Conditions of Should: On Dana Gioia’s “Meet Me at the Lighthouse”
Dana Gioia | Meet Me at the Lighthouse | Graywolf Press | February 2023 | 72 Pages
Where imperatives about writing tend to generalize accomplishment, erase nuance for the sake of homogenizing the here and now, Dana Gioia’s writing exists in the world of a polemical should: a poem should be written in a particular manner, and criticism about poetry should or should not adopt a style particular to these shoulds. The lingering question that Gioia first posed in Can Poetry Matter? (1992)—which, according to the marketing materials on his website, “is credited with helping to revive the role of poetry in American public culture”—does not ask, really, whether American poetry needs to be revived: “But why should anyone but a poet care about the problems of American poetry?” At the center of this should is the figure of the poet: outwardly determining the conditions by which he might answer the question, provoking the overwrought demand for poetry’s cultural revival. At the center of this should is a lighthouse:
Meet me at the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach,
That shabby nightclub on its foggy pier.
Let’s aim for the summer of ’71,
When all our friends were young and immortal.
A quatrain, four lines of blank verse in two sentences: the poem stages itself at The Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach, California, a hub for the West Coast jazz scene from May 1949 until the early seventies. In “Meet Me at the Lighthouse,” the first poem from Gioia’s sixth volume also titled Meet Me at the Lighthouse, a command is articulated three times, back-to-back-to-back: the title of the book, the title of the poem, the first clause of the first line. Meet me. The gauzy insistence that we must behave for the poem to operate, for the poem to even begin, the implied should lingering as readers situate the phrase “young and immortal” within a contrived drinking-song familiarity. Meet Me at the Lighthouse does not read like an invitation, more like a characteristic gesture of control. Meet Me at the Lighthouse is also the most careful expression of Gioia’s poetics.
If we might “aim for the summer of ’71,” as the title poem recommends, Gioia’s volume allows for the possibility that we slightly miss our target and land elsewhere. The figurative lighthouse is a point from which we might think about several decades of engagement with poetry and American culture. These poems are a little boozy, staggering from one short sentence to the next. “Three Drunk Poets,” for example, begins with a question of location:
Do you remember where we were that night,
three of us, walking down a small-town street,
reciting poems from memory?
We would not turn around, we vowed,
Until one of us ran out of poems. Some ideas
seem brilliant when you’re blitzed.
The question can only be answered—“Do you remember where we were that night”—by likewise remembering what poem was being recited: “Shakespeare, / Tennyson, Dickinson, Poe. Yeats / took most of a mile, Frost another.” One vicariously feels the exhaustion of drunkenly walking a few miles while the poem enumerates everything it knows. Who isn’t recited on the walk, what poets writing in what style? The stylistic bombast strapped to Gioia’s work identifies itself almost ironically: “A passerby would’ve looked away embarrassed, / but we strode beaming like ambassadors / exchanging costly gifts.” A passerby might have reacted the wrong way, with an embarrassed withdrawal, because the passerby does not know these three drunken poets are ambassadors for the culture. Yet the poem complicates this tone as soon as we realize that first question—where were we?—cannot be answered exactly, save for through its proximity to these other people, those that will never recognize the cultural authority of these three drunk goofballs. After walking so far that Catullus is recited, moving backwards in time, the poem ends in a premeditated failure, nothing left to be remembered: “By then it was nearly 3 a.m., / and so we headed back to town— / walking in silence—still not sober.” “We strode like ambassadors,” the poet writes.
Dana Gioia, at one time associated with the New Formalist movement of the eighties, writes poems and essays which insist on their importance to American culture. It’s in the stylistic framework, as he writes in the 1983 essay “Business and Poetry,” for example: “Few critics, I suspect, will be concerned about the absence of business from modern American poetry. They will probably feel that its omission is proper. The world of commerce will seem to them the territory of novelists rather than poets.” The specter of a generalized antagonist haunts Gioia’s writing from the very beginning, the speculative critic or “insider” poet, the academic or MFA student. Following Whitman, who predicted that “[American bards] shall be kosmos,” this self-insistence is not a new nor particularly idiosyncratic temperament for an American poet to dramatize. Yet in order for Gioia’s work to advocate for itself so vehemently, the writing must presuppose categories of good and bad, the should and the should not. Like all self-identified artistic movements which define themselves as a reaction, symptomatic of a changing culture, what makes the work produced through that movement compelling is not the manner in which it reacts but how it’s made. “Can Poetry Matter?” describes a problem which Gioia imagines as subsequently needing an embassy:
To look at the issue in strictly economic terms, most contemporary poets have been alienated from their original cultural function. As Marx maintained and few economists have disputed, changes in a class’s economic function eventually transform its values and behavior. In poetry’s case, the socioeconomic changes have led to a divided literary culture: the superabundance of poetry within a small class and the impoverishment outside it. One might even say that outside the classroom – where society demands that the two groups interact – poets and the common reader are no longer on speaking terms.
