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Interrogations at Noon: Poems
Winner of the American Book Award
Dana Gioia, an internationally known poet and critic, is notably prolific with his essays, reviews, translations, and anthologies. But like his celebrated teacher, Elizabeth Bishop, Gioia is meticulously painstaking and self-critical about his own poems. In an active 25-year career he has published only two previous volumes of poetry. Although Gioia is often recognized as a leading force in the recent revival of rhyme and meter in American poetry, his own work does not fit neatly into any one style.
Interrogations at Noon displays an extraordinary range of style and sensibility—from rhymed couplets to free verse, from surrealist elegy to satirical ballad. What unites the poems is not a single approach but their resonant musicality and powerful but understated emotion. This new collection explores the uninvited epiphanies of love and marriage, probing the quiet mysteries of a seemingly settled domestic life. Meditating on the inescapable themes of lyric poetry—time, mortality, nature, and the contradictions of the human heart—Gioia turns them to provocative and unexpected ends.
Dana Gioia, an internationally known poet and critic, is notably prolific with his essays, reviews, translations, and anthologies. But like his celebrated teacher, Elizabeth Bishop, Gioia is meticulously painstaking and self-critical about his own poems. In an active 25-year career he has published only two previous volumes of poetry. Although Gioia is often recognized as a leading force in the recent revival of rhyme and meter in American poetry, his own work does not fit neatly into any one style.
Interrogations at Noon displays an extraordinary range of style and sensibility—from rhymed couplets to free verse, from surrealist elegy to satirical ballad. What unites the poems is not a single approach but their resonant musicality and powerful but understated emotion. This new collection explores the uninvited epiphanies of love and marriage, probing the quiet mysteries of a seemingly settled domestic life. Meditating on the inescapable themes of lyric poetry—time, mortality, nature, and the contradictions of the human heart—Gioia turns them to provocative and unexpected ends.
- GenresPoetry
64 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2001
4 people are currently reading
115 people want to read
About the author
Dana Gioia
172 books120 followersDana Gioia is an internationally acclaimed and award-winning poet. Former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Gioia is a native Californian of Italian and Mexican descent. He received a B.A. and a M.B.A. from Stanford University and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. (Gioia is pronounced JOY-uh.)
Gioia has published four full-length collections of poetry, as well as eight chapbooks. His poetry collection, Interrogations at Noon, won the 2002 American Book Award. An influential critic as well, Gioia's 1991 volume Can Poetry Matter?, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, is credited with helping to revive the role of poetry in American public culture.
Gioia's reviews have appeared in many magazines including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Washington Post Book World, The New York Times Book Review, Slate, and The Hudson Review. Gioia has written two opera libretti and is an active translator of poetry from Latin, Italian, and German.
As Chairman of the NEA, Gioia succeeded in garnering enthusiastic bi-partisan support in the United States Congress for the mission of the Arts Endowment, as well as in strengthening the national consensus in favor of public funding for the arts and arts education. (Business Week Magazine referred to him as "The Man Who Saved the NEA.")
Gioia's creation of a series of NEA National Initiatives combined with a wider distribution of direct grants to reach previously underserved communities making the agency truly national in scope. Through programs such as Shakespeare in American Communities, Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, NEA Jazz Masters, American Masterpieces, and Poetry Out Loud, the Arts Endowment has successfully reached millions of Americans in all corners of the country.
The Big Read became the largest literary program in the history of the federal government. By the end of 2008, 400 communities had held month-long celebrations of great literature. Because of these successes as well as the continued artistic excellence of the NEA's core grant programs, the Arts Endowment, under Chairman Gioia, reestablished itself as a preeminent federal agency and a leader in the arts and arts education.
Renominated in November 2006 for a second term and once again unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Dana Gioia is the ninth Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Gioia left his position as Chairman on January 22, 2009. In 2011 Gioia became the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California where he teaches each fall semester.
Gioia has been the recipient of ten honorary degrees. He has won numerous awards, including the 2010 Laetare Medal from Notre Dame. He and his wife, Mary, have two sons. He divides his time between Los Angeles and Sonoma County, California
Gioia has published four full-length collections of poetry, as well as eight chapbooks. His poetry collection, Interrogations at Noon, won the 2002 American Book Award. An influential critic as well, Gioia's 1991 volume Can Poetry Matter?, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, is credited with helping to revive the role of poetry in American public culture.
