Greg Gioia can whip up one mean drink. Dana Gioia‘s new book, Pity the Beautiful, was fêted by a capacity crowd at Kepler’s last night.  One of the memorable highlights of the evening was Dana’s kid bro making a libation of his own invention, called “The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet.”

I watched him make it.  Parts of something that looked like Campari (but wasn’t Campari), then absinthe, and a few other ingredients, with a twist of orange for garnish.  “The lover,” Greg told me, was the quick spray of rosewater on top.  “The lunatic” was, obviously, the absinthe.

And “the poet”?  Greg told me the drink was a variation of one called “Arthur Rimbaud.”  But it also hearkens back to a line from William Shakespeare‘s A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

It’s also – for a third association – the title of a love poem in Dana’s new collection. Muriel Rukeyser famously said, “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”  Dana agrees:  We live by the stories we tell about ourselves, he said.  People who are “stuck” in their lives are in fact enmeshed in a particular narrative about their lives.  Then he read the poem.

It’s so lovely I’ll quote it in full, taking full advantage of Dana’s kind permission to do so:

The tales we tell are either false or true,
But neither purpose is the point. We weave
The fabric of our own existence out of words,
And the right story tells us who we are.
Perhaps it is the words that summon us.
The tale is often wiser than the teller.
There is no naked truth but what we wear.

So let me bring this story to our bed.
The world, I say, depends upon a spell
Spoken each night by lovers unaware
Of their own sorcery. In innocence
Or agony the same words must be said,
Or the raging moon will darken in the sky.
The night grows still. The winds of dawn expire.

And if I’m wrong, it cannot be by much.
We know our own existence came from touch,
The new soul summoned into life by lust.
And love’s shy tongue awakens in such fire –
Flesh against flesh and midnight whispering –
As if the only purpose of desire
Were to express its infinite unfolding.

And so, my love, we are two lunatics,
Secretaries to the wordless moon,
Lying awake, together or apart,
Transcribing every touch or aching absence
Into our endless, intimate palaver,
Body to body, naked to the night,
Appareled only in our utterance.

I think it’s one of his finest (I love the turn in the second stanza) – though I must admit that at some point the liquid form of the “the lunatic, the lover, and the poet,” began to take hold, and everything in the room was illuminated in a sort of roseate glow.  It had been a long week, and I had been fighting off illness.  Before I had a chance to go up for a refill of Greg’s potion, the initial euphoria faded, and I realized that it had only been the tension of a tight schedule that had been holding me together.  Suddenly my bones ached and my head throbbed.

I took Dana’s advice. A dash out the back door into the silence of the cool twilight and then homeward – as Dana suggested, I brought this particular story to bed.

Postscript on 5/6:  If you want Greg’s recipe, it’s here, on “Sidecar Cocktail Blog,”  the blog he’s been running for nine years.  That’s six longer than the Book Haven – whew!  how does he do it?   It’s a pretty good blog, too – clearly, writing talent runs in the family.  Brother Ted Gioia, occasionally mentioned on this blog, is a noted jazz scholar (I’ve written about him here).  His The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire will be out with Oxford University Press next month.  Congratulations to all Gioias!

At Stanford commencement, 2007 (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

Dana Gioia has been making the rounds: on April 26, he gave a reading from his new collection, Pity the Beautiful, at The Corner Bookstore in Manhattan (93^rd Street and Madison Avenue).

David Sanders‘s Poetry News in Review, now included in the electronic pages of the Prairie Schooner here, tipped me off on where to find the text of poet David Lehman‘s introduction to the reading that night, titled “The Businessman, the Statesman, and the Poet.”

I’m glad for the opportunity to include an excerpt the day before Dana’s appearance at Kepler’s in Menlo Park, (Wednesday, May 2nd, at 7 p.m.)  It wouldn’t do to talk about Dana without mentioning his personal generosity.

In his introduction, Lehman,  editor for The Best American Poetry series, praises Dana’s “unflagging energy and stringent work ethic [that] remain an inspiration to his friends” – true, true – then describes his ambitious agenda as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.  “It is safe to say that not since Archibald MacLeish headed the Library of Congress has a poet worked so hard, and accomplished so much of value, in so prominent a position in the federal government.”

