Poetry for Students

108 Poetry for Students

[Christina Vick]: When did you first conceive

a love for literature?

[Dana Gioia]: I can’t ever remember a time

when I did not love poems and stories, but who

knows how it all began? Oddly, I don’t recall my

parents ever reading books to me, but my mother

often read or recited poems. I remember hearing

hundreds of poems as a child. As soon as I learned

to read, I devoured books. We had—because of po-

litical graft—an enormous library in my otherwise

rundown hometown. I used to go there after school

and wander the shelves. No one ever advised me

on what to read, so I sampled everything. On the

same visit I might bring home a book of Roman

history, another of horror stories, and a third of Ital-

ian paintings. Reading was in many ways more real

to me than my daily life. It opened up a world of

possibilities beyond the dreary limits of working-

class, urban Los Angeles.

Were there any special circumstances in your

childhood that made books so important to you?

I spent a great deal of time alone. Both of my

parents worked. My first brother wasn’t born until

I was six, and except for my cousins next door there

were almost no children in my neighborhood,

which was made up mostly of small cheap apart-

ments. Our home, however, was full of books,

records, and musical scores from my uncle,

Theodore Ortiz, who had served in the Merchant

Marines before dying in a plane crash in 1955. He

was an old-style proletariat intellectual who spent

all of his money on music and literature. His library

lined nearly every room and spilled over into the

garage. There were books in six languages and hun-

dreds of classical LPs. My parents never read the

books or played the records, but they kept them for

sentimental reasons. The books were not especially

interesting to a child—the novels of Thomas Mann,

the plays of George Bernard Shaw, Pushkin in

Russian, Cervantes in Spanish—but growing up

with this large library around us exercised a strong

magic on me, and later on me brother Ted.

At what point in your life did you know that

you wanted to be a poet?

I remember quite exactly when I decided to be-

come a poet. I was a college sophomore studying

in Vienna on a Stanford exchange program. I had

gone to Europe as a decisive gesture to figure out

if I really wanted to be a composer. Living abroad

for the first time and speaking a foreign language,

I brooded a great deal in my room or else wandered

the labyrinthine streets of the inner city in a fever

of loneliness. Soon I found myself constantly read-

ing and writing poetry—both in English and Ger-

man. By the time I returned to America, I had

decided to be a poet.

Who or what do you read for pleasure or in-

spiration?

I read all the time—newspapers, magazines,

journals, and books—usually several books at once.

I don’t read as many novels now as I did when I was

younger, though I still read forty or fifty a year. Now

I tend to read more biographies and history. I also

read theological and philosophical books. And, of

course, I read—and reread—poetry all the time.

I find myself habitually rereading certain books and

authors, especially Virgil, Horace, St. Augustine,

Shakespeare, and the Bible. I read science fiction for

fun at bedtime. I also devour classical music and

opera magazines. I sometimes worry if I have spent

too much of my life reading, but how much narrower

my life would have been without books.

Who are your favorite authors?

I have too many to list, especially poets. Some

of my favorite novelists include Stendhal, Balzac,

James, Cather, and Nabokov. I have a special pas-

sion for the short story, which seems to me perhaps

The Litany

What

Do I Read

Next?

• A Death in the Family(1957), by James Agee,
  is a tragic tale of the effect of a man’s death on
  his family.


• For a comparative study of American poetry,
  read Richard Howard’s Alone with America: Es-
  says on the Art of Poetry in the United States
  since 1950(1980).


• Gioia dedicated The Gods of Winter(1991) to
  his son who died from sudden infant death syn-
  drome. Several of the poems in the volume deal
  with the subject of death.


• Gioia’s essay “Can Poetry Matter?,” published
  in Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and
  American Culture(2002), presents his contro-
  versial views of the status of poetry in America
  in the early part of the twenty-first century.