Dana at Stanford in 2007 (Photo: L.A. Cicero)
Once again, Dana Gioia has a new honor: This time, the Sewanee Review has just announced that he will receive this year’s Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry.
Previous winners have included Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, W.S. Merwin, Anne Stevenson, Donald Hall, X.J. Kennedy, and others.
Dana, known for his poetry, criticism, and arts advocacy, holds the newly created Judge Widney Chair in Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California. He’s also a former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and has received a number of honors in recent years, including the Laetare Medal. We’ve written about him here and here and here and here and, oh, perhaps a zillion other places.
His most recent collection is Pity the Beautiful – we’ve written about it here, and I’ve published excerpts from the volume, also here. Writing in Best American Poetry, David Lehman stated unequivocally: “I have no hesitation in declaring it to be his finest to date . . . These poems in which sentiment is refined by technical prowess, and simple words combine to make music and meaning merge marvelously and memorably.”
I love all the Gioias – including those I have never met (his parents, for example) – so perhaps my favorite passage from the announcement is this one:
Gioia’s poetic philosophy—particularly his belief that poetry should “touch on those things that are central to people’s lives”—can be traced back to his childhood in Los Angeles, where his Sicilian father and Mexican mother raised him. He remembers that his mother, who, he says, received no education beyond high school, recited poems to him by heart and read others from a “crumpled old book that had belonged to her mother.” Because of this, Gioia says, “I have never considered poetry an intrinsically difficult art whose mysteries can be appreciated only by a trained intellectual.”
The awards ceremony will take place February 19 at the University of the South in Sewanee. David Mason will give a lecture on Dana’s work on the 18th.
Tags: "Dana Gioia", Anne Stevenson, Anthony Hecht, David Lehman, David Mason, Donald Hall, Richard Wilbur, W.S. Merwin, X.J. Kennedy