Dana Gioia is a poet and critic who served for six years as the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. He has just accepted a chair in poetry at the University of Southern California. His new book of poems, Pity the Beautiful, will be published in May.
All afternoon my brothers and I have worked in the orchard, Digging this hole, laying you into it, carefully packing the soil. Rain blackened the horizon, but cold winds kept it over the Pacific, And the sky above us stayed the dull gray Of an old year coming to an...
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