A Conversation with Dana Gioia

An Interview by Ben Palpant

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Also, check out Dana’s new book Poetry As Enchantment available from Paul Dry Books.

I can imagine someone who found
these fields unbearable, who climbed
the hillside in the heat, cursing the dust,
cracking the brittle weeds underfoot,
wishing a few more trees for shade.
 
An Easterner especially, who would scorn
the meagerness of summer, the dry
twisted shapes of black elm,
scrub oak, and chaparral, a landscape
August has already drained of green.
 
One who would hurry over the clinging
thistle, foxtail, golden poppy,
knowing everything was just a weed,
unable to conceive that these trees
and sparse brown bushes were alive.
 
And hate the bright stillness of the noon
without wind, without motion,
the only other living thing
a hawk, hungry for prey, suspended
in the blinding, sunlit blue.
 
And yet how gentle it seems to someone
raised in a landscape short of rain—
the skyline of a hill broken by no more
trees than one can count, the grass,
the empty sky, the wish for water.

— "California Hills in August" by Dana Gioia

Even though Dana Gioia no longer serves as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts or California's poet laureate, he's still a busy man in high demand. So when he called, I expected a ten-minute business meeting and pulled the car to the side of a busy road. What I got instead was an energized, friendly, and informative conversation that took over an hour before we ever got on topic. I learned more about opera in that time than I have learned in my entire life (yes, you can call me a philistine), but mostly it was story after story that made us lose track of time. When we finally decided that we should get to the topic, I pitched him my idea.

"Look," I said, "I don't pretend to care more about your work than you do, but the twenty acres that you call home in California is conspicuously absent in your interviews. It’s mentioned, but never really explored. But I have a hunch that it’s important to you.”

The phone went quiet and I thought I had lost connection or, even worse, made a terrible suggestion. I decided to fill the void. "If that’s true, then it would be a disservice to your readers and a major gap in your body of work if it was never talked about in detail."

Silence, and then his voice: "Ben," he said, "I love that idea. This property has had an outsized impact on me and nobody asks me about it. Come with me." I heard the gravel crunching beneath his feet as he walked down a path. "We need to check on my bluebird nest. The fires over the last few years have severely damaged the bluebird population, and I'm trying to rehabilitate it." We talked for another twenty minutes. I told him about the spotted towhee nest I found the other day, built at the base of a tree. He told me about the doe that comes when called (she's named Betty). The conversation had already begun.

So when we picked up where we left off several weeks later, I asked him to tell me the story of his journey to this beautiful place, starting with his childhood in Southern California.

"I was born and raised in Los Angeles," he said. "We lived in a stucco apartment building set next to other apartments. There were no front yards, only concrete driveways. Across the street were the garbage cans of businesses along Hawthorne Boulevard—a liquor store, a Chinese restaurant, and a mortuary. My world was entirely urban. There was no open land. The parks were small and spare. I saw nothing natural except the beach and the Pacific Ocean, so my sense of nature was huge, wet, and inhuman. Both of my parents worked multiple jobs. We never took vacations longer than a weekend. I never saw a forest until I was twelve."

"But you've shared elsewhere that you had a good childhood," I reply.

"My childhood was happy. I had good parents. Our family of six was surrounded by relations, many of whom lived in the apartments around us. I took my daily world for granted. Yet I had a small but constant sense of deprivation, a hunger for beauty that expressed itself in my excessive reactions to art and brief glimpses of nature."

"When did you first come into contact with the natural world?" I ask.

"Except for the beach, my first encounters with nature began in college. I went north to Stanford, which fifty years ago still had a rural setting—now entirely gone due to the overbuilding of Silicon Valley and the campus itself. There were oak woods between the campus and Palo Alto. Behind the campus were open hills. I wandered through the woods and hills nearly every day. When political protests shut down the campus, a girl invited me to go camping in the coastal range. We took sleeping bags without any gear. We slept on the beach or in the woods. We rarely saw another human being. I felt as if I were on a different planet."

"Did those college experiences change you?"

"Very little. I loved the open land, but I considered myself an urban animal. I thought I could never live anywhere except a major city—L.A., New York, Washington, San Francisco. I spent two years at Harvard and hated Boston. I thought it was mostly the weather, but perhaps it was the first inkling of change. After returning to California for business school, I moved to New York. I spent the next twenty years in Westchester County, just north of Manhattan. I thrived in New York’s milieu, but it never felt like home. Yet I stayed. I was successful in both the business and literary world. I had no external motivation to leave."

