Dana Gioia

The poem climaxes with Ortiz's murder by a disgruntled and racist cowboy around 1910.

At the end of the poem, Gioia describes how his widowed great-grandmother watched Gioia's grandfather and great-uncle ride away to become cowboys themselves in order to support the family.

Gioia first heard the story from his grandfather as a ten-year-old child and later confirmed it with the assistance of the Wyoming State Librarian.

Michael Dana Gioia was born in Hawthorne, California.

His father, Michael Gioia, was a Sicilian immigrant who worked as a cab driver and later as a chauffeur.

Gioia's "tightly knit Sicilian family" lived together in the same triplex, spoke to each other almost exclusively in Sicilian dialect, and, "rarely socialized with anyone who wasn't related".

His mother, Dorothy Ortiz, worked as an operator for the phone company.

Ortiz had been "born in Hawthorne of mainly Mexican stock" but "had to become more Italian than the Italians to fit in."

Michael Dana Gioia (born December 24, 1950) is an American poet, literary critic, literary translator, and essayist.

In 1956, after Gioia's maternal uncle, "an old-style proletarian intellectual", former member of the American Communist Party, and Catholic convert named Theodore Ortiz, died in an airplane crash, Dorothy Ortiz Gioia inherited her brother's "exceptional library of books and records."

Gioia recalled, "So I grew up in a house filled with books in five or six different languages, musical scores, art books, and recordings. Even though my parents took no interest in these things, they kept them out of a sense of family duty. This extraordinary library had a marked influence on my life."

Gioia has described the working class Los Angeles of his childhood, as completely removed from Hollywood "glitz and glamor", and instead "quite old fashioned, very European, and deeply Catholic. No, 'European' is the wrong word. Very Latin. The Sicilians blended very well into the existing Mexican culture."

In 1969, Gioia received a scholarship to study music at Stanford University.

At Stanford, Gioia experienced the culture shock "of meeting the children of America's ruling class. It took me years to sort out my own reactions."

Gioia recalls, that he "was simultaneously impressed and repelled" by fellow students from wealthy families.

Gioia also recalls, "I was also naively astonished by how little their education meant to them."

He later recalled, "I came to Stanford planning to be a composer. After a short time with the Stanford Music Department, however, my passion for music was frustrated. I wanted to compose tonal music, but my teachers believed that tonality was a dead tradition."

Owing to his frustration, Gioia arranged to spend his sophomore year studying classical music and the German language and literature in Vienna.

Since the early 1980s, Gioia has been considered part of the highly controversial and countercultural literary movements within American poetry known as New Formalism, which advocates the continued writing of poetry in rhyme and meter, and New Narrative, which advocates the telling of non-autobiographical stories.

Gioia has also argued in favor of a return to the past tradition of poetry translators replicating the rhythm and verse structure of the original poem.

Gioia helped renew the popularity of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the rediscovery of John Allan Wyeth.

He also co-founded the annual West Chester University Poetry Conference, which has run annually since 1995.

At the request of U.S. President George W. Bush, Gioia served between 2003 and 2009 as the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).

In November 2006, Business Week magazine profiled Gioia as "The Man Who Saved the NEA".

Five years after Gioia left office, The Washington Post referred to him as one of "two of the NEA's strongest leaders".

Gioia is the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California and a Senior Fellow at the Trinity Forum.

On June 17, 2007, while giving a now iconic commencement address at Stanford University, Gioia quipped, "Although I have two degrees from Stanford, I still feel a bit like an interloper on this exquisitely beautiful campus. A person never really escapes his or her childhood. At heart I'm still a working-class kid — half Italian, half Mexican — from L.A., or more precisely from Hawthorne, a city that most of this audience knows only as the setting of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown — two films that capture the ineffable charm of my hometown."

Gioia attended parochial school at St. Joseph's Church in Hawthorne.

He has expressed gratitude for the classical education, rooted in both medieval scholasticism and renaissance humanism, which he received there from the Sisters of Providence of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods and which continued at Junipero Serra High School in Gardena.

Gioia recalls, "In my Catholic high school the Marianist brothers drilled us relentlessly in Latin and theology. We worked our way through most of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas's arguments. We also read Horace, Catullus, Virgil, and Ovid."

Despite the bawdiness of their content, the curriculum of the Marianist Brothers also used the Medieval Latin poetry of the Goliards as a further means of instruction.

Gioia credits the classical education he received with enabling him to become the first person in his family to go to college.

In December 2015, he became the California State Poet Laureate.

Gioia has published five books of poetry and three volumes of literary criticism as well as opera libretti, song cycles, translations, and over two dozen literary anthologies.

Gioia's poetry has been anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, The Oxford Book of American Poetry, and several other anthologies.

His poetry has been translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Chinese, and Arabic.

Gioia published translations of poets such as Eugenio Montale and Seneca the Younger.

In his cowboy poem, The Ballad of Jesus Ortiz, Gioia describes how his maternal great-grandfather, Jesus "Jake" Ortiz, a Mexican immigrant from Sonora, worked as a cow-puncher in the Old West before settling down, getting married, and working as a saloon keeper in Lost Cabin, Wyoming.

In a 2019 interview, Gioia described his maternal grandfather as "a hard-drinking and temperamental man," and explained that Dorothy Ortiz "left home in her mid-teens to escape his violent outbursts."

Gioia's younger brother is jazz and blues historian Ted Gioia.