Every half-century of English-language poets has its own panicked version of this statement, an explanation for why the status of poetry has changed in their present; poetry is perpetually dying, which makes its ostensible decomposition far less interesting than its refusal to wholly (or even partially) assimilate into popular culture. He continues, “The divorce of poetry from the educated reader has had another, more pernicious result. Seeing so much mediocre verse not only published but praised.” One does not need to look far into the past to see that this description is not particular to the nineties, not a historical anomaly, and neither is the mistake to conflate taste with achievement; movements and the reactions they catalyze seem important in our present, almost immediately becoming flashes of taste. What makes our present seem more interesting, in Gioia’s terms, is the way poetry has become insulated by university elitism in the second half of the twentieth century—a fleeting observation which perhaps seemed truer in the nineties than it does now, yet one which still lingers in Meet Me at the Lighthouse:
Here lies D.G. A poet? Who can say?
He didn’t even have an MFA.
These stodgy lines, the entirety of “Epitaph”—a verse genre of tomb inscriptions with origins in the seventh century BCE—read, at first, more like an argument that rhymes. The possibility for the epitaph to ironize the poet’s life, however, points back to a career in which questions about poetry’s place in American culture were asked with enthusiasm. The poem asks: at the end of one’s life, who would want to be remembered for having an MFA rather than the act of making poems? This epitaph marks the figurative tomb of D.G., a comfortable place in which to compose poems.
If Meet Me at the Lighthouse is a volume looking back at a life in poetry and music, if Gioia wants us to meet at The Lighthouse to share stories and listen, then we might listen most attentively in “The Ballad of Jesús Ortiz.” The poem narrates the life of Gioia’s great-grandfather, Jake Ortiz, who worked as a cowboy, who “married a sheepherder’s daughter, / Half-Indian, half white,” who after getting married worked as a saloon keeper while telling stories about his days as a cowboy, and who was murdered by a drunken bar patron:
Bill Howard slammed his fist down,
“Is this some goddamn joke,
A piss-poor Mexican peon
Telling me I’m broke?”
A little after midnight
Bill came back through the door.
Three times he shot his rifle,
And Jake fell to the floor.
The poem chronicles this murder, the journalistic narrative inflected by alternating rhythms of traditional ballad: a story told, recited, handed down, increasing the distance from its source. (The Western Folklife Center has hosted an annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada since 1985). What happens after Jake falls to the floor? Decades later, stories are told about his life; decades later, a poem is written which approximates “the tales of Western heroes”:
A sudden brutal outburst
No motive could explain:
One poor man killing another
Without glory, without gain.
The tales of Western heroes
Show duels in the noonday sun,
But darkness and deception
Is how most killing is done.
The impulse for the poem to explain itself in moralizing ambiguities like “glory” and “gain” perhaps comes from the same urge to look back at one’s life in the first place: all these stories told, all these poems written, arguments held, and what has changed? Not poetry, though cursory arguments of taste can fool us into believing the opposite. The most compelling moments of Meet Me at the Lighthouse suggest that change is not exactly the goal so much as the fondness for existing in this intermediary state of telling. Yet this word “glory” appears later in the book, its final poem “The Underworld,” in the eleventh section subtitled “Those ‘Legendary Heroes’”:
will not include you. You abjure heroics.
No epic journey, just a private trip
Without ambition for reward or glory.
You cross the border between two worlds to bring
Belated gifts to your uneasy dead.
No winged divinity spoke in your dreams.
Nothing compels you but your riven heart.
The poem might renounce classical heroics on its way to the underworld—necessary, like the poem’s invocation of Virgil, Facilis descensus Averno [Descending into Hell is easy]—though the stated opposition to “reward or glory” is another moment that tinkers with sincerity. The lyric poem belies its ambitions in epic terms: the goal may not be “reward or glory,” yet the “riven heart” which compels the Orphic figure toward his final disappointments suggests the only goal possible is the performance itself.
Now that several decades have passed since Gioia’s first collection was published in 1986, and the conditions for the New Formalist movement have transformed into different conditions of taste, as all conditions of the present seem to do in the not-so-distant future, Meet Me at the Lighthouse is a bit nostalgic: “Let’s aim for the summer of ’71, / When all our friends were young and immortal.” Do you remember drunkenly reciting Catullus until dawn? The New Formalist movement, responding to the abundance of experimental cliques in the eighties, was itself a bit nostalgic—especially for a time when the locus of American poetry was not the university. “Can Poetry Matter?” makes “six modest proposals” for how “poets and poetry teachers [can] take more responsibility for bringing their art to the public,” and five of these proposals include a should: “When arts administrators plan public readings, they should avoid the standard subculture format of poetry only,” for example, then “Finally poets and art administrators should use radio to expand the art’s audience.” Thirty years later, these categories of should immediately change. There are no shoulds besides making marks on a page and arranging those words in a particular order; what’s left is a condition of the present, of taste which cannot exactly be spoken to before it changes.
Do you remember that Damien Chazelle filmed bits of his sterilized La La Land at The Lighthouse, Ryan Gosling’s character incentivizing Emma Stone’s character to kind-of-care about jazz? The movie was released December 9, 2016. What else do you remember more immediately from that month? Thirty years from now, who will remember that D.G. didn’t have an MFA more than they might remember the figurative epitaph in the first place? What matters is having written it down, having arranged the materials: there are many ways to care about poetry, and all of them begin and end with language itself.