more satisfying to talk about than to read. But Kees's experiments are almost uniformly successful. They get sensibilities and subjects into poetry that I've never seen successfully assimilated into poetry. Kees was an accomplished visual artist. He exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists. It wasn't until I knew his work for many years that I understood the connection between these two sides of his sensibility. His central visual medium was the modernist collage. He does the same things in verse. He combines surprising and unlikely material to illuminate the arcane connections between dissimilar things. Isn't that the way poetic metaphor operates? Kees fits as much of American experience into poetry as any post-War American poet has managed.

RM: Many would argue that John Ashbery is also doing that. Certainly he's notably influenced by the Abstract Expressionist painters and the collage method. You yourself once pointed out that Kees was an unacknowledged influence on the New York School poets.

Gioia: Kees is never classified as a New York School poet, and yet he seems to me the very model of a modern New York School poet. He was the first poet to integrate the techniques of Abstract Expressionism into verse. When I compare Kees's work with Ashbery's, however, I feel Kees is more concise, more emotionally direct, and more accessible than Ashbery. I know when I use the word "accessible", I sound like a Philistine to some people, but ultimately one must judge art by a subjective reaction. Art either registers on one's imagination or it doesn't. And so by "accessible", I don't mean "simple." Kees is a complex, challenging poet. He is probably the bleakest, most apocalyptic poet in American literature. He is also among the most allusive. But the sheer emotional desolation of his work is redeemed by his imaginative brilliance which few poets in the last half century have managed. The closest counterpart to Kees in American poetry is Hart Crane.

RM: Do you like Hart Crane's poetry?

Gioia: I came to Hart Crane's poetry relatively late. I never read him seriously until I was in my late twenties. At first I found him difficult but alluring. Then I noticed I couldn't get certain lines of his out of my head. I kept going back to his poetry with increasing esteem. I now think that White Buildings is one of the greatest books of American poetry ever published.

RM: Does that volume include "Voyages"?

Gioia: Yes. There are a dozen poems of Hart Crane's that summarize the greatness of Modernist American poetry. The intense and forceful use of metaphor, the sense of the possibilities of poetic language were broadened by Hart Crane. In some ways he's our greatest lyric Modernist. I am less impressed by The Bridge, which seems a fascinating failure.

RM: Let me return to an earlier subject. Why did you leave Harvard graduate school in 1975 to make a career in business?

Gioia: I'm not sure that anyone understands entirely why he make important decisions in one's life. Decisions are always complex. They involve both rational and emotional factors. I believe that I left Harvard for two reasons - the first economic, the second literary. I was the oldest son in a large working-class family. I had absolutely no money, and I felt a great deal of responsibility to provide an economic basis for the rest of the family. So, in one sense, I entered business because I needed to make a living and wanted some modest control over my life. The other reason I left academics was to become a poet. That sounds paradoxical, but I felt that I was becoming a worse writer with each passing year in academia. My poetry was becoming too studied and self-conscious. I was writing poems to be interpreted rather than to register on the imagination and emotions. As a critic, I felt I was being - I didn't feel, I knew I was being - encouraged to write for other specialists versus a wider audience. Why write in a style that your most intelligent friends out the university can't follow when you can say everything with as much accuracy in a more accessible way? My writing was changing for the worse.

Perhaps the reason I had to leave the university was because I liked it so much. I was too susceptible to its intellectual blandishments. I found the intense atmosphere of Harvard too interesting. I couldn't shield myself from the influences as well as somebody who didn't like the scholarly environment as much. Watching my friends who stayed in academics, I notice that they are under constant, external pressure, because they're surrounded by so many intelligent, self-conscious, critical people. It's hard for innovative or unconventional ideas to have the time and privacy to gesture under those circumstances. It's like living in a fish tank.

RM: How far along were you at Harvard when you left?

Gioia: I left Harvard after having completed all the course work for my doctorate and most of the language requirements in French, German, Italian, and Latin. On departing I was awarded something appropriately called a "terminal Masters."

RM: Your departure from Harvard seemed to coincide with the rise of literary theory in the universities. In 1975 was literary theory already a presence there?