"And yet you did leave. Why? Did something unsettle you?"

"While I was in business school, my parents left Los Angeles. My father had been robbed twice at gunpoint. One of his friends had been killed. My folks felt that they had to get out of their neighborhood. My father, who had never lived anywhere but Los Angeles and Detroit, had a fantasy about living in a small town. My mother, who had lived in Hawthorne all her life, longed to go somewhere else. They bought a house on an old chicken farm in Sebastopol, sixty miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Sonoma County was still rural then. They were surrounded by apple orchards. I started going up to see them on weekends. Once in New York, I came out several times a year. I spent my vacations visiting them. I helped them with their small orchard and my mother’s small organic fruit and herb business. I began to think of this new place as home."

"A stark contrast to your daily life at the time,” I suggest. “Did you ever imagine moving there?" 

"Moving there seemed like a fantasy," he replies. "I couldn’t make a living. I was tied to metropolitan cities."

"What changed in your life that let you leave your big city existence?" I ask.

"In 1992, at the age of forty-one, I quit my job at Kraft Foods. I had become a well-known poet. My essay ‘Can Poetry Matter?’ had made an international impression. I felt I could make a living writing. For the next four years, despite some ups and many downs, I managed to support my family.”

“I’m sure you felt a sense of freedom.” 

“I was vastly relieved to leave corporate life, but I still felt out of place in New York. My wife loved Westchester County, especially our charming, ramshackle village, Hastings-on-Hudson. The New York metro area was the best place for a writer. Leaving made no career sense."

"Moving made no sense, and yet you moved. What compelled you to move?"

“While visiting my parents, I saw a house for sale and decided—then and there—to buy it. I wasn’t in the market for a house. I had not intended to move. It was the only house we looked at. Yet as I put my foot on the ground from the car, I knew this was where I would live. It was an irrational but irrefutable feeling. I needed to change my life, and it would happen here.”

“That’s quite a revelation.”

“The trouble was that we couldn’t afford the house. I kept talking to the owner. There was a property slump in California. Nothing was selling. After six months of offers and counter-offers, we bought it with a massive mortgage. We moved there in early January of 1996 with two small kids, a cat, no money, and no local employment. It rained every day for two weeks."

"That's a tough start. Was the adjustment difficult?" I ask. "I imagine that the change in noise levels alone would have taken acclimatization."

"It was an enormous shock. I had no idea of what it meant to live in the country. Back then we could hardly see another light at night, even though we were on top of a hill. The coastal fog would drift in and leave us in isolation. My first night I couldn’t sleep. Every sound alarmed me. And the dark woods around us were full of noises—owls, coyotes, foxes, and deer. You could hear animals moving in the trees and brush. Sounds of savage battles would erupt as packs of coyotes attacked the flocks of wild turkeys.”

“People often dream of moving into the country,” I add, “but they don’t reckon with these kinds of adjustments.”

“Having spent my life in L.A. and New York, I also felt vulnerable to human danger, although it was unlikely anyone would drive up the steep country road to rob us. It took me a few weeks to shed my urban anxiety."

"Tell me about the property. What do you see as you walk it—the geology, the shape of the land?"

"We bought twenty acres, very little of which is flat. The house is on the top of a hill with no other house nearby. The property slopes downhill in every direction. We look down to the floor of the Sonoma Valley which, at that time, was all vineyards, ranches, and horse farms.”

“What’s the soil like?”

“The ground is extraordinarily stony. Some glacier had carved the small canyon next to us and deposited all its Ice Age debris. When we plant trees, we have to dig the pit and remove the rocks—there are more rocks than soil."

"What trees grow in that kind of soil?"

"The hillsides were covered with black oaks, coast live oaks, and white oaks mixed in with madrones, pines, and buckeyes. The black oaks were enormous trees, hundreds of years old. Some redwoods grew in the pockets where the night fogs gathered. The whole area was thickly wooded. I decided I wouldn’t plant anything that wasn’t native to the area."

"What do you mean, it was thickly wooded?"

"We lost over half the trees in the Kincade fire of 2019, one of half a dozen massive wildfires that raged through Sonoma, Napa, and Lake counties. Few of the old oaks survived, and almost none of the pines. My forest turned into lightly wooded hillsides and meadows. It took us four years to clear out the dead trees. I planted dozens of oaks and nurtured the natural reforestation. Seeing that horrible destruction and nature’s response was an illumination."

"What else was on your property? What sort of wildlife?"

