Майкл Джойя: Американский поэт и деятель культуры

American poet and writer

Michael Dana Gioia ('/dʒ//ɔɪ//.//ə/; born December 24, 1950) is an American poet, literary critic, literary translator, and essayist. Since the early 1980s, Gioia has been considered part of the highly controversial and countercultural literary movements within American poetry known as New Formalism, which advocates the continued writing of poetry in rhyme and meter, and New Narrative, which advocates the telling of non autobiographical stories. Gioia has also argued in favor of a return to the past tradition of poetry translators replicating the rhythm and verse structure of the original poem. Gioia helped renew the popularity of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the rediscovery of Weldon Kees and John Allan Wyeth. He also co founded the annual West Chester University Poetry Conference, which has run annually since 1995. At the request of U. S. President George W. Bush, Gioia served between 2003 and 2009 as the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). In November 2006, Business Week magazine profiled Gioia as "The Man Who Saved the NEA". Five years after Gioia left office, The Washington Post referred to him as one of "two of the NEA's strongest leaders". In December 2015, Gioia became the California State Poet Laureate. Gioia has published six books of poetry and five volumes of literary criticism as well as opera libretti, song cycles, translations, and over two dozen literary anthologies. Gioia's poetry has been anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, The Oxford Book of American Poetry, and several other anthologies. His poetry has been translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Chinese, and Arabic. Gioia published translations of poets such as Eugenio Montale and Seneca the Younger.

Gioia was born in Los Angeles in 1950, the child of a working class Sicilian father and Mexican American mother. He attended Catholic schools for twelve years. He became the first person in his family to attend college. He received a B. A. and M. B. A. from Stanford and an M. A. in Comparative Literature from Harvard. At Harvard he studied with poets Robert Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Bishop. For fifteen years he worked as a businessman in New York while writing at night and on weekends. In 1992 he quit to become a full time writer.

In a 2016 interview, Gioia recalled, "As soon as I began publishing formal poems, my work was attacked." In response, he decided, "to articulate my poetics", by publishing literary essays. In his influential 1987 essay Notes on the New Formalism, Gioia wrote: "Literature not only changes; it must change to keep its force and vitality. There will always be groups advocating new types of poetry, some of it genuine, just as there will always be conservative opposing forces trying to maintain the conventional methods. But the revival of rhyme and meter among some young poets creates an unprecedented situation in American poetry. The New Formalists put the free verse poets in the ironic and unprepared position of being the status quo. Free verse, the creation of an older literary revolution, is now the long established, ruling orthodoxy, formal poetry the unexpected challenge Form, we are told authoritatively, is artificial, elitist, retrogressive, right wing, and (my favorite) Un American. None of these arguments can withstand critical scrutiny, but nevertheless, they continue to be made so regularly that one can only assume that they provide some emotional comfort to their advocates. Obviously, for many writers the discussion between formal and free verse has become an encoded political debate." In a 2016 interview with John Cusatis, however, Dana Gioia explained, "Literary movements are always temporary. They last a decade or so, and then they die or merge into the mainstream. The best New Formalist poets gradually became mainstream figures. There was no climax to the so called Poetry Wars, only slow assimilation and change. Free and formal verse gradually ceased to be considered polar opposites. Form became one of the available styles of contemporary practice."

In 1991, Gioia published the influential essay, Can Poetry Matter? in the April issue of Atlantic Monthly. In the essay, Gioia began with the words, "American poetry now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group. Little of the frenetic activity it generates ever reaches outside that closed group. As a class, poets are not without cultural status. Like priests in a town of agnostics, they still command a certain residual prestige. But as individual artists, they are almost invisible." The reason, Gioia explained, was that between 1940s and the 1960s, when college and university faculty positions were routinely offered to famous poets, American poetry had become imprisoned in college and university creative writing programs. As a result, recent poetry was no longer being read or studied by the vast majority of the American people. He alleged that, to say that a living poet was well known, meant merely that he or she was well known to other poets, who were generally professors and graduate students. He further wrote that poetry was no longer a fruit of Literary Bohemia, but of academic bureaucracy. Gioia concluded with the words, "The history of art tells the same story over and over. As art forms develop, they establish forms that guide creation, performance, instruction, and analysis. But, eventually, these conventions grow stale. They begin to stand between the art and its audience. Although much wonderful poetry is being written, the American poetry establishment is locked into a series of outmoded conventions – outmoded ways of presenting, dissecting, and teaching poetry. Educational institutions have codified them into a stifling bureaucratic etiquette that enervates the art. These conventions may once have made sense, but today they imprison poetry in an intellectual ghetto. It is time to experiment, time to leave the well ordered but stuffy classroom, time to restore a vulgar vitality to poetry and unleash the energy now trapped in the subculture. There is nothing to lose. Society has already told us that poetry is dead. Let's build a funeral pyre out of the desiccated conventions piled around us and watch the unkillable Phoenix rise from the ashes." Writing in 2002, Gioia recalled, "When the original essay appeared in the April 1991 issue of Atlantic Monthly, the editors warned me to expect angry letters from interested parties. When the hate mail arrived typed on the letterheads of University writing programs, no one was surprised. What astonished the Atlantic editors, however, was the sheer size and intensity of the response. Can Poetry Matter? eventually generated more mail than any article the Atlantic had published in decades." In 1992, Gioia resigned from his position as a vice president at General Foods to pursue a full time career as a poet.