Gioia's reviews have appeared in many magazines including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Washington Post Book World, The New York Times Book Review, Slate, and The Hudson Review. Gioia has written two opera libretti and is an active translator of poetry from Latin, Italian, and German.
As Chairman of the NEA, Gioia succeeded in garnering enthusiastic bi-partisan support in the United States Congress for the mission of the Arts Endowment, as well as in strengthening the national consensus in favor of public funding for the arts and arts education. (Business Week Magazine referred to him as "The Man Who Saved the NEA.")
Gioia's creation of a series of NEA National Initiatives combined with a wider distribution of direct grants to reach previously underserved communities making the agency truly national in scope. Through programs such as Shakespeare in American Communities, Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, NEA Jazz Masters, American Masterpieces, and Poetry Out Loud, the Arts Endowment has successfully reached millions of Americans in all corners of the country.
The Big Read became the largest literary program in the history of the federal government. By the end of 2008, 400 communities had held month-long celebrations of great literature. Because of these successes as well as the continued artistic excellence of the NEA's core grant programs, the Arts Endowment, under Chairman Gioia, reestablished itself as a preeminent federal agency and a leader in the arts and arts education.
Renominated in November 2006 for a second term and once again unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Dana Gioia is the ninth Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Gioia left his position as Chairman on January 22, 2009. In 2011 Gioia became the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California where he teaches each fall semester.
Gioia has been the recipient of ten honorary degrees. He has won numerous awards, including the 2010 Laetare Medal from Notre Dame. He and his wife, Mary, have two sons. He divides his time between Los Angeles and Sonoma County, California
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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
December 31, 2021
Great stuff - figurative language that really hits the mark, time and again. Surprised to discover rhyme scheme and meter, but Gioia is masterful, exploiting those constraints to create some wonderful wordplay. Some of the literary allusions were lost on me, but the metaphors carried me through.
January 29, 2025
Great ones at the start and end. The middle was a little less entrancing. Summer Storm was easily the most compelling, although The Voyeur was a strong contender with vastly different emotions. Also loved Unsaid.
July 25, 2007
wow very predictable. why did this win the American Book Award?
June 3, 2011
Worth the price of admission just for "Summer Storm" and "Unsaid."
February 9, 2024
Deeply enjoyable poetry. I love how he knits raw emotion into such a wide variety of poem structures.
I really like how the back cover describes this collection: “This new collection explores the uninvited epiphanies of love and marriage, probing the quiet mysteries of a seemingly settled domestic life. Meditating on the inescapable themes of lyric poetry—time, mortality, nature, and the contradictions of the human heart—Gioia turns them to provocative and unexpected ends.” “Uninvited epiphanies”…yeah. Wow. Also, gave names to the themes I love in lyric poetry (clearly didn’t study English or poetry in college, ha): “time, mortality, nature, and the contradictions of the human heart.” Those are definitely the four most compelling topics in poetry for me, so thank goodness for lyric poetry.
Some favorite words, as always:
- From “Words” (beautiful, lovely poem):
“The world does not need words. It articulates itself / in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path / are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted. / The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being. / The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.”
“To name is to know and remember.”
- From “The Litany”
“This is a litany of lost things, a canon of possessions dispossessed…”
“This is the liturgy of rain”
“This is a prayer to unbelief”
“This is a prayer, inchoate and unfinished, / for you, my love, my loss, my lesion, / a rosary of words to count out time’s / illusions, all the minutes, hours, days / ‘the calendar compounds as if the past / existed somewhere—like an inheritance / still waiting to be claimed.”
- From “Entrance”
“Whoever you are: step out of doors tonight, / Out of the room that lets you feel secure. / Infinity is open to your sight. / Whoever you are. / With eyes that have forgotten how to see / From viewing things already too well-known.”
- From “The Archbishop” (really poignant)
“His Reverence is tired from preaching / To the halt, and the lame, and the blind. / Their spiritual needs are unsubtle, / Their notions of God unrefined.”
- From “Curriculum Vitae” (the whole thing, actually)
“The future shrinks / Whether the past / Is well or badly spent. / We shape our lives / Although their forms / Are never what we meant.”
- From “Homage to Valerio Magrelli”
“Especially in weeping / the soul reveals / its presence / and through secret pressure / changes sorrow into water. / The first budding of the spirit is in the tear, / Then following this elemental alchemy / thought turns itself into substance / as real as a stone or an arm. / And there is nothing uneasy in the liquid / except the mineral / anguish of matter.”