Gioia: In comparative literature, literary theory was already gaining dominance in the early 70's. At Harvard, one of my pro-seminars was conducted by Edward Said. For Said, we read books by Foucault and Barthes in French before they had been translated into English. We also read Lukacs, Goldmann, Hirsch, and other theorists who since have become influential in the United States. They were already prominent in Europe. Of the literary theorists I read, the two who influenced me the most were an unlikely pair, George Lukacs, (especially his History of Class Consciousness), and E. D. Hirsch, (for his Validity in Interpretation). That was before Hirsch achieved national fame with Cultural Literacy. In other words, the areas which interested me most, in literary theory, were Marxist dialectics and hermeneutics. As a critic, I seem to have a very Germanic imagination.

RM: It's somewhat ironic, then, for you to move from Marxist theory to business. Isn't the type of criticism that you are doing now the antithesis to the type of literary criticism that is being done in the universities?

Gioia: Is it ironic for a poet who later became a businessman to have been influenced by Marxism? I don't think so. Marxism would not have dominated a great deal of European thought if it did not have some basis in truth. As an analytical technique, Marxism gets at certain social realities better than any other philosophical school. I have never agreed with the prescriptive political conclusions of Marxism, nor its claims at being a scientific political methodology. But, as an analytical tool, Marxist dialectic can be amazingly profound. One of the things that Lukacs taught me was how institutions work, and by institutions I mean not only political or economic institutions like the government or industry, but institutions such as the legal profession or academic literary studies. One of Lukacs's major apercus was that there comes a point when an institution becomes so inwardly focused in perfecting its own methodology that it loses touch with its original social function. Academic literary study has fallen into what Lukacs would have called a contradiction. It has become so obsessed with its own methodology that it no longer serves its primary educational purpose. So I would, ironically, use Marxist analysis to criticize many university theorists who themselves are Marxists. The general audience for serious literature in America is dying, even as the academic profession thrives. Much of the country is sinking into illiteracy. Literature means less every year to the educated classes. And what is the response of the academy? To burrow more deeply into intricate and arcane theory incomprehensible to anyone outside the profession. As a working-class kid who credits literature with broadening and clarifying his life, I have to deplore this smug parochialism. I naively believe that poetry still has value for a society.

RM: I am surprised to hear you speak so eloquently on behalf of literary theory. As a critic, you often seem to be battering the dominance of theory.

Gioia: It will surprise some people to hear me say that I have, in principle, a high regard for literary theory. Literary theory is an essential branch of humanistic study. But one must recognize what theory can do and cannot do. It's important to understand where literary theory fits into an academic curriculum. In America at least the academy grossly overemphasizes literary theory in its curriculum. I personally regret the shift in literary study from reading primary texts to reading critical and theoretical texts. The major problem today among students is that they simply have not read enough literature. Consequently they do not have the necessary background to take a critical attitude towards literary theory. One needs to test every abstraction against experience.

RM: Literary theory's other sin is that it has placed a layer of critical jargon between a literary text and the critics' own emotional and intellectual responses to it. Critics who try to speak clearly to a general audience are dismissed as journalists or failed academics.

Gioia: In America, there is an unprecedented cultural situation. Academic critics and imaginative writers not only possess no common set of concerns, but they no longer even share a common language. Neither side respects or even fully understands the other's language. Consequently, American literature is suffering the effects of an enervating bifurcation. At least one reason the poetry audience has declined in the United States is that there are no longer many first-class critics writing in a public idiom. One can point to only a handful of writers (ironically, often very scholarly ones like Hugh Kenner or Guy Davenport), who still write seriously in an accessible manner. Bruce Bawer is one of the few strong young critics who has continued the tradition of the public intellectual. Not surprisingly, he has had to make his career outside of the university. What we now posses is an impoverished public culture. No art is hurt worse than poetry by this situation. If mass circulation journals cover poetry at all they do so only in short journalistic pieces dumbed-down to reach the lowest common denominator. Meanwhile, the many academic journals and presses publish work written in a kind of professional jargon. Someone told me that the average American academic article is read completely by 0.9 readers. I believe it. That sort of criticism, as far as I can tell, is frequently written not to be read but to be weighed by a promotion committee.

Isn't is interesting that in the entire history of the world, there have never been so many people paid to profess poetry as in America today? We have tens of thousands of poetry professionals - perhaps hundreds of thousands, if we counted poetry teachers at every level. And yet there's never been a culture in which poetry has played so small a role, in which poetry has been so alienated from the common educated reader. Surely that cultural paradox must reveal something about the failure of our literary enterprises.

RM: Surely working outside of the university has been important to you. How has working in business affected your work?

