Dana Gioia's "Entrance"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 25 January 2024

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today’s poem is Dana Gioia’s interpretive spin on a Rilke poem about (among other things) poetics.

Dana Gioia is an internationally acclaimed poet and writer. Former California Poet Laureate and Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Gioia was born in Los Angeles of Italian and Mexican descent. The first person in his family to attend college, he received a B.A. and M.B.A. from Stanford and an M.A. from Harvard in Comparative Literature. For fifteen years he worked as a businessman before quitting at forty-one to become a full-time writer.

His surname is pronounced Joy-a.

-bio via DanaGioia.com

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
0:04.3	I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Thursday, January 25th, 2024.
0:10.4	Today's poem is by Dana Joya, and it's called Entrance.
0:14.7	I'll read it once, say a few things, and then read it again.
0:20.9	This is entrance.
0:25.4	Whoever you are, step out of doors tonight, out of the room that lets you feel secure.
0:33.3	Infinity is open to your sight, whoever you are.
0:43.6	With eyes that have forgotten how to see from viewing things already too well known,
0:51.5	lift up into the dark a huge black tree and put it in the heavens, tall, alone.
0:55.7	And you have made the world and all you see.
0:59.7	It ripens like the words still in your mouth.
1:03.6	And when at last you comprehend its truth,
1:15.9	then close your eyes and gently set it free. This is a poem translated by Joya,
1:20.6	from a poem originally by Rainer Maria Rilke,
1:24.8	another favorite of ours here on the daily poem.
1:32.0	And there is a whole body of literature about the enterprise, the joys, the struggles of translating the poetry of Raina Maria Rilke.
1:41.7	And it is a favorite pastime of English poets. And so there are a variety,
1:49.1	usually, of translations to choose from and compare whenever you encounter one of Rilke's poems
1:54.4	in English. Dana Joya does something fascinating with this poem that I'll get to in a minute, but it is largely
2:05.7	unaltered and recognizable in most of its forms, although there are a few key variations.
2:15.2	This poem seems to be more or less,
2:19.5	and at least on its face, a poem about the act of willing,
	...

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