What is the immediate effect of a great poem? What experience does it create for its readers as they first encounter it? The poet and critic Dana Gioia has likened the experience to being under a spell. In one essay, he observed that “all poetic technique exists to enchant—to create a mild trance state in the listener or reader in order to heighten attention, relax emotional defenses, and rouse our full psyche, so that we hear and respond to the language more deeply and intensely.” His latest collection of poems, Meet Me at the Lighthouse (Graywolf Press, 2023), demonstrates many of the ways that poets can cast the hypnotic spell on readers.
The collection shows that the poet can bewitch his readers with a fascinating array of forms and styles. There are psalms, a lament, a sonnet—even a murder ballad about Gioia’s great-grandfather. There is a lot of death indeed, from a description of a descent into the underworld to an epitaph for Gioia himself, which doubles as a sharp critique of the over-credentialized world of modern American poetry: “Here lies D.G. A poet? Who can say? / He didn’t even have an MFA.” (No, Gioia doesn’t have a Master of Fine Arts, but he did serve as chair of the National Endowment for the Arts from 2003-09.)
There’s also a lot of music: lyrics Gioia composed for the jazz pianist Helen Sung (you can hear Gioia read the poems, and Sung sing them, on Spotify); a libretto for a children’s opera; the words to a bawdy Cabaret number about chastity. The title poem imagines a rendezvous at a jazz club, where the ghosts of great musicians perform. Where so much contemporary poetry insists on severing itself from poetry’s musical elements, Gioia’s attraction to song is refreshing.
Many of the best poems in this collection are about language. Among the most compelling—and enchanting—is “Words, Words, Words,” a four-stanza examination of what moves a poet to write. The title is taken from Hamlet—when Polonius asks what he’s reading, the prince slyly (or madly) replies, “words, words, words.” It is the exchange that inspires Polonius’s famous aside, “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.”
Each of the poem’s four stanzas proposes a motive for the act of writing poetry—or, as Gioia puts it, “why the game is played.” The first three stanzas introduce partial reasons: “It isn’t just the words,” as important as they are, nor is it the childish joy of rhyming (“the superstitious chanting we despise / but can’t forget”), nor “the pain we hope to end” through the cathartic act of expression.
The poem lands on something less substantial, a component that is apparent to the poet but not the reader who sees only the finished work:
It is the luck to fail at what we started,
of letting language use us a vessel
swept on a course we never could have charted—
to hope that once
the angel came, possessed us, and departed.
These lines emphasize what poets cannot foresee or control, the fruitful frustration and serendipitous discovery of the creative process. This paradox of lucky failure is a fascinating way of understanding how poets—and other writers—seldom exercise complete control over the language. Sometimes this lack of control is frustrating; other times, the uncharted course is a blessing.
Gioia had hinted at some surprises of poetry earlier, referring to the “accidental insights of conjunction” revealed by rhyme and lamenting that sometimes “the truest words subvert what we intend.” In the first stanza, though, poets are in control of words, “hav[ing] made a science of” them and (changing metaphors) using them like playing cards. By the end, this master/servant relationship is inverted. The poem’s final line seems to evoke Caravaggio’s The Inspiration of St. Matthew, which depicts the evangelist, pen in hand, looking to an angel over his shoulder for instruction on what to write next.
Yes, as Gioia explained in his essay, poets use an array of techniques to enchant their readers. But in “Words, Words, Words,” he elaborates that in making this enchantment possible, poets themselves must experience an enchantment of their own. Or, to adapt the phrasing of the title’s source material: though there is method, yet there is luck in’t.
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