NEA nominee puts poetry back on Page 1

Dana Gioia, who is President Bush’s candidate to lead the National Endowment for the Arts over the next four years, once posed the question “Can poetry matter?” If the flurry of interest that has arisen since the 51-year-old Santa Rosa poet and critic’s name was first floated last week is any indication, the answer is emphatically yes.

Every story on his impending nomination has included this set of facts: Gioia is the Hawthorne-raised son of hard-working parents -- Dad a cabby, Mom a soda fountain attendant. He earned advanced degrees from Harvard and Stanford before pursuing a successful business career -- he oversaw Kool-Aid for General Foods -- which he threw over for life as a poet and critic. In a controversial 1991 essay, he argued convincingly that contemporary poetry needs to be rescued from the deadly grip of academe.

And, finally, he is the maker of an equally controversial remark about Los Angeles. This is, Gioia said, “perhaps the only great city in the world that has not yet produced a great poet, a poet who captures the spirit of the place,” as Walt Whitman did for New York and Baudelaire for Paris.

Speaking by telephone this week from Chattanooga, Tenn., where rehearsals are underway for “Nosferatu,” an opera for which he wrote the libretto, Gioia stood by his assessment. He was quick to point out, though, that he never said that great poems had not been written in Los Angeles nor that great experiences of poetry have not occurred here.

“The first live poetry reading I ever attended,” he recalled, “was at the Mark Taper Forum, where I heard Kenneth Rexroth read his translations of Chinese poetry accompanied by classical Chinese music. It was an unforgettable experience.”

Beyond that, with his nomination still pending, Gioia said he is reluctant to amplify his thought about Los Angeles. As the recent controversies surrounding Quincy Troupe and Amiri Baraka have shown, poetry and politics can be uneasy bedfellows.

So how should Los Angeles plead to the charge of lacking an unchallenged bardic voice? Guilty with an explanation.

The explanation should begin with a question: Why is it that alone among the world’s great cities, Los Angeles lacks a single inarguably distinguished public building -- the jury is still out on Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall and Jose Rafael Moneo’s new cathedral -- but is the largest repository of great domestic architecture?

The answer is that this is overwhelmingly a city of private life. The great bourgeois conception that private life is meaningful has reached its apogee -- or decadence -- here on the shore of the Pacific. Our great spaces are private not public ones; our major preoccupations are individual and familial rather than communal. And just as these facts subsume common social and political expectations, so they frustrate the expectation that a great city must inevitably have a single, great poet.

“In the strict Whitmanesque-sense, Gioia is correct,” said David L. Ulin, who has edited anthologies of Los Angeles’ literature. “There is no poet who has made a career singing the song of the city, but I would argue that L.A. is a special case because it doesn’t have a cohesive civic identity or central narrative in the sense that New York does. L.A. is a chaotic collage of cultures and people and, therefore, unique.”

Ulin said that while he is not a big fan of Charles Bukowski, L.A.’s bestselling poet, “he wrote some great stuff. I think, though, that Wanda Coleman more often takes on the issues of the city. I think Eloise Klein Healy and Aleida Rodriguez are both wonderful, but theirs is a very personal poetry. The dislocation that is a fact of life here works against any other type.”

Bay Area poet and critic Jack Foley, host of the influential “Cover to Cover” program on Berkeley radio station KPFA, agrees.

“When I go down to Los Angeles to do a poetry reading, people come up to me afterward and say, ‘That was very nice. Do you have a film script?’ In L.A., serious thinking and writing goes into films and novels. Bukowski and other important poets there are systematic outsiders and, in a certain sense, small-towners. Bukowski was much more inclined to write about San Pedro or Hollywood the neighborhood. Venice Beach is a constant presence in the work of Stuart Perkoff, who is a poet I admire very much. Neither is interested in the city as a whole.”

Gioia’s appraisal of Los Angeles’ poetry came during a debate that’s been going since the publication in 2000 of another of his controversially plain-spoken critical essays in which he decried the mediocrity of so much contemporary California poetry. “Lacking a vital critical milieu, well-intentioned regional literati usually practice boosterism,” Gioia wrote. That, he argued, is “a slow poison to native excellence.”

Much invective ensued. “Arrogant” and “elitist” were two of the lesser epithets tossed Gioia’s way. Somehow, though, they are hard to reconcile with the description of himself that Gioia offers in an unpublished essay titled “On Being a California Poet”:

“I was born and raised in Hawthorne, Calif., a tough working-class town in southwest Los Angeles. Hawthorne was also my mother’s hometown. Her mestizo father had fled his reservation in New Mexico to settle on the West Coast. My father’s family had immigrated from Sicily at the turn of the century. Surrounded by Italian-speaking relations, I grew up in a neighborhood populated mostly by Mexicans and Dust Bowl Okies.

“I attended Catholic schools at a time when Latin was still a living ritual language. I went to Junipero Serra High School, a Catholic boys school run by the French Marianist order -- many of whom were Hawaiian, Chinese or Mexican. The school was located in Gardena, where Buddhist temples outnumbered mainstream Protestant churches. Having experienced this extraordinary linguistic and cultural milieu, I have never given credence to Easterners who prattle about the intellectual vacuity of Southern California. My childhood was a rich mixture of European, Latino, Indian, Asian and North American culture in which everything from Hollywood to the Vatican, Buddha to the Beach Boys had its place.

” ... I believe that it is essential for some writers to maintain their regional affinities. To speak from a particular place and time is not provincialism, but part of a writer’s identity. It is my pleasure and my challenge to speak from California.”

So he has, and excellently so. It will be more than refreshing to see the NEA directed at last by someone who understands the wisdom of poet Patrick Kavanagh’s dictum: While the best art often is parochial, it never is provincial.