"When we first got here, we couldn’t have told you what was on our property. My wife and I had been raised in cities. We didn’t know the names of things. Coming here made me realize how alienated we were from the natural world. We decided that we would learn the names of all the plants and animals in our locale.”

“That’s a noble aim. I’m afraid I wouldn’t know where to start.”

“We learned the trees first. There were really only about a dozen varieties. Then we learned the birds. We have acorn woodpeckers, stellar jays, scrub jays, ravens, turkeys, quail, vultures, spotted towhees, northern flickers, red-tailed hawks, and great-horned owls, to name only the larger birds. My wife became so interested that she became a serious birder."

"What about the plants and flowers?"

"The plants are more challenging. We learned the wildflowers, but their weedy companions were harder to master, though many have colorful names—coyote bush, miner’s lettuce, foxtail, quaking grass, and umbrella sedge. Knowing the names of plants changed my relationship to the landscape and the seasons. Wild grasses and thistles grow thigh-high in the spring with yarrow, spearmint, and sage. When the plants die, we have to cut them for fire protection. It takes months of work to keep the place safe."

"Did living on that property change you in any fundamental way as a person?" I ask.

"Living here gradually changed me in so many ways that it is hard to explain the process. I went from a very social urban life to a very solitary rural one.”

“You were alone with your thoughts.”

“My property bordered on other open land. I often finished an outside chore and decided to walk through the woods. I had never lived in woodlands. I had just been a tourist. I had never hiked so much alone. I tramped around in all sorts of weather, and got lost in both the landscape and my thoughts. I realized I had a deep need for solitude and contemplation. I had been starved in my previous life. If you spend hours every day in solitude and quiet observation, it transforms you."

"Did it change you as a Christian?"

"More deeply than I ever expected. I had always been a very intellectual Catholic. My education had filled me with theology, philosophy, and church history. I thought my way through religion. Living in a natural landscape across the seasons, I watched the world move forward without human agency. Everything had a shape and purpose that mysteriously unfolded around me. I had never viscerally understood the notion of creation. Cities are human-built. Nature isn’t. I felt a divine presence around me every day."

"In your book Studying With Miss Bishop, you wrote, 'The professions we enter change the way we look at the world and ourselves.' Would you say the same thing about where we live? Did your move from New York to the countryside near Santa Rosa have an immediate impact on your spirit and your outlook?" 

"It had an immediate impact as I made the great practical adjustments, but they were often mundane. I had never had to move fallen trees, clear irrigation pipes, or deal with wild boars. There were problems nearly every day. I learned, not very masterfully, lots of practical skills. The more interesting changes happened slowly inside. I began to think of myself as belonging to this place which supposedly belonged to me."

"The Kincade fire must have been devastating." 

"The Kincade fire was the largest fire in the history of Sonoma County. It burned 78,000 acres, including twenty of ours. It was the culmination of three years of huge regional wildfires. We had been evacuated twice earlier that year.”

“How much of your property was burned?”

“The fire destroyed the homes of most of my neighbors. It burned over my property, but it didn’t ignite the structures because I had been scrupulous about clearing brush and trimming trees. But it did great damage. The exterior walls were scorched; all my fences, power lines, irrigation lines, and septic system were destroyed. We had to peel the exterior walls off and rebuild them. It took nearly two years to repair the damage. We were initially told that our house and my studio had been entirely destroyed, so even the mess we found felt like a gift.”

"What damage did the fire do to the local landscape?"

"It left the area desolate and black. None of the ground vegetation survived. The ground was covered by ash. The air stank for weeks. The wildlife fled or died.  We lost hundreds of trees, including most of the huge old oaks. The hillsides went from heavily wooded to lightly wooded. The flat areas went from woods to meadows. It took three years to clear the burnt trees with injured trees constantly toppling over. We saved some old giants by irrigating their roots and pruning their branches. I also planted two dozen new oaks."

"What a traumatic experience."

"While the fire was traumatic, I must confess that one of the great experiences of my life was to watch the landscape heal itself slowly over the next few years. The madrones grew back from the blackened roots. Thousands of shoots emerged on the same day—Holy Saturday, actually."

Surprised, I say, "On Holy Saturday. That's remarkable."

"The new buckeye shoots came up a few months later. This year, more than four years since the fire, oak shoots appeared on all the hillsides. The birds returned, one species at a time. The repopulation continues. Last night I saw two huge black stag beetles walking on my porch for the first time since the fire. Last week I noted, with less pleasure, that the rattlesnakes had also returned.”

“I’m not a fan of snakes. What about the deer?”

