"An Italy of the Mind": I ritorni di Dana Gioia

A native Californian, of Italian (Sicilian, as he often specifies) descent on his father’s side and Mexican (mestizo) on his mother’s, Gioia has maintained a lifelong interest in Italian culture. Classical and Mediterranean elements can be identified throughout his varied literary productions (poetry, essays, translations, opera libretti). Even the (“new”) formalism embraced at the outset of his career, far from being the symptom of "Eurocentric blindness" (a criticism leveled at the author), seems rather to be the sign of the deep awareness of the past and the history that a given lyric form embodies. Gioia’s poetry features a profound vision, spanning the centuries, and not neglecting the successive dense stratifications generated over time in their current relevance. In this sense, despite his proud proclaiming himself a California poet, Gioia inevitably embodies all the complexity of his mixed diasporic (Italian, Mexican, Native) heritage.