- “In the evening when the light is dim, / I hide in bed and collect / the silhouettes of reasoning / which silently run across my limbs. / It is here I must weave the tapestry of thought / and arranging the threads of my self / design my own figure. / This is not work / but a kind of workmanship. / First out of paper, then from the body. / To provoke thought into form / molded according to a measure. / I think of a tailor / who is his own fabric.”
- From “Time Travel”
“The past is waiting for us somewhere”
“The shameless modesty of our desire / Only to possess what we already had.”
- From “The Lost Garden”
“If ever we see those gardens again, / The summer will be gone—at least our summer.”
“For even sorrow / Seems bearable when studied at a distance, / And if we speak of private suffering, / The pain becomes part of a well-turned tale / Describing someone else who shares our name.”
“The trick is making memory a blessing, / To learn by loss the cool subtraction of desire, / Of wanting nothing more than what has been, / To know the past forever lost, yet seeing / Behind the wall a garden still in blossom.”
- From “Unsaid”
“So much of what we live goes on inside / The diaries of grief, the tongue-tied aches / Of unacknowledged love are no less real / For having passed unsaid. What we conceal / Is always more than what we dare confide. / Think of the letters that we write our dead.”
I really like how the back cover describes this collection: “This new collection explores the uninvited epiphanies of love and marriage, probing the quiet mysteries of a seemingly settled domestic life. Meditating on the inescapable themes of lyric poetry—time, mortality, nature, and the contradictions of the human heart—Gioia turns them to provocative and unexpected ends.” “Uninvited epiphanies”…yeah. Wow. Also, gave names to the themes I love in lyric poetry (clearly didn’t study English or poetry in college, ha): “time, mortality, nature, and the contradictions of the human heart.” Those are definitely the four most compelling topics in poetry for me, so thank goodness for lyric poetry.
Some favorite words, as always:
- From “Words” (beautiful, lovely poem):
“The world does not need words. It articulates itself / in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path / are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted. / The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being. / The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.”
“To name is to know and remember.”
- From “The Litany”
“This is a litany of lost things, a canon of possessions dispossessed…”
“This is the liturgy of rain”
“This is a prayer to unbelief”
“This is a prayer, inchoate and unfinished, / for you, my love, my loss, my lesion, / a rosary of words to count out time’s / illusions, all the minutes, hours, days / ‘the calendar compounds as if the past / existed somewhere—like an inheritance / still waiting to be claimed.”
- From “Entrance”
“Whoever you are: step out of doors tonight, / Out of the room that lets you feel secure. / Infinity is open to your sight. / Whoever you are. / With eyes that have forgotten how to see / From viewing things already too well-known.”
- From “The Archbishop” (really poignant)
“His Reverence is tired from preaching / To the halt, and the lame, and the blind. / Their spiritual needs are unsubtle, / Their notions of God unrefined.”
- From “Curriculum Vitae” (the whole thing, actually)
“The future shrinks / Whether the past / Is well or badly spent. / We shape our lives / Although their forms / Are never what we meant.”
- From “Homage to Valerio Magrelli”
“Especially in weeping / the soul reveals / its presence / and through secret pressure / changes sorrow into water. / The first budding of the spirit is in the tear, / Then following this elemental alchemy / thought turns itself into substance / as real as a stone or an arm. / And there is nothing uneasy in the liquid / except the mineral / anguish of matter.”
- “In the evening when the light is dim, / I hide in bed and collect / the silhouettes of reasoning / which silently run across my limbs. / It is here I must weave the tapestry of thought / and arranging the threads of my self / design my own figure. / This is not work / but a kind of workmanship. / First out of paper, then from the body. / To provoke thought into form / molded according to a measure. / I think of a tailor / who is his own fabric.”
- From “Time Travel”
“The past is waiting for us somewhere”
“The shameless modesty of our desire / Only to possess what we already had.”
- From “The Lost Garden”
“If ever we see those gardens again, / The summer will be gone—at least our summer.”
“For even sorrow / Seems bearable when studied at a distance, / And if we speak of private suffering, / The pain becomes part of a well-turned tale / Describing someone else who shares our name.”
“The trick is making memory a blessing, / To learn by loss the cool subtraction of desire, / Of wanting nothing more than what has been, / To know the past forever lost, yet seeing / Behind the wall a garden still in blossom.”