Gioia: I am not sure I can answer that question accurately. Our professions mold us gradually in many ways that we ourselves can't see. Whenever I get together with old friends who have become teachers or lawyers, I marvel at how their work has accentuated some parts of their personalities while allowing other parts to atrophy. I would offer only two observations about the impact my job has had. First, unlike most university poets I spend all day working with adults - most of whom are smart, mature, and practical. That experience differs from spending your days reaching the young. I think that experience of working with peers rather than my juniors has shaped the concerns of my poetry in many ways that I only half understand. Second, by making a living outside of literature, I have been able to be utterly quixotic about poetry. I can spend (and, alas, sometimes have spent) years working on a poem or essay. I have been able to write about whatever subjects I want without worrying about the commercial consequences. I can send work to small magazines, including long prose pieces that took months to write. Poets who must support themselves as writers could never afford that luxury. They must write for the marketplace. Even though my work appears in mass circulation magazines like The New Yorker and The Atlantic, I feel more allegiance to smaller journals like The Hudson Review or Verse whose central mission is literature and the arts.

RM: What did you hope to get out of business?

Gioia: One attraction of business was the privacy it gave me as a writer. There are so many conflicting claims on young poets today that they develop very slowly. They have to sort through more possibilities, more influences than ever before. I felt that I needed anonymity to discover myself. I needed a time with no external pressures for publication. After leaving Harvard, I did not send any poems out for nearly eight years. But I wrote virtually every night after work and on the weekends. Much of the time I spend revising. I would sometimes write and rewrite a particular poem off and on for years only to discard it. But the process of submerging myself utterly in my imagination and my medium was invaluable. I could never have born the sheer loneliness of those years if I had not had an office full of people to go to each morning. Not worrying about publication gave me the freedom to make mistakes, to follow odd impulses. This period of public silence let me discover my own voice, develop my own set of concerns, without worrying about anyone outside approving or disapproving.

RM: Did your colleagues at work know that you wrote poetry?

Gioia: Of course not! I kept my writing a secret from them as long as I could. I felt that being known as a poet could only hurt my reputation inside the company. I also didn't want the people I worked with every day - good but very conventional middle-class folk - to know what I was writing. Offices are just like villages. People poke their noses into each other's affairs. I wanted the freedom to write about whatever I wanted, and that required absolute privacy.

RM: Was that a difficult time for you?

Gioia: Absolutely. All young writers crave praise and recognition. I was no exception. I felt, however, that isolation and anonymity were the necessary price for self- discovery. I had to shut off the distractions in my life. I had published a great many poems as an undergraduate and graduate student, but I found, at this beginning stage that, in sending poems to editors they did not publish my "best" work. They would frequently publish the poems in which I imitated some other writer. To an editor, those poems were more obviously accomplished than the clumsy, inchoate musings in which I was struggling to define my own material. When I had these early exercises in other people's styles accepted, I found myself encouraged to write more in those borrowed mainstream styles rather than to work out my own murky destiny. Consequently, I felt I needed not to publish. I was not strong enough to resist the unintentional influence of editors. I also knew that I was not strong enough at that stage in my life to make a career in business while writing and publishing. One of those things had to go, and it was publishing.

RM: Could you be more specific in terms of characterizing those early poems? What poets influenced you? What type of poetry were you writing as a graduate student and in your early days as a businessman?

Gioia: My strongest early influences were Eliot, Auden, Pound, Roethke, Rilke, and sometimes anyone I happened to be reading at the time. By the time I completed my first quarter in business school, I had made the decision to stop publishing. So what I'm describing is my early work. But I published a great many early poems.

RM: How many, if any, of those poems made it into Daily Horoscope?

Gioia: The earliest poem in Daily Horoscope is "The Burning Ladder," the first draft of which was written when I was studying with Robert Fitzgerald. There are only one or two other early poems which made it into that book. "Four Speeches for Pygmalion," for instance, is based on a long dramatic monologue I wrote for Fitzgerald. All of the other poems were written after I had gone into business. Virtually none of my early work has been collected.

RM: Didn't you take one poetry writing seminar as a business student at Stanford?

