Dana Gioia's "California Hills in August"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 1 July 2021

⏱️ 7 minutes

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Summary

Michael Dana Gioia (/ˈdʒɔɪ.ə/; born December 24, 1950) is an American poet, literary critic, literary translator, and essayist.

Gioia was born into a working class family of Mexican and Sicilian descent and grew up attending Roman Catholic parochial schools in Hawthorne and Gardena, California. After becoming the first member of his family to attend college, Gioia graduated from both Stanford University and Harvard University. He spent the first fifteen years of his literary career writing at night while working as a senior executive for General Foods in New York City. Since the early 1980s, Gioia has been considered part of the literary movements within American poetry known as New Formalism, which advocates the continued writing of poetry in rhyme and meter, and New Narrative, which advocates the telling of non-autobiographical stories. In opposition to what was then the common practice of translating formal poetry into free verse, Gioia has argued in favor of a return to the past tradition of replicating the rhythm and verse structure of the original poem. Gioia has also published his own translations of poets such as Eugenio Montale and Seneca the Younger.

--Bio via Wikipedia

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the Daily Poem. I'm Heidi White, and today is Thursday, July 1st.
0:06.8	And today I'm going to read for you a poem by American poet, Dana Joya.
0:12.5	Dana Joya was born in 1950, and he's still alive today. He is a poet, a critic, a translator, and a businessman.
0:21.1	And he said of himself that he is, quote, the only person in history who went to business school to be a poet, end quote.
0:31.0	And he talks some.
0:32.6	You can look up some really interesting interviews by him in which he talks about the connection between his life as a businessman and his life as a poet. It's really interesting. But today's poem is called
0:43.8	California Hills in August, and this is how it goes. I can imagine someone who found these fields
0:51.4	unbearable, who climbed the hillside in the heat, cursing the dust,
0:56.6	cracking the brittle weeds underfoot, wishing a few more trees for shade. An Easterner, especially,
1:04.0	who had scorn the meagerness of summer, the dry, twisted shapes of black elm, scrub oak,
1:10.3	and chaparral, a landscape August has already drained
1:14.1	of green. One who would hurry over the clinging thistle, fox tail, golden poppy, knowing everything
1:21.5	was just a weed, unable to conceive that these trees and sparse brown bushes were alive and hate the bright stillness of the noon without wind, without motion, the only other living thing a hawk, hungry for prey, suspended in the blinding sunlit blue.
1:43.6	And yet, how gentle it seems to someone raised in a landscape short of rain,
1:50.0	the skyline of a hill broken by no more trees than one can count,
1:55.0	the grass, the empty sky, the wish for water.
2:00.0	This is a poem about perspective. sky, the wish for water.
2:04.2	This is a poem about perspective.
2:13.1	The narrator describes two walkers in a landscape of California Hills.
2:24.3	One walker is himself, of course, who is enjoying the scene, who sees the rising life in the fields around him in spite of the drought-ridden landscape. But this walker is imagining someone strolling through this landscape and finding no life in it, right?
2:32.3	Someone who's used to a more lush landscape with lots of rain in
2:37.3	which a lot of green and many things would be growing in such a hillside. And he contrasts the two,
	...

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