- From “Unsaid”
“So much of what we live goes on inside / The diaries of grief, the tongue-tied aches / Of unacknowledged love are no less real / For having passed unsaid. What we conceal / Is always more than what we dare confide. / Think of the letters that we write our dead.”
February 18, 2023
Interrogations at Noon has to be one of my favorite single author poetry books of all time.
This book starts off with Words, an ode to the world around Gioia; how “none can reply”, as Shelley would say. What a powerful start that establishes Gioia’s view of the world— that we are only a little part of something bigger. That theme of life’s impermanence is a central one in the book although it takes different shapes throughout. Gioia confronts loss, domesticity, adulthood, perception, love in ways that are not intimidating to the reader but push the reader’s set way of thinking.
I think poetry’s point in the world is to connect people that otherwise would not be connected. Whitman preaching self love and acceptance, Shelley and Keats connecting readers with the sublime around them, Gioia connecting a small part of the world’s population with each other— with people who have suffered, whose life’s boats sunked & sobbed. The talent and unconscious cultivation it has taken Gioia to compile these poems is remarkable. I would recommend this book / to people interested in natural spirituality & the sublime, and to those who are maybe stuck in a way of thinking.
This was a messy ramble of a review but there are not enough ways that I can properly articulate the importance of this book on any scholar’s shelf.
This book starts off with Words, an ode to the world around Gioia; how “none can reply”, as Shelley would say. What a powerful start that establishes Gioia’s view of the world— that we are only a little part of something bigger. That theme of life’s impermanence is a central one in the book although it takes different shapes throughout. Gioia confronts loss, domesticity, adulthood, perception, love in ways that are not intimidating to the reader but push the reader’s set way of thinking.
I think poetry’s point in the world is to connect people that otherwise would not be connected. Whitman preaching self love and acceptance, Shelley and Keats connecting readers with the sublime around them, Gioia connecting a small part of the world’s population with each other— with people who have suffered, whose life’s boats sunked & sobbed. The talent and unconscious cultivation it has taken Gioia to compile these poems is remarkable. I would recommend this book / to people interested in natural spirituality & the sublime, and to those who are maybe stuck in a way of thinking.
This was a messy ramble of a review but there are not enough ways that I can properly articulate the importance of this book on any scholar’s shelf.
November 19, 2025
Dana Gioia is a poet, critic, translator, and essayist. Since the early 1980s, Gioia has written against the grain. Drawing on classical sources, writing poetry in rhyme and meter, and addressing traditional themes which eschew confessional verse, Gioia has been labeled as a New Formalist. President George W. Bush appointed Gioia as the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, where he served from 2003 until 2009.
Gioia’s “Interrogations at Noon” displays a range of style and sensibility—from rhymed couplets to free verse, from elegies to brief vignettes. The collection lacks a unified theme; but the selections explore familiar terrain: love, marriage, and loss. In many instances, traditional lyrics resonate with emotion as Gioia employs irony to provoke and surprise the reader.
His “Unsaid,” the volumes concluding selection is a succinct summation of the ineffable nature of human communication:
“So much of what we live goes on inside--
The diaries of grief, the tongue-tied aches
Of unacknowledged love are no less real
For having passed unsaid. What we conceal
Is always more than what we dare confide.
Think of the letters that we write our dead.”
Gioia’s “Interrogations at Noon” displays a range of style and sensibility—from rhymed couplets to free verse, from elegies to brief vignettes. The collection lacks a unified theme; but the selections explore familiar terrain: love, marriage, and loss. In many instances, traditional lyrics resonate with emotion as Gioia employs irony to provoke and surprise the reader.
His “Unsaid,” the volumes concluding selection is a succinct summation of the ineffable nature of human communication:
“So much of what we live goes on inside--
The diaries of grief, the tongue-tied aches
Of unacknowledged love are no less real
For having passed unsaid. What we conceal
Is always more than what we dare confide.
Think of the letters that we write our dead.”
March 28, 2023
The first and last poems in this collection really make it all work.
June 4, 2023
Last section is best.
January 22, 2025
Been very interested in poetry lately. I was recommended Gioia. Excited to read more
April 20, 2009
Interrogations at Noon was thoughtful, each poem was quietly building strength. Less like a punch in the face and more like a letter you're not sure you should send. I didn't find the title poem satisfying, however, and I thought it was a little bland.
"Failure" was good - the idea already thought of, but eloquently written.
