Like it or not, the world seems to be reenchanting, though how and toward what end seem up for grabs. CEOs seeking personal transfiguration attend psychedelic retreats. AI delivers otherworldly magic via chatbots and is hailed by its creators, with optimism and dread, as an imminent superbeing. (Leave aside UFOs and crystals for now.) Overshadowed in this chaos are the poets, who for a long time now have stood in the breach between realms and occasionally brought back treasure for the rest of us—so long, says Dana Gioia, ’73, MBA ’77, that poetry, around since before the invention of writing, predates history itself.
That observation, from the title essay in his recently published Poetry as Enchantment: And Other Essays, hints at Gioia’s perspective on verse, which he considers not only across time but also through the lens of various genres, publications, and poets and writers, canonical and otherwise, Ray Bradbury to Robert Frost. The latter, Gioia notes, pointed to the utility and staying power of poetry: “a way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget.”
Like the songs of birds or dances of bees—but on a higher level of complexity—poetry reflects the unique cognitive capacity of the human mind and body.
The common denominator across the essays is Gioia’s enthusiasm for the form, which he assures readers is here to stay and hiding in plain sight everywhere. Example: Lady Gaga’s Gesang ist Dasein (“Singing is being”) tattoo borrows the phrase from Rainer Maria Rilke, among those who hailed poetry’s consciousness-transforming power for both the poet and the audience.
Perhaps most enjoyable about this 17-essay romp are the many anecdotes in which Gioia describes how his own life has been transformed through poetry encounters, on the page and in person, including during his B-school days on the Farm. “I’m the only person who ever went to business school to be a poet,” he’s written elsewhere. (He famously ditched a successful career as a General Foods executive to become a full-time writer.)
Between his accounting and finance classes at the GSB, Gioia regularly sat in on Eighteenth-Century Poetry, a graduate seminar taught by Donald Davie, a pre-eminent postwar English poet who’s now mostly forgotten. Davie became a from-the-beyond answer to Gioia’s deepest wish—a mentor who would help him learn to write on his own. “By either luck or destiny, the person I wanted most was actually at Stanford,” Gioia writes.
Dana Gioia (Photo: Star Black)
At a moment when people look to meet their destiny with an assist from psychedelics or large language models, it’s refreshing to hear how Gioia met his at 1970s Stanford. “I didn’t ask permission,” he writes. “I just showed up and sat in the back row.” Fans of his poetry and prose, enjoying his still-prodigious output, are undoubtedly happy that he did.
Geoff Koch, MA ’04, is a writer in Portland, Ore. Email him at stanford.magazine@stanford.edu.