Lehman continues:

“I like to remember the day in 2003 when Dana came to New York and we had coffee at the Cornelia Street Café. Dana told me about the National Book Festival he was organizing for the fall and he asked me to help him make a presentation of American poetry. There would be a brunch at the White House that my wife, Stacey, and I could attend. I said: My mother – It would mean a lot to her, a holocaust refugee, then 88, to come. Dana took the cell phone out of his pocket and made a call and five minutes later my mother was on the guest list. The day we visited the White House was one of the happiest days in her life, and for that I will always have Dana to thank.”

Read the whole thing here.

From music to words

A postcard in the mail, telling me Dana Gioia‘s new book, Pity the Beautiful, is officially out. It’s the first collection since he stepped down as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts in 2009.  The postcard, with an amiable handwritten note from Mary Gioia,  invited me to a reading and discussion at Kepler’s in Menlo Park on Wednesday, May 2, at 7 p.m.  (Another one, on May 15, will take place at the Booksmith, 1644 Haight Street, San Francisco.)

I already wrote about Dana’s ghost story here, and a little about the book itself here, and about the magical evening in Santa Rosa, when Dana read some of the poems to me and his wife Mary here.

I was intrigued that the new book is dedicated to Morten Lauridsen, with the words “the necessary angel” beneath the composer’s name.  Some years ago Dana sent me Lauridsen’s Lux Aeterna – a marvel.  I’d never heard of the composer before Dana’s introduction – he’s largely overlooked in the MSM, though widely performed in choral music circles.

The composer said in an interview with Bruce Duffie:

I’m getting all this mail on the Lux Aeterna, because it’s a large cycle; every one of the five movements relates to light, a universal symbol in so many ways. It was a great deal of pleasure to write that particular cycle, and I wrote it as my mother was in the process of dying, so it was a way of, as so many artists do, of dealing with that kind of a situation in an artistic way. … On Lux Aeterna and so many of my works, I like the immediacy — to draw my listener in immediately, to hold their attention, to transport them, to do something to do them on some level, whether it’s excite them, or move them, or elate them, or whatever.

Necessary angel on left

The connection is no surprise, really.  Dana began his studies at Stanford with aspirations to become a composer.  Since changing directions towards poetry and business (he has an M.B.A.), he has created the libretti for two operas – Alva Henderson‘s Nosferatu, and Paul Salerni‘s Tony Caruso’s Last Broadcast. Fewer know Dana was one of the champions of Derrière Guard, founded by the composer Stefania de Kenessey.

Lauridsen got a National Medal of Arts in 2007 – during Dana’s term as chairman of the NEA.  Then Dana stepped down and became the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California – where Lauridsen has been a professor of composition at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music for more than three decades.

So Dana has at last returned to poetry full time.  The new collection has many fine poems, and a few translations.  The title poem is likely to get the most notice, but I know the one I’ll remember is the three-part “Special Treatments Ward”:

I.

So this is where the children come to die,
hidden on the hospital’s highest floor.
They wear their bandages like uniforms
and pull their IV rigs along the hall
with slow and careful steps. Or bald and pale,
they lie in bright pajamas on their beds,
watching another world on a screen.

The mothers spend their nights inside the ward,
sleeping on chairs that fold out into beds,
too small to lie in comfort. Soon they slip
beside their children, as if they might mesh
those small bruised bodies back into their flesh.
Instinctively they feel that love so strong
protects a child. Each morning proves them wrong.

No one chooses to be here. We play the parts
that we are given – horrible as they are.
We try to play them well, whatever that means.
We need to talk though talking breaks our hearts.
The doctors come and go like oracles,
their manner cool, omniscient, and oblique.
There is a word that no one ever speaks.

II.

I put this poem aside twelve years ago
because I could not bear remembering
the faces it evoked, and every line
seemed – still seems – so inadequate and grim.

What right had I whose son had walked away
to speak for those who died? And I’ll admit
I wanted to forget. I’d lost one child
and couldn’t bear to watch another die.

Not just the silent boy who shared our room,
but even the bird-thin figures dimly glimpsed
shuffling deliberately, disjointedly
like ancient soldiers after a parade.

Whatever strength the task required I lacked.
No well-stitched words could suture shut these wounds.
And so I stopped …
But there are poems we do not choose to write.

III.

The children visit me, not just in dream,
appearing suddenly, silently –
insistent, unprovoked, unwelcome.

They’ve taken off their milky bandages
to show the raw, red lesions they still bear.
Risen they are healed but not made whole.

A few I recognize, untouched by years.
I cannot name them – their faces pale and gray
like ashes fallen from a distant fire.

