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“As long as poets belonged to a broader class of artists and intellectuals, they centered their lives in urban bohemias, where they maintained a distrustful independence from institutions. Once poets began moving into universities, they abandoned the working-class heterogeneity of Greenwich Village and North Beach for the professional homogeneity of academia.”

Dana Gioia

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

Universe

“Old empires always appeal to modern poets more than new ones.”

Dana Gioia

"The Rise of James Fenton," http://www.danagioia.net/essays/efenton.htm published in The Dark Horse (Autumn 1999 and Summer 2000)
Essays

“Dante and Hopkins, Mozart and Palestrina, Michelangelo and El Greco, Bramante and Gaudi, have brought more souls to God than all the preachers of Texas”

Dana Gioia

29
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

God , Soul

“If Catholic Christianity does not offer a vision of existence that transcends the election cycle, if our redemption is social and our resurrection economic, then it’s time render everything up to Caesar.”

Dana Gioia

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

Time

“"Between 1945 and 1965 Catholic novelists and poets received 11 Pulitzer Prizes and 5 National Book Awards (6 NBAs if one counts O'Connor's posthumously published Complete Stories in 1972)" (18).”

Dana Gioia

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

Books

“Forty years ago, when Dylan Thomas read, he spent half the program reciting other poets' work. Hardly a self-effacing man, he was nevertheless humble before his art. Today most readings are celebrations less of poetry than of the author's ego. No wonder the audience for such events usually consists entirely of poets, would-be poets, and friends of the author.”

Dana Gioia

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

Art , Reading

“We are not as we were. Death has been our pentecost.”

Dana Gioia

"Pentecost"
Poetry, Interrogations at Noon (2001)

Death

“The second observation is that poetry is a universal human art. Despite post-modern theories of cultural relativism that assert there are no human universals, there exists a massive and compelling body of empirical data, collected and documented by anthropologists, linguists, and archeologists that demonstrates there is no human society, however isolated, that has not developed and employed poetry as a cultural practice. Most of this poetry, of course, has been oral poetry. Many of these cultures never developed writing. But the fact remains—and it is a demonstrable fact, not mere opinion—that every society has developed a special class of speech, shaped by apprehensible patterns of sound, namely, poetry”

Dana Gioia

9-10
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), Poetry as Enchantment (2015)

Art , Universe

“Poets serious about making careers in institutions understand that the criteria for success are primarily quantitative. They must publish as much as possible as quickly as possible. The slow maturation of genuine creativity looks like laziness to a committee. Wallace Stevens was forty-three when his first book appeared. Robert Frost was thirty-nine. Today these sluggards would be unemployable.”

Dana Gioia

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

Books , Understanding , Appearance , Success

“My blessed California, you are so wise.
You render death abstract, efficient, clean.
Your afterlife is only real estate,
And in his kingdom Death must stay unseen.”

Dana Gioia

"A California Requiem"
Poetry, Interrogations at Noon (2001)

Death

“Until quite recently poetry was taught badly—at least according to current academic standards. Poetry was used to teach grammar, elocution, and rhetoric. It was employed to convey history, both secular and sacred, often to instill patriotic sentiment and religious morality. Poetry was chanted in chorus at female academies. It was copied to teach cursive handwriting and calligraphy. It was memorized by wayward schoolboys as punishment. It was recited by children at public events and family gatherings. Being able to write verse was considered a social grace in both domestic and public life. Going to school meant becoming well versed.”

Dana Gioia

24
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), Poetry as Enchantment (2015)

Life , Children , School , Family

“To speak from a particular place and time is not provincialism but part of a writer’s identity.”