“My pet deer, Betty, came back. I’d known her since she was a fawn. She comes when I call. I feed her our stale bread and vegetables. I was afraid she had died in the fire, but a year later she just showed up."  

"You have said that the artist who is most local is the one who will appeal to a universal audience. How did the move impact your writing? I’m thinking in terms of the mental space as well as the impact on your heart’s predispositions."

"Much of my early poetry reflected a person who was a wanderer,” he replies. “I came from California, but my life led me to other places. I never lost my deep connection to my birthplace. I saw everywhere else, even places I liked, as an outsider. I spent twenty years in the East. Finally, I came home.”

“It seems to me,” I suggest, “that rootlessness is a common malady for writers.”

“So much of American poetry is rootless because the lives of our writers are nomadic,” he says. “They are born somewhere and grow up somewhere else. Then they go off to school and move again for graduate school. They take a job in yet another city and continue moving for their career. They don’t belong to any specific place. They have a professional perspective on the world—sophisticated but unspecific. In corporate life, I saw the same thing among salespeople who moved from state to state every time they got a promotion."

"How does a life rooted in one locality affect your writing?"

"The world looks different from different places. It helps to know where you stand and see things. I rooted myself in the hills of Sonoma Valley. My daily life does not resemble the worlds of my years in New York and Washington. None of the people I see regularly went to college. Most of them were born in Mexico. This is just like my early life. My mother was Mexican-American, and we lived in a Mexican neighborhood.”

“It changes how you live day-to-day.”

“My daily life is a weird combination of physical and intellectual work. I spend part of each day reading and writing. The rest I spend doing manual labor. The chores get harder as I get older. The writing is easier, though the older I get the more difficult it is to convince myself to sit down and get started."

"Are there any other ways in which your new home influenced your thoughts or work?"

"The most important thing that living in nature taught me was how small and insignificant I am in the scheme of things. I am a momentary observer in the vast and endless unfolding of the world. Having spent my life in huge cities—in major universities, corporations, and public institutions—I had developed a delusional sense of my own importance. That subjectivity was slowly eroded by witnessing the objective reality of the world. Wisdom seemed to know my small piece of the natural world as well as I could. And to love and protect it. I didn’t need to think about God when I could feel him everywhere around me."

"A little bit ago, you said, 'Knowing the names of plants changed my relationship to the landscape and the seasons.' How does naming something, or knowing its name, change how you relate to it?"

"Being able to name a thing means you recognize its individuality," he replies. "You can differentiate it from everything around it.”

“Help me understand what you mean.”

“Think of it in human terms. If you can’t remember a person’s name, he or she blurs into the crowd."

"We named our ten acres Brightwing," I say, "from the end of one of my favorite poems, 'God’s Grandeur' by Gerard Manley Hopkins. I wanted the name to incite hope in me as I age. Have you thought about naming your property?"

"Many people have suggested we name our hilltop. When we bought it thirty years ago, the poet Donald Justice urged me to name it. That seemed to me a very Southern thing to do. Naming a homestead allows you to imbue it with your hopes and aspirations. But it also puts a name between you and the thing itself. I like living in a place I can’t put a title to."

"In your poem 'Marriage of Many Years,' you say to your wife, Mary, 'You are a language I have learned by heart.' In a different way, wouldn’t you say that your land—the trees and the plants, even the rolling hills—has become a language you have learned by heart?"

"Your question answers itself. I spend hours every day outside. I know the property—there is no other word for it—intimately. There are a few places that are too steep for me to visit. Otherwise I know every tree and bush. I can tell you the history of every tree. I’ve planted them or pruned them. I can tell you when each wildflower blooms and each kind of weed appears.”

“Your surroundings have changed, but so has your social life.”

“My social life consists mostly of animals and plants. They are good company. I’ve never been happier." 

"Many people are looking for significance. You seem to have found it counterintuitively by realizing how temporary and small you are in the scope of God’s work. Is that how you see it?" 

"I was a self-directed and disciplined young man. I had long-term goals and worked steadily toward them. I had the delusion that I could control my own destiny. I led my life guided by a laser. I needed to discover a lamp—a way of seeing everything around me, not just my narrow path.”

Recognizing myself, I say, “Being driven seems easier to me than learning to see myself within a larger context. That mindset  requires humility.”

“Yes, it does. Thomas Aquinas once defined humility as seeing things as they really are. Living here has taught me humility."

