The Christmas season brings interesting surprises through the mail – and this year was no exception. Dana Gioia‘s new monograph Psalms and Lament for Los Angeles arrived in my mailbox, letterpress and hand-bound by Providence Press in Ojai. The press was founded by the celebrated printer Norman Clayton, who publishes some of the special editions for the Book Club of California. It’s not the poet and the publishers’ first collaboration: Providence printed The Ballad of Jesus Ortiz in 2018 as its first-ever project. (The book is now in its second printing.)
The three long poems in Psalms and Lament represent Dana’s “late style,” composed between 2018 and 2020 – the first two before the pandemic, the last one, “Psalm to Our Lady Queen of the Angels,” praising his Latino origins (“a mutt of mestizo and mezzogiorno/The seed of exiles and violent men”), at the height of coronavirus.
They were previously published in The Hudson Review, Rattle, and First Things.
Here’s the first part of the second poem in the monograph, “Psalm of the Heights,” describing his native Los Angeles:
PSALM OF THE HEIGHTS
I.
You don’t fall in love with Los Angeles
Until you’ve seen it from a distance after dark.
Up in the heights of the Hollywood Hills
You can mute the sounds and find perspective.
The pulsing anger of the traffic dissipates,
And our swank unmanageable metropolis
Dissolves with all its signage and its sewage—
Until only the radiance remains.
That’s when the City of Angels appears,
Silent and weightless as a dancer’s dream.
The boulevards unfold in brilliant lines.
The freeways flow like shining rivers.
The moving lights stretch into vast
And secret shapes, invisible at street level.
At the horizon, the city rises into sky,
Our demi-galaxy brighter than the zodiac.
The dedication for the monograph is to his friend Scott Timberg, the gifted Palo Alto-born journalist, culture writer, and editor who committed suicide two years ago this month – all too young at 50. He is best known for his 2008 book, Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class (Yale University Press). You can read a retrospective of the writer over at the Los Angeles Review of Books here, or on the Book Haven here and here.
Here’s some exciting news: Dana Gioia’s dedication precedes another announcement: my publisher Heyday in Berkeley, Steve Wasserman, will be publishing Scott Timberg’s essays, in a collection called Boom Times at the End of the World. I’m looking forward to it. Hope you are, too.
Tags: Dana Gioia, Norman Clayton, Scott Timberg