Interrogations at Noon by Dana Gioia

First published: Saint Paul, Minn.: Greywolf Press, 2001

Genre(s): Poetry

Subgenre(s): Narrative poetry

Core issue(s): Beauty; Communion; good vs. evil; humility; innocence; regeneration; self-control

Overview

Born on December 24, 1950, in Los Angeles, Dana Gioia graduated from Stanford and Harvard Universities, from Harvard having received two degrees, an M.A. in 1975 and an M.B.A. in 1977. While also writing poetry, he rapidly worked his way into a vice presidency at General Foods Corp. A practical man of business as well as a poet, like Wallace Stevens, Gioia is an unusual writer who is concerned with reviving poetry as a popular art form and bringing it back into general culture. A well-known commentator on poetry as well as a poet, Gioia in 2003 took the leadership of the National Endowment for the Arts, and he used that position to raise public awareness and appreciation of poetry.

From the beginning of his career, Gioia’s work reflected the Catholicism in which he was raised. Again like Wallace Stevens, a poet he admires, Gioia finds writing a realm of spiritual exploration as well as a way to comment on the fallen world. His mostly formalist poetry deals with Christian and, more specifically, Catholic themes, including awareness of sin and weakness, possibility of grace, and the mysterious otherness of small events in daily life. He has the sacramental vision which is often the distinguishing mark of the Catholic poet, and many scenes in his narratives have elements of the sacramental, suggestions of a meeting place or a transaction between the temporal and the eternal.

The poems in Interrogations at Noon find epiphanies in the experiences of ordinary life. The daily round of satisfactions and disappointments is backlit by the eternal. There is in Gioia’s poetry always a serious and religious sense of the individual’s place in the world and of the responsibilities that come with the cost of living. The passion and intensity of the spiritual search are the center of these poems.

“Interrogations at Noon,” the title poem, is a kind of self-dismissal, indicating the general nature of the poems and the failure one always feels in trying to live up to absolute standards:

Just before noon I often hear a voice,Cool and insistent, whispering in my head.It is the better man I might have been,Who chronicles the life I’ve never led.

The judge is severe. The speaker is condemned. The “better man,” however, is not the final judge, and the poem suggests a Christian humility, an Ignatius-style self-analysis in terms of ultimate values and concerns.

Greek and Roman myth appears frequently in the poems, evoking a sense of classic values through the figures and events of the myths. Roman playwright Seneca the Younger’s description of the underworld is presented, as well as the passions embodied in the tale of Juno (“Juno Plots Her Revenge”). The original ways in which the poet commands rhyme and meter is also reminiscent of the classics and of the “lapidary style”—a spare, terse style appropriate for monuments. There is little ornament in Gioia’s poetry despite the rhyme and rhythm; each word counts. The poems are therefore easily memorized, and like Robert Frost’s poems, their last lines can return to the reader as wisdom literature: “You only fail at what you really aim for” or “Our rituals are never for the dead.” Wry, epigrammatic, and memorable, the poems restate in different guises their common concerns: loss, ritual, words as healers, unrealizable desire, soul-making. “Homage to Valerio Magrelli,” a long poem based on Magrelli’s work—uncharacteristically for Gioia, in free verse—touches on some of these themes:

Especially in weepingthe soul revealsits presenceand through secret pressurechanges sorrow into water.The first budding of the spiritis in the tear,a slow and transparent word.

Thus grief is a necessary stimulus to soul-making.

Christian Themes

The poems in the collection reflect the Catholic sacramental vision, seeing signs of the eternal in ordinary life. The seven sacraments are Baptism, Confirmation, Holy Eucharist, Matrimony, Holy Orders, Confession, and Anointing of the Sick. Images from ordinary life are conferred with meaning by association with the sacraments, especially Baptism, Eucharist, and Confession. The physical act of taking a shower may suggest a rebirth; revealing sins and insecurities suggests a revitalization of faith and a personal renewal; a variety of symbolic communions suggest reaffirmation of the bond between human and divine. The book’s title and the poems suggest a vigorous self-examination at mid-life that brings a kind of closure and redirection. The situation may recall Dante’s beginning to the Inferno (c. 1320), at which point another middle-aged traveler seeks to find his place in the scheme of things:

Midway in the journey of our lifeI came to myself in a dark wood,for the straight way was lost.

Like Dante’s journey, Gioia’s brings him to realizations about self, world, and God.

Gioia’s work expresses an unusual perspective on divine mystery, which glimmers through the ordinary from time to time when least expected. The sense of possibility, which is often glimpsed in the work, is a form of rebirth. Mystery and rebirth combine in a sense of eternity present in the now.

The new year always brings us what we wantSimply by bringing us along—to seeA calendar with every day uncrossed,A field of snow without a single footprint.

The quatrain above that concludes “New Year’s” rounds out a poem that explores the question of what is now and how the present—the “tiny fissure where the future drips/ Into the past”—is not really a moment of time but part of something larger.

Much of Gioia’s work is about loss and the way people deal with loss through ritual and memory. Some of these poems were generated by the loss of his son to SIDS, and the grief occasioned by that loss. The work provides no easy consolation. Grief is work and the fragility of human life cannot be evaded. The Christian solution in the poems contains elements of faith, acceptance, and awareness of the responsibility always to remain involved, despite one’s personal problems or tragic losses. The poems suggest that a social commitment to attempt to make the world a better place is part of the divine assignment. One meets one’s commitment by inspired words and deeds as well as by faith.

Thus, although Gioia usually does not write explicitly or directly religious poems, his work is Christian and Catholic in its concerns and images. He uses Christian terms in his titles and as metaphor; “Litany” and “Pentecost” are examples. He mingles Christian and secular imagery in poems that define what it means to live as a believer in a secular world. One of his main themes is the Christian way of accepting death through ritual and remembrance. His sacramental vision gives readers a way of looking at the world that shows its divine origin. Gioia is among the poets who represent their faith in their work in a subtle, sometimes oblique manner, producing nuanced work that appeals to non-Christians as well as Christians.

Sources for Further Study

Gioia, Dana. Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture. 10th anniversary ed. St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 2002. Contains Gioia’s essays on what poetry can and should be doing in the contemporary world. Helpful for understanding his poetics.

Hagstrom, Jack W. C., and Bill Morgan. Dana Gioia: A Descriptive Bibliography with Critical Essays. Jackson, Miss.: Parrish House, 2002. Contains an exhaustive bibliography of Gioia’s work as well as several useful articles about it. The most complete source for Gioia materials.

Lindner, April. Dana Gioia. 2d ed. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 2003. A general introduction to Gioia’s thought and work. Useful for students.

Meyer, Bruce. “Dana Gioia.” In New Formalist Poets. Vol. 282 in Dictionary of Literary Biography, edited by Jonathan N. Barron. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Group, 2003. A brief biography and an analysis of Gioia’s major themes.