"Aldo Leopold, in his book The Sand County Almanac, has an interesting line. I wonder if you have found it to be true. He writes, “Every farm woodland, in addition to yielding lumber, fuel, and posts, should provide its owner a liberal education. This crop of wisdom never fails, but it is not always harvested."

"I work outside every day. I can’t do as much as I once did, but I still spend a few hours, some in the morning, some in late afternoon, doing chores. It is routine work—clearing brush, pruning trees, irrigating plants, repairing stone walls. I do the same things over and over. Yet I always see something new. I learn something unexpected.”

“To some people, that sounds idyllic.”

“I fear I sound like a drippy character from a Jean-Jacques Rousseau novel, an innocent child of nature. That couldn’t be less true. I am deeply intellectual. I spend most of my time reading, thinking, writing. That is why this second life is so important to me. Today I spent a few hours writing about Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman without a Shadow) and then dragged cut brush down the hill. My immersion in the physical world has saved my poetry from becoming disembodied and abstract."

"You’ve dedicated your life to cultivating this property. What are the similarities between cultivating your land and cultivating culture through writing?"

"Let’s not overstate the quality of my labor. I’ve spent thirty years mucking around in all sorts of weather to preserve the natural beauty and vitality of this place. I’ll win no blue ribbon at the county fair. I do what I can. I am now in my early seventies. But the trees, native plants, and wildlife are thriving. Literary life is also an ecosystem. Each part depends on the others. Without good schools, we don’t have capable readers. Without educated readers, good writing won’t be recognized. Without strong critics, writers exist in a vacuum. Without strong editors and publishers, authors can’t find their public”

“When you look back over your life, are you pleased with the cultural cultivation you were able to accomplish?”

“I gave seven years of my creative life to public service at the National Endowment for the Arts. I was able to create several huge literary programs such as Poetry Out Loud, the national high school poetry recitation competition. Five million teenagers have memorized and recited in those annual contests. The program had a measurable impact. Over the next decade, readership of poetry doubled among teenagers and young adults."

"Your property is a beautiful and hospitable space," I say. "You’ve worked hard to tend and steward it. Do you see your writing similarly—as an act of hospitality, an opportunity to build something that will be welcome and refresh your readers?" 

"I believe that literature is a conversation. The writer needs to engage the reader in an open and intimate dialogue. The author’s voice is public; readers respond in the privacy of their minds and imagination. There are many kinds of conversations since human experience is various. The vitality of the conversation is the true measure of an author. Great authors sustain a lively exchange across centuries.”

“What would you advise for writers who want to cultivate culture and make a difference in the world?”

“Never lie or condescend to your readers. Treat them as equals, even if you might disagree with them on many things.  Believe that there always exists some common ground in our common humanity. That sounds obvious, but there is factionalism, even hate, in the literary world today. There is also too much genteel and self-serving dishonesty.  Friedrich Nietzsche said, ‘The poets, the poets lie too much.’ That is truer than ever. It is so easy to strike an impressive posture. It takes courage and intelligence to speak truth. Someone will be offended."

"Does this lack of honesty and candor, this disrespect for the reader, relate to a sense of place?"

"Oddly, yes. Ansel Adams said, 'A good photograph is knowing where to stand.' Most people today don’t know exactly where they stand. Their lives are uncentered. They look around and try to stand like everyone else. It seems the sensible thing to do—to merge into a crowd. Nowadays it isn’t even a real crowd, just a virtual one. That is why a sense of place is important. You need to speak truthfully from your own experience. You can never fully know the truth, but you do know when you’re lying or obfuscating. You approach the truth by refusing to lie. Being fully present in a place allows you to see a few things, however small and local, accurately. It gives you a better ability to judge the larger claims you hear."

"So what exactly is your place?"

"I am a working-class, Latin, West-Coast Catholic. Writing is my trade. It’s portable, but I do it best on native soil. I love my place and my people. Despite a few tragedies, I’ve been lucky in life, but my deepest loyalties remain with the world of my childhood—the working poor, especially immigrants. There is dignity in work and honor in doing something well. My uncle Giacomo was a master carpenter and cabinetmaker. Every joint and surface he made was perfect. Fifty years later, his work is still sturdy and handsome. That’s my goal as a writer."

For more from Dana Gioia, check out his new book, Poetry As Enchantment.

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Ben Palpant is a memoirist, poet, novelist, and non-fiction writer. He is the author of several books, including A Small Cup of Light, Sojourner Songs, and The Stranger. He writes under the inspiration of five star-lit children and two dogs. He and his wife live in the Pacific Northwest.