Gioia: As an undergraduate, I never took creative writing courses. Strictly speaking, the only creative writing I ever took was while I was in business school. I took Donald Davie's graduate poetry writing seminar, which was officially open only to the Masters candidates in Creative Writing, but Donald bent the rules and let in two outsiders - myself and an Indian student from the Food Research Institute named Vikram Seth. Donald's seminar was one of the most interesting intellectual experiences I've ever had. It was full of bright people - like Vikram, John Gery, and Vickie Hearne. It was a first rate course in practical criticism. I felt, however, that Donald's course was extraordinarily damaging for me as a poet because the work I was trying to write was at odds with the sort of poetry that he wanted us to write. He had strong preconceptions of the traditions an American poet should follow. Perhaps the work we brought him was still half-formed, but too much deviation from the schools of either Pound or Winters was not encouraged. In retrospect, I am grateful to Donald for being so discouraging. It toughened us up. It let us know that, if we were going to do something different, we had to expect the worst from critics.

RM: It's odd that the type of poetry that Davie would encourage was not the type of poetry that you were writing. A number of the poets you mention - Seth, Gery, and yourself - were later associated with New Formalism. I am struck by the parallels between New Formalism and Davie's early allegiance, The Movement. Davie ended up reacting against The Movement. Was he going through a phase when he was very influenced by Pound?

Gioia: Donald is one of the great living literary critics. But he was so English that he approached - half correctly, I think - American poetry as a foreign tradition. At that stage, Donald did not believe that Americans should be writing metrical poetry or narrative poetry. He also rejected any stylistic elegance or overt musicality. He encouraged us to write free verse about what he considered authentic American experience. I still remember the poem he praised most generously during the entire term was an formless memoir of Midwestern childhood. This poem had no redeeming quality except its Americanness. But, once again, when you have a poet-critic as strong as Donald Davie for a teacher, you must recognize that he will have his own agenda. What interests him, may or may not interest you. One fine thing that came out of this class, however, was that several of us established our own informal writing group. John Gery, Vikram Seth, Vickie Hearne, Gail Lynch, and I formed a weekly poetry group. We would get together at someone's house or a bar and show each other our poems. John, Gail, and I were the most loyal members. Vikram and Vickie were more irregular. But that experience of non-academic writing group, which was entirely new to me then, helped me a great deal.

RM: When you left Stanford, didn't you work for a year in Minneapolis?

Gioia: No, I worked for a large company in Minneapolis the summer of 1976 between my two years in business school. I had never been in the Midwest before. I knew no one in Minneapolis, and it was an extraordinarily lonely period for me. I spent my days analyzing trade budgets and charting trends. I found the work and the environment most unsympathetic, and living in isolation, I spent most of my free time reading, writing, walking, and fretting. It was my first experience working for a large corporation. It made me a nervous wreck. But gradually one learns to fit in.

RM: Did you write much poetry at that time?

Gioia: I wrote a great deal of poetry in Minneapolis. Several poems in Daily Horoscope came out of that brief sojourn such as "My Secret Life," and "An Elegy for Vladimir de Pachmann." In Minneapolis I also began a long poem called "Pornotopia" that was a kind of sexual nightmare in the tradition of Eliot and Thompson. I discarded almost all of this poem, but a few sections survived in Daily Horoscope - "Pornotopia," "The Memory," and "Speech from a Novella." "My Secret Life" was a parallel poem I wrote at the same time. I wanted to explore the fantasy worlds which some people use to escape life. The most important experience for me in Minneapolis, beside the unbroken solitude of my summer there, was discovering Weldon Kees.

RM: Both "Pornotopia" and "My Secret Life" seem quite different from the themes, the domestic themes in the first section of Daily Horoscope or the love lyrics there and in The Gods of Winter.

Gioia: I don't think of myself as a domestic poet. I have written very few autobiographical poems about family life. When I read the reviews of my first book, I was surprised at the difference between how the critics saw me and how I saw myself as a poet. Daily Horoscope is a very diverse book of poems which shows allegiance to several concerns. Most critics focused on one part of my writing which tends to be narrative or semi-narrative poems about everyday life. I have been linked to the tradition of Larkin, Frost, and Hardy. I consider that a great and perhaps undeserved compliment. But there's another side of my work, which is more private, more apocalyptic, that is also central to my sensibility. In addition to lyric and narrative poetry, I am interested in an exploratory kind of cultural and political poetry. Poems like "A Short History of Tobacco," "My Secret Life," "An Elegy for Vladimir de Pachmann," "The Lives of the Great Composers," "My Confessional Sestina," "News from 1984" represent an equally central part of my sensibility. I also believe that poems which have a lyric element, such as "In Cheever Country," "In Chandler Country," and "The Next Poem," are not simply lyrics, even if that is sometimes the easiest way to approach them critically. But an author always has grandiose visions of his own work! I'm interested in creating a lyric poetry which operates ambitiously, which reflects the aesthetics of concentration, allusiveness and even the impersonality of the Modernist lyric, but which nonetheless doesn't borrow the style of Modernsim.

RM: Perhaps I used the term "domestic" too quickly. I used it with reference to what I perceive to be the narrative movement, if there can be said to be one in the first section of Daily Horoscope which concludes with a vision of "In Cheever Country" - suburbia - as a type of paradise. Certainly some earlier poems in the section, like "Insomnia" demonstrate that a suburban home doesn't necessarily provide a sense of security.

Gioia: Wouldn't that make it anti-domestic?

RM: Well no, it seems to me that there's a tension in the poems between being a poet and living in the modern world, between being a businessman and a poet. There is also a sense of psychological tension in that first section of the book - a sense in poems like "The Man in the Open Doorway" and "Men After Work" that business life can be unfulfilling for many people - balanced by the final poem, "In Cheever Country" where you write: "If there is an afterlife, let it be a small town/gentle as this spot at just this instant" that suggests at least a temporary sense of solace, resolution.

Gioia: A poet must be honest to experience. Whatever I write must somehow be grounded in my actual life. Contemporary American poetry does not have nymphs and shepherds, but it has its equivalent cliches. Most American poetry takes place in prefabricated literary landscapes, be they redwood forests or working class bars - conventionally poetic places where poets have poetic experiences. I have tried to write out of the range of my actual experience, which means the suburbs as well as nature, which means books and music as well as the family. If some of that subject matter is domestic, to me it's a kind of imperilled, precarious domesticity. My practical theory of poetry is based on tension. Any poem I write that moves comfortably along in one direction doesn't satisfy me. Good poems have unexpected leaps and turns. In the same way the language of a poem should stretch against whatever form one lays out. There should be lines and turns of phrase that surprise and delight the reader. Unless a poem contains some surprising contradiction between its subject and its form, between its departure point and its destination, it doesn't interest me much.

RM: If one can identify, however problematically, one persona, connected with all of the poems in the opening section of Daily Horoscope, this persona achieves especially at the end of "In Cheever Country," "a momentary stay against confusion," which is what Frost thought a poem should do - provide a "momentary stay."

Gioia: I believe that it's the poet's job to redeem the ordinary world around us for the imagination and the spirit - even if that world is the suburbs and office life. But the poet cannot attempt this redemption at the price of simplifying or distorting it. One must see the world for what it is. One must present all of the burdens and miseries of this common life and still see the value in it. This spiritual challenge is at the root of my notion of poetic tension. It's hard for me to see beauty without somehow acknowledging the fragility of it. If I am a transcendentalist, it is of an austere and unillusioned sort.

RM: Has Frost influenced your poetry?

Gioia: I consider Frost a pivotal figure in American poetry. He redefined the possibilities of our literature. Whitman and Williams created an authentic American voice only by discarding the past. That led to a very narrow definition of American art, one that was progressive and yet oddly provincial. But Frost found a way to be American without rejecting tradition. He quietly and masterfully transformed it to suit new purposes. He was our secret Modernist. He reinvented formal prosody to fit modern American speech. He used traditional genres like the narrative poem and the pastoral in startlingly innovative ways. But because he stressed his continuity with tradition the novelty of his efforts were not recognized during his lifetime. No later poets pursued the rich possibilities his work opened up. That neglect is why Frost is so attractive to me.

In the mid 1970's when I tried to write narrative poetry seriously for the first time, I found no contemporary models. Modernism had declared narrative poetry defunct. Poets still wrestled with the epic - the massive culture poem in the tradition of Pound or Crane. There were lots of poets writing anecdotal, autobiographical poems in the confessional vein. But no one seemed to be exploring narratives about other people's lives. I wanted to write what I once called in my essay "The Dilemma of the Long Poem," "poems of middle length," verse narratives that were equivalent in scope to a short story. After discarding a few aborted poems, I began searching the past for a usable tradition to draw on. Browning seemed too remote; Tennyson lovely but inert. Early Eliot was attractive but too idiosyncratic. Robinson came close, but his language and manner were too severe for my sensibility. Then I looked at Frost, and all sorts of possibilities occurred to me. He had found just the balance between lyric tension and narrative credibility. He had created a style whose full potential had not yet been realized.