Gioia has created several major literary conferences—each addressing a unique need. In 1995 he co created (with fine press printer Michael Peich) the West Chester Conference on Form and Narrative to provide training in poetic form. West Chester soon became the largest all poetry conference in the U. S. It ran for twenty years. Gioia later created the “Teaching Poetry” (2001–2003) for high school instructors. Although successful, it ended when Gioia became NEA Chairman. Finally, in 2013 he created the first “Catholic Literary Imagination Conference” at USC. This influential conference has been repeated at two year intervals Fordham, Loyola Chicago, and University of Dallas.

On February 23, 1980, he and Mary Elizabeth Hiecke were married. They had three sons, one of whom died in infancy. His poem "Planting a Sequoia" is based on his experience of losing his infant son.

Gioia has published six full length volumes of poetry in addition to many smaller fine press books and pamphlets. Although Gioia is best known for helping revive rhyme and meter, all of his books contain a mix of poems in free and formal verse. His first collection, Daily Horoscope (1986), attracted much notice, favorable and unfavorably, because of its use of rhyme, meter and verse narrative, but its most widely reprinted poem, “California Hills in August,” is in free verse. The Gods of Winter (1991), Gioia’s dark second collection, contains poems written after the death of his first son. Published in the U. S. and U. K, the British edition was chosen by the Poetry Book Society as their main selection. This volume demonstrated Gioia’s interest in narrative poetry with two long dramatic monologues, “Counting the Children” in which an accountant has a disturbing interaction with a dead woman’s grotesque doll collection, and “The Homecoming,” which is spoken by an escaped returning home to commit one final murder. Gioia’s third collection, Interrogations at Noon (2001), was the winner of the 2002 American Book Award. This diverse book, which contains both original poems and translations, was followed by a decade of silence during Gioia’s service at the National Endowment for the Arts and the Aspen Institute. Pity the Beautiful (2012) marked Gioia’s return to poetry and included two chilling poems, “Special Treatments Ward,” which describes a terminal ward in a children’s hospital, and “Haunted,” a dramatic monologue in equal parts of a love story and a ghost story. “Haunted” was turned into a ballet opera by composer Paul Salerni. Gioia’s next volume, 99 Poems: New & Selected (2016), surveyed his career in an unusual way. Rather than present his poems chronologically, Gioia arranged them by seven themes. The book won the Poets’ Prize. Gioia’s most recent volume, Meet Me at the Lighthouse (2023), paid special attention to his Mexican roots and included “The Ballad of Jesus Ortiz,” which recounts the life and death of this great grandfather, a vaquero who was killed in a racially motivated incident. Gioia's most recent collection of poems is Meet Me at the Lighthouse, published in 2023.

Gioia has collaborated with musicians including James MacMillan, Ned Rorem, Lori Laitman, Morten Lauridsen, Paul Salerni, Alva Henderson, David Conte, Tom Cipullo, Stefania de Kenessey, and John Harbison. His jazz collaborators include Dave Brubeck, Paquito D'Rivera, and Helen Sung. Gioia has written three opera libretti. His first opera, Nosferatu, with music by Alva Henderson, was jointly premiered by Rimrock Opera and Opera Idaho in 2004. His second libretto, Tony Caruso's Final Broadcast, with music by Paul Salerni, won the National Opera Association award for best new chamber opera and was premiered in Los Angeles in 2008. Both of these works have been recorded. His latest opera, The Three Feathers, with music by Lori Laitman, was premiered by Virginia Tech and Opera Roanoke in 2014.

Matthew Brennan. Dana Gioia. A Critical Introduction. (Story Line Press Critical Monographs) (2012, expanded and revised 2020) Franciscan University Press. April Lindner. Dana Gioia (Boise State University Western Writers Series, No. 143) (2003)
Jack W. C. Hagstrom and Bill Morgan. Dana Gioia: A Descriptive Bibliography with Critical Essays (2002)
Janet McCann, "Dana Gioia: A Contemporary Metaphysics", Renascence 61.3 (Spring 2009): 193–205. Michael Peich. Dana Gioia and Fine Press Printing (Kelly/Winterton Press) (2000)
John Zheng (editor). Conversations with Dana Gioia. University of Mississippi Press (2021).