Dana Gioia, Meet Me at the Lighthouse. Graywolf, 2023.
Review by Carter Davis Johnson
Dana Gioia’s poetry collection, Meet Me at the Lighthouse, is full of ghosts. Whether it be his great-grandfather, an evening with friends, or the Los Angeles of yesteryear, the past haunts these poems. Fittingly, the collection begins (with its title poem) by juxtaposing “Dr. Death” and “tartarus” with the lingering presences of the “young and immortal.” The poem is set in a nightclub, one intertwined with memories of Dana’s deceased cousin, Philip Dragotto, to whom he dedicates the poem. In the “perfume of tobacco,” Gioia invokes a lost world, including a number of dead musicians. Although these people and places are gone, they are rendered palpable by the poem, invading our present experience. The poem’s magic arises from the simultaneity of presence and absence. In Faulkner’s words, “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
This simultaneity is likewise manifested in a series of “psalms” written to the city of Los Angeles. Gioia laments the urban decay that has destroyed the city’s beauty: “On the streets of Hawthorne I sat down and wept. / Yes, wept as I remembered it.” However, while the former L.A. cannot be reconstituted, the loss is not final. Gioia also tenderly describes the city’s beauty at night, seen from afar: “That’s when the City of Angels appears, / Silent and weightless as a dancer’s dream.” In these psalms, Los Angeles is both lost and lingering. This multiplicity is solidified by a line warning those who would move away: “You’ll miss the juvenescent rapture of L.A. / Where ecstasy cohabits with despair.” Like the presence of a deceased friend, a city can be both absent and present. It can produce both ecstasy and despair.
Gioia’s attention to physical place is closely tied to his focus on embodiment. Throughout the collection, we are reminded that our perceptions, moods, and memories are inextricable from our bodily existence (or, in phenomenological talk, the Lebenswelt). This is nowhere more evident than in the triptych “Three Songs for Helen Sung,” originally written as lyrics for jazz pianist Helen Sung, and used in her album Sung with Words (2018). In the first poem/song, Gioia writes,
Let’s go downtown. It’s a hot summer night. Lovers are sitting in sidewalk cafés — Breaking up, making up, hooking up, cooking up Plans for tonight that leave me amazed. … Let’s live in the flesh and not on a screen. Let’s dress like people who want to be seen. Don’t bring me home till the dawn’s early light. Let’s not waste this hot summer night.
As in “Meet Me at the Lighthouse” and “Three Drunk Poets,” a sense of place exudes from this poem. We are brought alongside friends, invited into the raucous, funny, and sensuous heat of summer evenings. In the iambic and anapestic feet of the last stanza’s couplets, we can feel the physical environment charge the poetic voice with energy. We recollect (again, presence and absence) such evenings in our own lives that stretched until the “dawn’s early light.” Gioia crafts, across this collection, aesthetic moments that speak to a fleshy human embodiment, an embodiment that resists the “screen.”
The opposition between the “flesh” and the “screen” is an excellent example of Gioia’s subtle critique of modernity. Rather than polemicize or didacticize, his gentle corrections remind us of our humanness. One example occurs in “Travel,” in which he contrasts modernity’s obsession with vacations, “one click away,” with the richness of everyday experience, as modest as a book and coffee. The poem ends with several striking lines: “I feel no need to vacate my own existence. / Isn’t the point to be happy where you are? / But so little in life is about being happy.” Gioia diagnoses the vacation fetish as a desire to escape the intolerable conditions that emerge from modernity’s lack of concern with the good life. Modern life is about health or money or fun, anything but a rich conception of Eudaimonia, the rich happiness described by Aristotle and invoked by Gioia’s domestic scene. “Travel” is a reframing of the good life that harkens back to Dr. Johnson maxim: “To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition.”
To me, the humanness of Gioia’s verse is the most compelling attribute of the collection. This is most poignantly displayed in “The Ballad of Jesús Ortiz,” recounting the life of the poet’s great-grandfather. Gioia renders his family story into a beautiful, archetypal western. It begins with adventure: vaqueros, cattle drives, and the desert’s sweet morning air. After these adventures, our hero concludes his wandering, marrying a “shepherder’s daughter” and forming a new community: “They had two sons, and finally / Things in his life were right.” And yet, the dream can’t last. Jake (Jesús) is wrongfully killed by a “drunkard, and coward.” Gioia’ reminds us of the true West, not the glamorized, Hollywood West:
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 poem ends with Jake’s two sons departing for “cattle drives,” silently living their mother, “who watched them ride away.” And so the cycle continues. In tastefully direct stanzas, Gioia communicates the deep melancholy and ache achieved by masterpieces of the Western genre, such as McCarthy’s Border Trilogy or McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. Above all, the story communicates the universal in the particular, tapping into the traditional and mythic origins of the ballad.