What use am I to them, almost a stranger?
I cannot wake them from their satin beds.
Why do they seek me? They never speak.

And vagrant sorrow cannot bless the dead.

(Meet you at the reading on Wednesday at Kepler’s.  And if you’re too far away, check out these 2011 interviews with Dana and Martin Perlich here.  Below, Lauridsen’s O Magnum Mysterium – he says “it’s become the best-selling octavo in the history of Theodore Presser, who has been in business for over two hundred years now. We’ve had perhaps 3,000 performances of it.”)

Joe Loya in a car.

It’s election year, and no doubt we will find much fodder for our Orwell Watch, from all points on the political spectrum.

Here’s a good catch from Joe Loya on Facebook: “Politicians decrying other politicians ‘playing politics’ with an issue has to be one of the goofiest moral spectacles on the planet. What are they supposed to play? Badminton? Third base? (Sen. McCain, Prez. Obama plays politics because he is a politician, like you!) These knuckleheads sound as stupid as if they bemoaned cellists playing cellos, or basketball players tossing basketballs in baskets, or race car drivers driving race cars. I mean, c’mon, ‘politic’ is right there in the word ‘politician.’ Dummies!”

He was, of course, challenged:  Is a smoker wrong for telling someone not to smoke?  Shouldn’t a murderer warn a kid not to murder?

Da Man

His rebuttal:  “All I’m saying is if I applied for the job of dishwasher and then the other dishwasher tried to make me appear morally inferior to them for washing dishes while they are also washing dishes, all I’m saying is they are idiots for hassling me for doing what I was hired to do, what is in fact the job description in the title ‘dishwasher.'”

What can we add?

The Orwell Watch.  Collect the whole set!

Orwell Watch #19: End the war.

Orwell Watch #18: “Back to the Middle Ages” – an era that “exceeds expectations”

Orwell Watch #17: The 10th anniversary of 9/11 – prepare for an avalanche of buzzwords

Orwell Watch #15, #14: Jens Stoltenberg’s graceful words, a few of our graceless ones

Orwell Watch #13, continued: “The American people”

Orwell Watch #13: More daily offenses.

Orwell Watch #12: There is no faculty lounge. Get over it.

Orwell Watch #11: One man’s lonely war against cliché

Orwell Watch #10: Literary criticism, or cut-and-paste?

Orwell Watch #9: “I take full responsibility for…”

Orwell Watch #8: “I know you’re disinterested in this, but…”

Orwell Watch #6: “Like” and the culture of vagueness

Orwell Watch #5: Before we shoot off our mouths again…

Orwell Watch #4: Jared Loughner: Madman, terrorist, or both?

Orwell Watch #3: Please. No “gifting” this Christmas.

Orwell Watch #2: Murder in Yeovil

Orwell Watch #1: Paul Krugman vs. George Orwell. (Hint: Orwell wins.)

"Why did people ever like novels to begin with? Because they used to love lies? No way."

I somehow missed the kerfuffle about Mike Daisey’s “monologue” about the terrible working conditions in Apple’s Chinese factories, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.”  Another chapter in the long history of fabricated memories, which became the subject of a painful retraction last month.

Over at The Rumpus, author Elif Batuman had a very different take on the matter.

Is the truth more compelling than any attempt to fictionalize it?  “That’s what I always tell myself when I’m being fact-checked, and some detail I was attached to turns out not to be true,” she told interviewer Sean Carman.  “I’m initially disappointed, and maybe discouraged that now there’s more work for me to do, but I know that 99.9% of the time there’s actually something there, in the truth, that’s more interesting than whatever I or anyone else can make up.

“When you invent something, you’re drawing on reservoirs of knowledge that you already have. It’s only when you’re faithful to the truth that something can come to you from the outside.  … something maybe less neat but richer and stranger.”

In general, she’s more interested in the audience for fibs, rather than the fibbers themselves, and  “figuring out why and how anyone believed it – why they needed to believe it”:

He did his homework. (Russia's first color portrait, 1908)

They want it to be true. And it’s actually an odd thing to want.  The rationale is that people these days are no longer interested in novels, because we live in a newsy age, we care about facts, we care about the truth. But I mean, why did people ever like novels to begin with? Because they used to love lies? No way.