Dana Gioia

"Being a California Poet" http://www.danagioia.net/essays/ecalifornia.htm (1999) , from My California: Journeys by Great Writers, ed. Donna Wares (2004)
Essays

Time , Parting

“The schism between Christianity and the arts has had two profound consequences, two vast impoverishments--one for the arts world, the other for the Church. First, for the arts world, the loss of a transcendent religious vision, a refined and rigorous sense of the sacred, the breaking and discarding of the two thousand years of Christian mythos, symbolism, and tradition has left contemporary American art spiritually diminished. The shallow novelty, the low-cost nihilism, and the vague and sentimental spiritual pretensions of so much contemporary art—in every medium—are the legacy of this schism, as well as the cynicism that pervades the arts world”

Dana Gioia

26
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

World , Art , Sense , Loss

“It is time to renovate and reoccupy our own tradition”

Dana Gioia

35
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

Time

“I can’t think of better ways to learn than through pleasure and curiosity. I guess the reason these two qualities play so small a role in formal education is that they are so subjective and individual. Curiosity and delight can’t be institutionalized.Childhood and adolescence form our sensibilities. By the time I arrived in college, I had already developed a deep suspicion of all theories of art that did not originate in pleasure.”

Dana Gioia

"Lonely Impulse of Delight: One Reader's Childhood," http://www.danagioia.net/essays/elonely.htm The Southern Review (Winter 2005)
Essays

Pleasure , Education , Art , Way

“Catholic writers tend to see humanity struggling in a fallen world. They combine a longing for grace and redemption with a deep sense of human imperfection and sin. Evil exists, but the physical world is not evil. Nature is sacramental, shimmering with signs of sacred things…. Catholicism is also intrinsically communal, a notion that goes far beyond sitting at Mass with the local congregation, extending to a mystical sense of continuity between the living and the dead. Finally, there is a habit of spiritual self-scrutiny and moral examination of conscience”

Dana Gioia

10
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

World , Communication , Nature , Sense

“Tradition is not, as post-modernists maintain, a library or museum the artist plunders. It is the endless conversation between the living and the dead. Young artists enter into this conversation passionately — not merely intellectually, though study and analysis play a part. They live and breathe it. Tradition is not a public building. It is a love affair.”

Dana Gioia

"Paradigms Lost," interview with Gloria Brame, ELF: Eclectic Literary Forum (Spring 1995)
Interviews

Love , Study , Passion , Parting

“America's first great surrealist artists were named Walt Disney, Max Fleischer, and Tex Avery. Their artistic medium was cartoon animation, though we must remember that cartoons of this era were seen not only by children but by a mixed audience, consisting mainly of adults. These men took — quite literally — the principles of surrealism and turned them into mass entertainment. As Fleischer's scantily clad Betty Boop ran through a phantasmagoric underground landscape to the driving beat of Cab Calloway's "Minnie the Moocher," moviegoers of the Thirties saw surrealist dream-logic unfold more powerfully than in any experimental poem created in Greenwich Village. To this day the greatest moment of North American surrealism is probably Dumbo's drunken nightmare choreographed to the demonic oom-pah-pah of "Pink Elephants on Parade" from Walt Disney's 1941 movie. When the surrealist style was so quickly assimilated into mass-media comedy, what avant-garde poet could consider it sufficiently chic?”

Dana Gioia

"James Tate and American Surrealism," BBC Radio 3, published in Denver Quarterly (Fall 1998)
Essays

Men , Children , Dreams , Animals

“Audiences and critics acknowledge that a play or concerto gains force in great rendition. A good play may overcome bad staging. A great concerto may survive a poor soloist. But it is naturally assumed that a more accomplished performance intensifies the impact of the work. The play's text or concerto's score does not change, but the right actors and musicians help realize its full potential. Among contemporary literary critics, however, one never encounters this notion in regard to books and printing. To recognize the sensual contributions of the physical elements of a book is somehow assumed to demean the spiritual purity of the text. To notice the book itself smacks of philistinism, and to make distinctions based on paper, binding, and typography brings accusations of elitism or decadence.”

Dana Gioia

"Designing Literature: Creative Collaboration" http://www.danagioia.net/essays/ecreative.htm (1992)
Essays

Books , Nature , Change , Help

“In social terms the identification of poet with teacher is now complete. The first question one poet now asks another upon being introduced is "Where do you teach?" The problem is not that poets teach. The campus is not a bad place for a poet to work. It's just a bad place for all poets to work. Society suffers by losing the imagination and vitality that poets brought to public culture. Poetry suffers when literary standards are forced to conform with institutional ones.”

Dana Gioia

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

Imagination , Question , Problem , Suffering