The final poem in the collection, “The Underworld,” is the most ambitious. In this deeply intertextual narrative, the poetic voice narrates a descent into Hell, making a sundry of allusions, nodding to Virgil, Dante, and Yeats (among others). The narrative takes the form of instructions; they begin with boarding a mysterious train, the Western Line:
Go to the final car. Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t exit when you reach the outmost station. Don’t move—not even when the lights go off … Don’t talk to them [other passengers]. They know much less than you... And frankly, they aren’t interested in you. Remember why you’ve come.
In this opening, Gioia establishes the question that will unify the entire poem. Why would someone board a doom-bound train to Hell? He depicts the ride as a choice, a search for something. As the descent continues and the situation becomes dire, the central question remains unanswered, even unasked: “The question should be asked—why have you come?... But no one speaks. / The train jogs forward through the dark. You learn / No one will stop you on the journey down.”
Whatever knowledge that the riders seek, however, becomes a kind of pharmakon. In achieving what they desire, they find something they cannot un-know or undo:
…They hoped to learn Forbidden things and yet remain untouched. There are some truths that only darkness knows. Such knowledge never comes without a price. … The deeper they explored, the more entangled. The truths that darkness taught infected them, Clouding their minds, goading their descent.
From the beginning, the narrator makes clear that the train ride is both free (“no money changes hands”) and costly. Each forward movement further eliminates the possibility of return. The mind that sought to remain untouched becomes “entangled,” “infected,” and clouded.
When the train arrives, we receive a description of the Underworld’s topography:
The train emerges to a lowland plain Bordered by mountains on either sides. Behind each range another range arises, Higher and curving inward like a dome — A space at once enormous and confined, Not dark but dim and shadowed like the twilight, A landscape without sky, an underworld.
Gioia’s description is incredibly rich. The Underworld is enormous, implying the possibility of movement and growth. And yet, such possibility is illusory. In reality, this shadowed place is confined and claustrophobic; the mountains are endlessly falling over each other, constricting and enclosing. The traveler —like Dante’s Satan—is stuck in a place that restrains movement. Furthermore, this constricting dome is “curving inward.” The geography of Hell is an embodiment of Luther’s characterization of sin, incurvatus in se, a selfish inward turning.
I think this concept of selfishness is key to understanding the nature of Gioia’s Underworld and the fate of its inhabitants. As the train arrives, a nearby passenger turns to stone. Her transformation invokes Lot’s wife or an inverted version of Ovid’s Pygmalion story. And yet, importantly, “no Gorgon-gaze arrested her. / She drew this slow perfection from within.” Rather than originating from an external actor, her hardness arises from within. In other words, the trip to Hell is voluntary and its bleak transformation is self-originating.
The final section, titled “Disappointments,” is a harrowing end to the story:
No fire, no furies, no ferryman, No bleeding thorns, no waters of oblivion, No triple-headed dog to guard the gate, No gate at all as far as you can tell, No burning wheel, no stones to push uphill, No Titans bound in chains, no serpent king. No sun, no moon, no stars, no sky, no end.
The revealed Underworld is not exciting. There are no mythic horrors or eternal torturers, only a disappointing nothingness. In the Underworld, all meaning is subsumed into a great negation. The repetition of “no” is resonant of the “nada prayer” in Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” rendering prayer meaningless. Furthermore, this nothingness makes embodiment impossible. As Merleau-Ponty wrote, “the body is our anchorage in the world.” Here, the anchor is severed by negation, and the ship is swallowed by the deep. The fleshy human experience that Gioia so gracefully depicts across the collection vanishes.
In this final poem, we do not find the simultaneous relation of presence and absence as charted in the first poem. We find only absence. If I might draw a (partial) message from the conclusion, I would suggest that the Underworld for Gioia consists of and is caused by selfishness. In its inward turning, the self becomes unreceptive to the meaningfulness of human community (both the living and dead) that forms the core of Gioia’s poetic affirmations. In response, we might reject this fate and embrace embodiment with others, accepting the gifts that “we can’t reciprocate” (“Tinsel, Frankincense, and Fir”).
Carter Davis Johnson is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Kentucky. In addition to his scholarly work, he writes creatively and has been published in Ekstasis, The Road Not Taken, Flyover Country, and Front Porch Republic. He writes a regular substack titled Dwelling.
If you’d like to read a sample from Gioia’s collection, here is a link to a poem in its original publication venue:
“The Ballad of Jesús Ortiz” in Los Angeles Review of Books