RM: You have extended your range as a narrative poet in your second collection. The tension between lyric epiphany and violence is even more emphatic in "Counting the Children" than "The Room Upstairs" from Daily Horoscope, and in "The Homecoming" it is most emphatic of all. Are you consciously invading the territory of prose in these longer poems?

Gioia: Absolutely. By the end of the 1970s American poetry had been reduced to a few lyric genres. The potential of the art had been diminished. The main contribution of the so-called New Formalists has not been the reintroduction of rhyme and meter. That was only a manifestation of a deeper change in sensibility. Their most important accomplishment was the reinvention of traditional genres in a viable and unpedantic contemporary form. We wanted workable forms that went beyond the autobiographical and surrealist lyric. Some poets like Charles Martin, Tom Disch, and R. S. Gwynn have focused mainly on satiric and discursive genres. They want to steal some of the energy and flexibility of prose without necessarily giving up formal strength of poetry. My own interests have been largely focused on finding a way to tell stories memorably in verse, to create something that works both as a compelling narrative and a forceful poem. That hasn't been easy. It requires a different kind of poetic language from what the lyric needs. The reinvention of the narrative poem seems to me the most important thing now happening in American poetry. It is also the clearest signal that Modernism is dead, and that poets are creating a new aesthetic.

RM: Did the death of your first son alter your development as a poet?

Gioia: It utterly transformed my life. How could it not also transform my consciousness as a writer? Tragedy inevitably simplifies your vision. It sweeps away everything that isn't essential. Losing my first son made me realize how little most of the things in my life mattered to me - and how desperately important few remaining things were. There was a searing clarity to the grief. I stopped writing for a year. It took all of my energy to get myself and my wife through each day. When I gradually began writing again, I saw poetry somewhat differently. Writing took on a spiritual urgency I had never experienced before - at least in so sustained and emphatic a way.

RM: How was writing these new poems different for you?

Gioia: I was no longer concerned with what the reader would think about the poems. I wrote them for myself. I trusted my intuition and emotions. In one sense this made the poems more difficult. I didn't worry about explaining an image or situation, if it had a private resonance to me. But, in a different sense, it also made the poems more emotionally accessible. I admitted my obsessions and allowed myself to be vulnerable. I no longer cared if critics thought I was morose or sentimental. Perhaps all I am saying is that I wrote the poems that my life dictated without trying to turn them into something else.

RM: Most of the poems in The Gods of Winter are directly or indirectly about death, including some poems written before your son's death. How do you account for that eerie coincidence?

Gioia: Some of the poems were composed earlier. "The Gods of Winter," for instance, was written for my wife after she had recovered from some potentially serious surgery. But some of the poems were reconceived and recomposed after my son's death. When I began writing again, I grew dissatisfied with some of the poems I had written after Daily Horoscope. I no longer felt the impulse that had created them. Since I normally work on poems for years before publishing them, it was natural for me to revise these poems-in-progress into something which spoke to my new situation. I could never have finished them in their original form. My Rilke translation, "The Song," for example, seemed elegant but evasive. I rewrote it into something quite personal. When I looked at "The Homecoming" (which was then titled "The Killer"), I suddenly saw the theme of the poem differently. It wasn't about religion but about family. I rewrote it from beginning to end. I took the narrative poem I had been working on the night before my son died - "Counting the Children" - and turned it into a longer, darker poem which eventually resolved itself into a vision. The episode I had originally planned as the ending became instead a turning point at the middle. That poem especially became a kind of spiritual self-examination for me. There was no other way for me to finish it except to transform it.

RM: Has the immense public response to your essay, "Can Poetry Matter?" had any effect on you as a writer.

Gioia: Yes, for several months it kept me too busy to write. I knew it would prove a controversial piece. I was prepared for criticism, but I was utterly defenseless for praise. Hundreds of letters arrived. Reporters called at the office. Radio and television producers booked interviews. Critical rebuttals and endorsements poured in. I made the mistake of trying to deal with the publicity responsibly. I answered a great many of the letters personally. I spent countless hours talking with reporters who knew very little about poetry. I wanted them to understand why the issues at stake were important. Meanwhile I had to maintain my normal business schedule. The whole experience drained me. I should have run for cover.

RM: What are your plans for the near future?

Gioia: To write poems again, if the Muse will still have me.