海角大神

What is life? How do we confront it? Why do we so often squander it?

Award-winning poet and critic Dana Gioia has made a career of facing such questions head-on. Gioia, the former head of the National Endowment for the Arts, sent shock waves through the poetry world with his 1991 essay in The Atlantic titled 鈥淐an Poetry Matter?鈥� Today 99 Poems: New & Selected serves to reenforce Gioia鈥檚 reputation as one of America鈥檚 best living poets.

Gioia writes in both metered and free verse and has a respect for form that gives his verse a somewhat classic feel. And yet there is also a heartfelt simplicity that keeps his work warm and accessible.

Much of Gioia鈥檚 verse seems to speak directly to the empty corners of human life. 鈥淗e sometimes felt that he had missed his life/ By being far too busy looking for it,鈥� he writes in his short poem 鈥淭he Road,鈥� which he concludes by asking, 鈥淲here was it he had meant to go, and with whom?鈥�

Gioia directly challenges the emptiness of much of human endeavor. 鈥淪trange how most journeys come to this: the sun/ bright on the unfamiliar hills, new vistas/ dazzling the eye, the stubborn heart unchanged,鈥� he notes in 鈥淢ost Journeys Come to This.鈥�

Yet Gioia鈥檚 poems never seem to suggest futility. There is always a point to the striving, a virtue to be won in the attempt. In a short, poignant poem called 鈥淯nsaid,鈥� Gioia acknowledges the truth of what we experience, even when we cannot express it in words as we may wish to do.

So much of what we live goes on inside 鈥�
The diaries of grief, the tongue-tied aches
Of unacknowledged love are no less real
For having passed unsaid. What we conceal
Is always more than we dare confide.
Think of the letters that we write our dead.

In other words, even our failed or belated efforts to share our inner lives still serve to validate their power.

In 鈥淎utumn Inaugural,鈥� Gioia writes:

There will always be those who reject ceremony
Who claim that resolution requires no fanfare....

And they are right. Symbols betray us.
They are always more or less than what
Is really meant. But shall there be no
Processions by torchlight because we are weak?
What native speech do we share but imperfection?

It鈥檚 hard to imagine a better defense of poetry than this.

Marjorie Kehe is the Monitor鈥檚 books editor.