When you’re reading a novel, I think the reason you care about how any given plot turns out is that you take it as a data point in the big story of how the world works. Does such-and-such a kind of guy get the girl in the end? Does adultery ever bring happiness? How do winners become winners?

Just because a book is labeled as a novel, you don’t assume it happened in La La land and has nothing to do with reality. It just means that the novelist has processed, consolidated, or edited his experiences and observations, to tell a story. Which obviously happens in a memoir, too. It’s a difference in degree, not a difference in kind. That’s why I find it weird when you walk into a bookstore the most privileged distinction is between fiction and nonfiction.

When Tolstoy wrote War and Peace, he did a ton of historical research about Napoleon – he spent ages in archives, reading letters and diaries, many of them written by his wife’s relatives. In general, in his career, he borrowed a lot of plot details from the lives of his in-laws. I bet if Tolstoy was writing now in America, there would be a lot of pressure on him to do War and Peace as a nonfiction book – like, tracing the domestic and personal life of his wife’s grandmother through journals and letters, interwoven with his own philosophical musings about the Napoleonic wars. But Tolstoy didn’t think he was detracting from the truth-telling power of his book by writing it as a novel.

Final excerpt:

We hear a lot these days about two opposing tendencies in literature. On the one hand, there’s a tendency away from the novel, toward nonfiction. On the other hand, there’s a tendency away from objective journalism, toward memoiristic or essayistic nonfiction. They’re opposing tendencies, but they both reflect an anxiety about how much we can trust facts. We expect facts to give us objective truth, but objective truth keeps eluding us. We move away from the novel, because the novel isn’t factual; but in our nonfiction writing, we feel constantly compelled to cast doubt on our access to objective facts. We hire teams of fact-checkers to track them down. Fact-checkers do a lot of great work, but they can’t solve the nature of reality for us.

Read the whole thing here.

Self-effacing star at Stanford (Photo: Adam Johnson)

When author Jesmyn Ward was named the winner of the 2011 National Book Award at the awards ceremony a few months ago, she covered her face with her hands.  She had believed the earlier notification that she was a finalist to be “a joke or a scam,” but winning seemed even farther beyond the reach of a girl who came from a “rural, southern, mostly poor” Mississippi town.

She didn’t take her hands from her face, or respond to the applause, or move to accept the award for her novel Salvage the Bones. Her publicist finally grabbed her by the shoulders and shouted her name at her.

National Book Award winner?  “I still haven’t come to terms with it – I still hesitate to say it,” the Hurricane Katrina survivor told an audience Monday night at Stanford.

In a world of self-promotion, Ward’s modesty and humility were downright charming.

Author Elizabeth Tallent‘s introduction to the reading included this snippet from Ward’s interview in The Missoulian:

I didn’t think I was going to write about Hurricane Katrina. …  After the hurricane, I didn’t write anything for around two-and-a-half years. I didn’t realize how it had affected me at the time. I was here with my family for the hurricane.  So not only did I have to deal with the experience of surviving the hurricane, being out in the hurricane when it was going on, but with the residual terror in the knowledge that a storm like that can take away everything your family has within a matter of hours. I had to contend with all that, and the rebuilding process.

We got hit by the worst of the storm. After the rubble was cleared away, it just looked like things disappeared. There was a gas station there, and it’s not there anymore.  And the trailer park there, it’s not there anymore. I had no hope during that time. So I needed enough time to pass beyond Katrina to see that people would come back and they would rebuild.

The New York Times review called the book “a taut, wily novel, smartly plotted and voluptuously written. It feels fresh and urgent, but it’s an ancient, archetypal tale.” One author, fellow Southerner Ken Wells, said that she writes like “an angel with a knife to your throat.”

But great books affect people in different ways. For Tallent, reading Salvage the Bones resulted in a different understanding:  “I realized I needed a dog in my life again.”

So she credits author Ward – and the novel’s white pit bull named China (“on a shortlist of great dogs in literature”) – for the shelter dog she recently acquired.  Tallent said that although Ward had been a Stegner fellow from 2008-10, “we all think of it as five minutes ago.”

During the question-and-answer period following the reading, Ward was asked if she had ever envisioned herself as a successful novelist.  “It was my dream. I didn’t think I would ever be good enough.”

Ward’s memories of Stanford are nuanced and complex: “Much of my years here was feeling overwhelmed, that I didn’t deserve to be here.”

Monday’s applause for her work is gravy:  “I’m coming back to Stanford as the person I wanted to be as an undergraduate.”