Poems that ask for more

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Next up on The World and Everything in It: poetry finds its voice.

A composer and a poet put their skills to work, beginning a collaboration that’s lasted decades.

It started in 1987 when the wife of composer Paul Salerni read a poem in The New Yorker by Dana Gioia. She thought it ought to be set to music. She persuaded her husband to give it a try, he did, and a team was born.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Salerni and Gioia’s first project was a one-act opera. Their second, a song collection. Their latest is a project that blends both.

WORLD’s music critic Arsenio Orteza asked about the project, and what makes their partnership tick.

ARSENIO ORTEZA: In 2024, WORLD Magazine chose Poetry As Enchantment as one of its books of the year. It’s a collection of essays by the poet Dana Gioia. 

“These essays, as a whole,” wrote Micah Mattix, “offer one of the most eloquent defenses in recent memory of the power of poetry’s musicality and the art’s spiritual nature.” 

Gioia's awareness of “poetry’s musicality” has not been lost on contemporary composers, many of whom have set his poems to music. One of the first was Paul Salerni, who in 1987 set Gioia’s poem “Garden on the Campagna”:

MUSIC: [“Garden on the Campagna” by Alison Tupay and the Da Capo Chamber Players]

Since then, Salerni and Gioia have collaborated on three album-length projects. The first was 2010’s Tony Caruso’s Final Broadcast, a one-act opera about a classical-music radio host on the eve of his station’s switch to a commercial format. 

The album Speaking of Love: Love Songs and Chamber Music followed seven years later. Then, last year, Haunted and Other Works by Dana Gioia & Paul Salerni. It juxtaposes contemporary opera with art song. Some of it is contemplative, and some of it is playful. It’s an eclectic mix, and it made me wonder who Salerni considers his audience.

SALERNI: We want people who are committed to paying attention, who don't come with a lot of biases. I want to talk to my fellow composers because they're my colleagues, but I want to reach beyond them. I want my mother, who had to get a high school equivalency degree in order to go to nursing school, you know, I want to talk to my children when they were young. I think I started writing music that I write, both thanks to Dana's voice, but also to this idea that, yes, there's a broad audience there that I really want to get to. And so, yeah, I think I'm trying to write for everybody.

A good example of how Gioia’s work takes on different dimensions when set to music is “Film Noir.” It’s a poem that cleverly tweaks and arranges clichés associated with the genre until they tell a suspenseful and compelling, if bare-bones, story. 

As recited by Gioia, it sounds like this:

MUSIC: [“Film Noir” by Dana Gioia]

But set to music by Salerni and sung by Jessica Bowers, it sounds like this:

MUSIC: [“Film Noir” by Jessica Bowers]

“Film Noir” is one of three stand-alone “other works” on Haunted and Other Works. The other two are “The Ballad of Jesús Ortiz,” which tells the story of Gioia’s great-grandfather, and “Prayer at Winter Solstice,” a kind of contemporary version of the Beatitudes. 

The main piece, though, is "Haunted" itself. It’s Salerni’s transformation of a 112-line blank-verse narrative poem into a 34-minute combination opera-ballet. And, like the other material on the album, it’s sung by the award-winning baritone Keith Phares.

MUSIC: [“Haunted, Scene 1: Remembering Mara” by Keith Phares]

Because the poem tells a story, it’s possible to spoil the plot by saying too much about it. But I can say that one of its main characters, just like one of the main characters in Tony Caruso’s Final Broadcast, is a ghost.

Gioia has what he calls a “metaphysical view of life.” In other words, he believes that we experience the material and the spiritual simultaneously, and that though we live in time, we have a sense of the eternal. 

It’s good, he says, for a writer to feel that way because it helps him to grasp life’s complexity.

GIOIA: I saw a ghost when I was young. When I was a young boy, both of my parents worked, but occasionally my aunt Felice would take me in because she had a whole bunch of kids and I just, you know, merged into the pack. And she died of cancer. I don't know how old I was, maybe nine, and I was in my bed one night and she came into my room. She looked at me, she put her hand on me, and then she left. She didn't say anything, but I knew it was her, and I knew I was awake.

Gioia is a practicing Catholic and does not take the spiritual implications of such an experience lightly. He eventually described the encounter to a priest, who said that because the spirit didn’t speak, it probably wasn’t demonic. 

But, as far as the ghosts in his poetry goes, it’s important to him that they retain their mystery.

GIOIA: I'm trying to write a poem that awakens in my readers an increased awareness to the full realities of their own life, the possibilities of their consciousness, that I make them remember things in their past that they've forgotten. And my poems are deliberately unfinished. I leave something out of my poems. And the reader goes, ‘Well, why isn't he telling me this?’ And the reader then has to bring something from his or her own life to complete the poem.

In one sense, you could say that, in setting them to music, Salerni has already completed the pieces on Haunted and Other Works for the listener. 

In another sense, though, you could say that Salerni’s music has mysteries of its own, mysteries that, in overlaying Gioia’s, require even more of the listener than before. It’s a “more” that listeners will be happy to give.

MUSIC: [“Prayer at Winter Solstice” by Keith Phares]

I’m Arsenio Orteza.

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