Colosseum Critical Introduction to Dana Gioia

"Dana Gioia has often been more admired and deplored as a literary and cultural celebrity than as a poet, even though he has published five collections of poems, has served as the California State Poet Laureate, has won the American Book Award, the Poets' Prize twice, and the Aiken Taylor Award, and has been canonized in The Norton Anthology of Poetry and The Oxford Book of American Poetry. In the new century his fame was spurred by becoming chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts in 2003 and by receiving the Presidential Citizens Medal in 2008. Before Gioia stepped down from the NEA in 2009, his reanimation of the downtrodden agency brought him renown as newly launched programs such as The Big Read and Poetry Out Loud reached both communities across the map and arts lovers from all generations. Another important venture of the Endowment under Gioia's direction, Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, staged workshops for soldiers, their families, and other veterans. Their writings composed the anthology Operation Homecoming, which the Washington Post listed among the best works of nonfiction for 2006. All this meaningful work, however, came with a personal price: It kept Gioia from the writing desk, so much so that he began to wonder if the muse might desert him (Johnson 35). Earlier, in the nineties, he had drawn international attention as an iconoclastic critic for his controversial essay in the Atlantic Monthly, "Can Poetry Matter?" In the midst of the maelstrom surrounding the article, he published his second volume of verse, The Gods of Winter (1991). However, while the hotly contested essay made Gioia something of a household name, it also overshadowed his poetry. Even his initial emergence into the spotlight in the mid-eighties limited attention to his poems' intrinsic merits. While working as a marketing executive at General Foods and secretly publishing poems and criticism on the side, Gioia was unmasked in 1984 when his name made a list in Esquire of "Men and Women Under Forty Who Are Changing America" ("Being Outted"). This accolade helped Gioia's first book, Daily Horoscope (1986), reach a wide audience of readers and critics; nevertheless, the irrelevant fame of his business career led some reviewers to caricature his volume as catering to an audience of yuppie commuters (Peters 50) or to equate it with "The Poetry of Money" (the title of Greg Kuzma's dismissive review). The book, of course, won much high praise for its virtues, but the penumbra of Gioia's day job made it easy to typecast. At the same time, as a prime example of the New Formalism (a term derisively coined by Ariel Dawson in "The Yuppie Poet"), Gioia's poetry elicited other reductive views that focused on his use of rhyme and meter. Notably, some wrongheaded critics simplistically considered the stylistic return to form as an act of political conservatism (Byers; Wakoski). His own defense of New Formalism helped the "movement" to reach its eventual place in the mainstream, but his success and fame as a critic further obscured his primary identity as "a poet who tries to do a good job" (qtd. in Lindner 6). Indeed, despite his prominent role as critical advocate of the movement, Gioia denies that he is "a formalist" poet himself since he writes a third of his poems in free verse and likes to invent his own forms. These distracting controversies now seem of a different period. After his time at the NEA, Gioia resettled into the life of a poet. He began writing the poems that eventually made up Pity the Beautiful, 99 Poems, and The Ballad of Jesu s Ortiz, the old culture wars now a blur in his rear-view mirror. Simultaneously, he has turned his critical attention toward the relations of Catholic writers with the American mainstream. As he approaches his seventieth birthday later this year, he not only continues to write and publish individual poems for what will be his sixth volume of verse, but also is drafting a long poem, "The Underworld," which figures to be a major work. In the last decade, then, Gioia has been able to cultivate his primary vocation, whose seedtime began in the rough-and-tumble working-class town of Hawthorne, California, where he discovered the joy of reading"--