"Divination" was a good example of repitition and was tightly bound together.
As stuffy as "Elegy with Surrealist Proverbs as Refrain" sounds, it was actually very captivating.
One of my favourites was "Metamorphosis" with its mythical references.
"My Dead Lover" was, as expected, very sad and moving ("Our rituals are never for the dead").
I liked the idea of "Spider in the Corner" and the end of "For Sale", which I didn't see coming.
The only thing was that, while each poem was good, the whole book didn't really stand out. I don't particularly like rhyming poems, which were pretty constant. It was good, but not memorable.
"Failure" was good - the idea already thought of, but eloquently written.
"Divination" was a good example of repitition and was tightly bound together.
As stuffy as "Elegy with Surrealist Proverbs as Refrain" sounds, it was actually very captivating.
One of my favourites was "Metamorphosis" with its mythical references.
"My Dead Lover" was, as expected, very sad and moving ("Our rituals are never for the dead").
I liked the idea of "Spider in the Corner" and the end of "For Sale", which I didn't see coming.
The only thing was that, while each poem was good, the whole book didn't really stand out. I don't particularly like rhyming poems, which were pretty constant. It was good, but not memorable.
August 15, 2011
The rating system on Goodreads is lacking.
Four of the poems in this slim collection I would rate five stars (Interrogations at Noon, The Bargain, Summer Storm and Unsaid), the rest I would give two. It averages out to be about three stars overall but that doesn't really mean anything.
I don't know if in five years time I would rate them the same. I've found poetry to be pretty subjective. In my case it comes down to the visual and emotional strings that the poet can pull and that depends on my brain capacity and emotional state. I don't think it's a coincidence that all four of the poems I loved were some of Mr. Gioia's shorter ones. The longer pieces were probably too much for my pea brain to take.
Four of the poems in this slim collection I would rate five stars (Interrogations at Noon, The Bargain, Summer Storm and Unsaid), the rest I would give two. It averages out to be about three stars overall but that doesn't really mean anything.
I don't know if in five years time I would rate them the same. I've found poetry to be pretty subjective. In my case it comes down to the visual and emotional strings that the poet can pull and that depends on my brain capacity and emotional state. I don't think it's a coincidence that all four of the poems I loved were some of Mr. Gioia's shorter ones. The longer pieces were probably too much for my pea brain to take.
June 4, 2014
When I started this volume last week, I was disappointed by the first dozen poems. I started over today from the beginning and found them all lovely. Strange. I don't think I know the extent to which my disposition shapes my reading. Also I don't like the style of the cover illustration.
Afterthought from Evelyn Waugh: "Elegance" is a quality in writers who recognize that "no two words are identical in meaning, sound and connotation."
Afterthought from Evelyn Waugh: "Elegance" is a quality in writers who recognize that "no two words are identical in meaning, sound and connotation."
July 5, 2007
Gioia now heads the National Endowment for the Arts, but he's also a poet. He experiments in these poems, which makes me admire him. In this collection he tries on rhyming couplets, surrealist elegy, satirical ballad, free verse translation of Seneca (!), and even includes portions of his libretto for the opera Nosferatu. Slim and tender.
January 2, 2008
Words is one of my all-time favorite poems and Long Distance sums up perfectly how it feels to be separated from someone you're in love with. Gioia's poetry is accessible and so human. This is one of my favorite books of poetry.
October 17, 2008
My bias is toward poets who are more direct in what they are saying. This work I found a mix of stunning and hard to grasp poems. Still, the poems that reached me were enough to make me want to read more of this talented poet.
May 3, 2013
Gioia's poetry exudes tenacious attention to word choice, rhyme, rhythm, and themes. While not overt, there exists an undercurrent of spiritual depth that draws the reader into the author's experience and toward self-reflection.
July 9, 2020
I discuss this book in my May 2020 Wrap-Up over on YouTube, check it out here!
December 16, 2007
This is an outstanding collection. Enough said.
July 6, 2010
Blown away by this; favorite poetry I've read since Franz Wright. I plan on getting the rest of his stuff.
February 12, 2013
Some thought-provoking pieces included in this collection.
March 22, 2013
very into form, can feel a bit preachy at times. i have started reading his latest, Pity the Beautiful and it seems much more personal
September 12, 2013
Very generous with cliches.
January 8, 2015
Because Dana Gioia was coming to speak to the Patrons of the Library, I read all of his poetry. I love it. Enough said.
Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews