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Dana Gioia's archives go to Huntington, Stanford – including "tens of thousands" of letters!
Dana Gioia's books, manuscripts, libretti are now at the Huntington Library.
Dana Gioia is a man of letters in the time-honored sense of the term, influencing our culture as a poet and essayist, but also as a translator, editor, anthologist, librettist, teacher, literary critic, and advocate for the arts. His correspondence was extensive, and it went on for decades. Hence, his archive is a treasure trove, and though he has had offers from other institutions to acquire it, he wanted his papers to stay in California. Now they will. He has donated his substantial archive to the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, which announced today it had acquired the papers of the poet and writer who served as the chair of the National Endowment for the Arts from 2003–09 and as the California Poet Laureate from 2015–19.
Dana Gioia in L.A. with friend, Doctor Gatsby (Photo: Starr Black)
It is the second large donation he has made in the last year. Last August, he gave to Stanford the large archive of Story Line Press, which he co-founded. The papers are the central archive for the New Formalism movement. The archive includes a number of people who have spent time at Stanford, including Donald Justice, Donald Hall, Christian Wiman, Paul Lake, Annie Finch, and of course Dana himself, among others. Stanford Libraries already holds the archive for The Reaper, so this is a natural pairing with that irreverent journal.
The larger Huntington archive includes correspondence with many of the major poets and writers for the last several decades, including Elizabeth Bishop, Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur, Ray Bradbury, Rachel Hadas, Jane Hirshfield, William Maxwell, Thom Gunn, Edgar Bowers, Kay Ryan, Robert Conquest, Julia Alvarez, Thomas Disch, Cynthia Ozick, Donald Davie, Anthony Burgess, John Cheever, J.V. Cunningham, and even some musicians, such as Dave Brubeck. It also includes his own books, manuscripts, and libretti. "Even after I pruned my correspondence, there is a lot of letters – in the tens of thousands," said Dana.
"When I told my brother Ted that I had made the donation, he commented that I wanted my papers to be at the Huntington because our mother took us there as children. 'You're probably right,' I said. I still remember seeing the elegant manuscript of Poe's 'Annabel Lee' there nearly sixty years ago. It was my first glimpse into that enchanted kingdom by the sea called poetry."
The Huntington picked up 71 archival boxes last December – the first part of his donation. Then Dana Gioia had a more urgent task: the next day he flew back to northern California home, which sustained fire damage during last year's Kincade wildfire.
From the Huntington release:
The archive documents Gioia's work as a poet through fastidiously maintained drafts of poems and essays from his books, which include five books of poetry and three books of critical essays. He is one of the most prominent writers of the "New Formalist" school of poetry, a movement that promoted the return of meter and rhyme, although his arts advocacy work situates him in a broader frame.
The archive en dishabillé, as Mary Gioia helps organize.
"In his correspondence, you see a writer who has been willing to engage the young and old, the esteemed and emergent—anyone who wants to critically discuss poetic form, contemporary audiences for poetry, and the importance of literary reading during decades when popular culture has become increasingly visual and attention spans have fractured," said Karla Nielsen, curator of literary collections at The Huntington. "We are delighted that Dana has entrusted his papers to The Huntington, where his collection fits perfectly. He is a local author—he grew up in a Mexican/Sicilian American household in Hawthorne—and even as he attained international recognition as a poet and assumed the chairmanship of the NEA, he remained loyal to the region and invested in Los Angeles' unique literary communities."
"I'm delighted to have my papers preserved in my hometown of Los Angeles, especially at The Huntington, a place I have loved since the dreamy days of my childhood," said Gioia.
While the range of correspondents in the collection is broad and eclectic, the sustained letter writing with poets Donald Justice, David Mason, and Ted Kooser is particularly significant.
Gioia's work co-editing a popular poetry anthology textbook with the poet X. J. Kennedy from the 1990s to the present will interest scholars working on canon formation during those decades when the "culture wars" were a politically charged issue.
A portion of the materials represent Gioia's work as an advocate for poetry and the arts at the NEA and as the California Poet Laureate. This work is integral to his career and will be important to scholars interested in the place of poetry and the role of reading for pleasure within greater debates about literacy and literary reading at the beginning of the 20th century. … At The Huntington, Gioia's archive joins that of another businessman poet, Wallace Stevens; that of a very different but also quintessentially Los Angeles poet, Charles Bukowski; and those of two other New Formalist poets, Henri Coulette and Robert Mezey.
Tens of thousands of letters and much more – now at the library his mother Dorothy Ortiz took Ted and Dana Gioia to visit as children. Dana remembers the Poe manuscript of "Annabel Lee."
Tags: "Dana Gioia", "Kay Ryan", Annie Finch, Anthony Burgess, Anthony Hecht, Charles Bukowski, Christian Wiman, Cynthia Ozick, Dave Brubeck, David Mason, Donald Davie, Donald Hall, Donald Justice, Edgar Bowers, Elizabeth Bishop, Henri Coulette, J.V. Cunningham, Jane Hirshfield, John Cheever, Julia Alvarez, Karla Nielsen, Paul Lake, Rachel Hadas, Ray Bradbury, Richard Wilbur, Robert Conquest, Robert Mezey, Seamus Heaney, Ted Kooser, Thom Gunn, Thomas Disch, Wallace Stevens, William Maxwell, X.J. Kennedy
Seamus Heaney's last days: "a moment of changing direction … a movement of gratitude to the people who helped him."
John Deane (Photo: Mossy Carey)
We've posted on the seminal conference at Loyola University in Chicago last week here and here. This is our final installment. The Irish poet and novelist John Deane, founder of Poetry Ireland and The Poetry Ireland Review spoke movingly, eloquently of his friend and fellow countryman, the Nobel poet Seamus Heaney. (We've written about him before, here and here and here.) He described his eminent colleague's crisis of faith and final days in 2013. He has allowed us to share an excerpt from his essay in the April 2019 issue of Intercom Magazine:
In the collection Human Chain, he reflects on the stroke he has suffered and how he was helped by others; it is a poem where he uses that same metaphor of the palsied man lowered through the roof. Heaney had suffered a severe stroke and this poem uses the metaphor – not as a spiritual poem, not an act of faith, Heaney insisted, but a moment of changing direction in one's life – as a movement of gratitude to the people who helped him. There is continuum of perspective in the poem, "Miracle", and a placing of the work on the ground of his early Christian awareness: "Not the one who takes up his bed and walks / But the ones who have known him all along / And carry him in —" The reader, or hearer, of this poem is not urged towards belief in miracles, but towards wonder at the kindness of the people who brought him to the ambulance when he needed them.
"A wonder at the kindness of the people…"
When I asked Seamus Heaney if he might write a poem for the issue of Poetry Ireland Review I was planning, seeking new work from poets I knew that might offer a personal answer to the question of what the personal Christ meant to them, ("Who do you say that I am?") he answered enthusiastically: "I will definitely keep the project in mind. It's quite a commission, a test of truth and art, but one worth risking." Eventually he sent me "The Latecomers". It reads, to me, as a poem in which Heaney sees himself, not as the palsied man, nor as the helpers, but as Christ himself, surrounded by the needy who press around seeking help and healing. Seamus was then constantly being badgered for signatures, for readings, for statements. The poem is written from Christ's perspective and I will quote it in full:
The Latecomers
He saw them come, then halt behind the crowd
That wailed and plucked and ringed him, and was glad
They kept their distance. Hedged on every side,
Harried and responsive to their need,
Each hand that stretched, each brief hysteric squeal –
However he assisted and paid heed,
A sudden blank letdown was what he'd feel
Unmanning him when he met the pain of loss
In the eyes of those his reach had failed to bless.
And so he was relieved the newcomers
Had now discovered they'd arrived too late
And gone away. Until he hears them, climbers
On the roof, a sound of tiles being shifted,
The treble scrape of terra cotta lifted
And a paralytic on his pallet
Lowered like a corpse into a grave.
Exhaustion and the imperatives of love
Vied in him. To judge, instruct, reprove,
And ease them body and soul.
Not to abandon but to lay on hands.
Make time. Make whole. Forgive.
It is a remarkable piece, and I hoped it signalled a new certainty and confidence in Heaney. In a book just published (He Held Radical Light, 2018), the former editor of Poetry Chicago, Christian Wiman, a powerful poet in his own right, tells of a reading Seamus gave, one of his last, in Chicago. He tells how he "met Seamus Heaney in person only once", at a dinner given after that reading. They sat together and Seamus mentioned he had been reading the proofs of Wiman's memoir, My Bright Abyss, where Wiman struggles with suffering and faith. Wiman was moved to know he was being read. Later in the dinner, "and in the middle of a conversation that had nothing whatsoever to do with religious faith, he leaned over to me and said – very quietly, he seemed frail to me – that he felt caught between the old forms of faith that he had grown up with in Northern Ireland and some new dispensation that had not yet emerged." Wiman felt unable to respond properly, but the moment is highly significant. I would hold that that "new dispensation" in faith is already in place, based on a Christian cosmology and catholicity, and an acceptance of the developments in faith demanded by the fact of evolution. …There is one God; there are as many ways to the love of God as there are individuals. A poet with Seamus Heaney's intellect, imagination and great generosity of spirit, cannot be confined within the limited and limiting borders of dogma and ritual. His is a rich and, I would assert, a holy spirit.
Tags: Christian Wiman, John Deane, Seamus Heaney
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Black coffee, and a couple poems for the road
Poet and coffee.
We don't usually think of poetry when we think of Tikkun, but maybe we should. The "magazine dedicated to healing and transforming the world," according to its website, just published Kenneth Fields's poem, "Black Coffee at Noon," early this month here. Ken kindly allowed us to publish it on the Book Haven pages. (Thanks, Ken!)
Black Coffee at Noon
by Kenneth Fields
Black coffee at noon with fellow sufferers.
The bleak cups squeak in our hands. So do the chairs.
We listen, fidget, smile, occasionally weep
In this ancient ritual of bitterness, joy,
And irritation. We learn everyday the same
Text for the sermon: Our compulsion, our need
Push us apart and hold us here—the cup
Ephemeral foam, the grounds at the bottom, the drink
Inside circling the translucent vessel, our fragile
Lives jittery with the freedom of pilgrimage.
The magazine also published Chana Bloch's "Night Stop" in March here, and Christian Wiman's "Wartime Train," after Hungarian poet and essayist Sándor Csoóri, here. Lots of traveling poems.
Tags: "Kenneth fields", Chana Bloch, Christian Wiman, Sándor Csoóri
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Stanford writers bag an awful lot of prizes this year
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2012
It's easy to forget the caliber of the people you are rubbing elbows with every day. So let me take a moment to blow their collective horn – especially since they're so humble. Many of you may have seen the recent New Yorker article about high-tech Stanford's close relationship with Silicon Valley. Fewer people, alas, know that it also has one of the top-rated faculties in English and Creative Writing anywhere.
This year has been a banner year. Stanford and its alums have bagged a Pulitzer, a Ruth Lilly Prize, a National Book Award, a Guggenheim, a presidential awards. Everything short of a Nobel. Are you listening, Stockholm?
From a piece I wrote recently:
Turning 40 is a landmark for many, and poet Tracy Smith was no exception. She planned to celebrate in style with champagne. But what she didn't expect was the biggest present ever: her husband told her The New York Timeswebsite had just announced that she'd won this year's Pulitzer Prize in poetry.The new Pulitzer for Smith, a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, is one of several awards that have put a spotlight on Stanford's top-ranked English Department and its renowned Creative Writing Program– a sometimes overlooked triumph on a campus that more often prides itself on its technological savvy.
Poet W.S. Di Piero got the news that he had won the 2012 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize on April 1. "They called me on April Fools Day. So I had to ask twice if they were serious. They said it was on the up and up."
"In the land of poetry it's a big prize," said the emeritus professor of English. His new collection of poetry, Nitro Nights, was published in December, but the $100,000 award honors lifetime accomplishments.
According to Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry magazine, "He wakes up the language, and in doing so wakes up his readers, whose lives are suddenly sharper and larger than they were before. He's a great poet whose work is just beginning to get the wide audience it deserves."
Poets weren't the only ones to get prizes: English Prof. Denise Gigante got a coveted Guggenheim Fellowship, topping a year that had already brought stunning accolades: The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George, was named a New York Times Notable Book for 2011 and an Editor's Choice in The New York Times Book Review.
The Guggenheim will give her time to work on her new book, The Book Madness: Charles Lamb's Midnight Darlings in New York, a study of 19th century bibliomania, the formation of important libraries and literary culture in America, and the half-forgotten English essayist Charles Lamb.
"Americans were fascinated with the figures of British poets," said Gigante. "Culture was imported from Britain – that's not true today. And library-makers were the cultural brokers of the time." Her book will be "an experiment in literary critical form," she said.
Gavin Jones, English Department chair, said, "Denise is the rare scholar with the power to tell a story that's also the biography of an age and an intellectual culture."
The list of awards continues: President Obama awarded Prof. Ramón Saldívar a National Humanities medal in February. (Arnold Rampersad, emeritus professor of English, received the same award a year before.)
The English Department has consistently been at the top of U.S. News and World Report rankings of graduate programs. The creative writing program, which does not confer an MFA, is considered by many to be the best in the country. Its Stegner fellows form a tight-knit, ongoing society.
Pulitzer prizewinner Smith, at Stanford from 1997 to 1999, said her years at Stanford "pushed me to move towards a mature sense of what I was doing. To be honest, I didn't know how to do that."
The program's focus on moving from manuscript to book "frees you from the person you were as a student and into what you will be as a poet."
Smith, now an assistant professor at Princeton, was awarded for her collection Life on Mars. The New York Times called her "a poet of extraordinary range and ambition" whose book "first sends us out into the magnificent chill of the imagination and then returns us to ourselves, both changed and consoled."
Although many may have seen The Descendants, a critically praised film with George Clooney that won two Golden Globe awards (for best picture and best actor in drama), few know it was born in the English Department. Kaui Hart Hemmings, a Stegner Fellow from 2002-2004, was working on the novel while at Stanford.
Jesmyn Ward became the out-of-nowhere winner of the prestigious National Book Award for 2011 with Salvage the Bones, a novel about a working-class family confronting the disaster of Hurricane Katrina.
Novelist Tobias Wolff said, "One of the great pleasures of teaching in the Stegner program is seeing the manuscripts we discuss in our workshops turn into books, distinguished, remarkable books, and recognized as such by the larger world."
"Jesmyn Ward's recent success is but one of too many examples to list here," said the professor of English.
Eavan Boland, one of Ireland's leading poets and director of the Creative Writing Program, called it "a stellar year" for the English department – but cautioned that "our entire focus has to be on the writing and not the recognition. The writing life is an end in itself – that's what the program stands for."
"We have many outstanding Stegners who don't win awards and go on to be significant writers through their commitment to that life and its outcomes."
For the award-winners, however, the recognition certainly doesn't hurt: "I've done a lot of the research, but the writing needs the fellowship," said Gigante. "I needed to have this award. The timing seems perfect."
For Smith, now working on a memoir, the birthday bash was even bigger than she had planned. "A lot of champagne was involved," said Smith. "It was put to good use, very quickly."
What will Di Piero do with all the money? "Of course the first thing that came to mind a really hot, fast car. I don't own one, so if I'm going to buy one, I should get serious."
"But in order to buy a car, I need a parking space, and to have a parking space, I should buy a house. And even the Lilly prize doesn't go far enough to buy a house in San Francisco."
Tags: Arnold Rampersad, Christian Wiman, Denise Gigante, Eavan Boland, Gavin Jones, Jesmyn Ward, Kaui Hart Hemmings, President Obama, Ramón Saldívar, Tobias Wolff, Tracy Smith, W.S. Di Piero