Dana Gioia: Trending quotes (page 2)

“If Catholic literature has a central theme, it is the difficult journey of the sinner toward redemption”

Dana Gioia

14
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

Literature

“What does an instinctively popular poet do in contemporary America, where serious poetry is no longer a popular art? The public whose values and sensibility he celebrates is unaware of his existence. Indeed, even if they were aware of his poetry, they would feel no need to approach it. Cut off from his proper audience, this poet feels little sympathy with the specialized minority readership that now sustains poetry either as a highly sophisticated verbal game or secular religion. His sensibility shows little similarity to theirs except for the common interest in poetry. And so the popular poet usually leads a marginal existence in literary life. His fellow poets look on him as an anomaly or an anachronism. Reviewers find him eminently unnewsworthy. Publishers see little prestige attached to printing his work. Critics, who have been trained to celebrate complexity, consider him an amiable simpleton.”

Dana Gioia

"The Anonymity of the Regional Poet: Ted Kooser" http://www.danagioia.net/essays/ekooser.htm, from Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture (1992)
Essays

Life , Religion , Art , Feeling

“Most editors run poems and poetry reviews the way a prosperous Montana rancher might keep a few buffalo around — not to eat the endangered creatures but to display them for tradition's sake.”

Dana Gioia

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

Way

“"Sixty years ago Catholics played a prominent, prestigious, and irreplaceable part in American literary culture…They included established fiction writers--Flannery O'Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Walker Percy, J. F. Powers, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Horgan, Jack Kerouac, Julien Green, Pietro di Donato, Hisaye Yamamoto, Edwin O'Connor, Henry Morton Robinson, and Caroline Gordon. (Sociologist Father Andrew Greeley had yet to try his formidable hand at fiction.)…also science fiction and detective writers such as Anthony Boucher, Donald Westlake, August Delerth, and Walter Miller, Jr."…in American poetry…Allen Tate, Robert Lowell, Robert Fitzgerald, Kenneth Rexroth, John Berryman, Isabella Gardner, Phyllis McGinley, Claude McKay, Dunstan Thompson, John Frederick Nims, Brother Antoninus (William Everson), Thomas Merton, Josephine Jacobsen, and the Berrigan brothers, Ted and Daniel…. There were even Catholic haiku poets, notably Raymond Roseliep and Nick Virgilio" (15-16).”

Dana Gioia

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

Science , Parting

“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.”

Dana Gioia

"The Litany" http://www.danagioia.net/poems/litany.htm
Poetry, Interrogations at Noon (2001)

Love , Loss , Time , Waiting

“I want a poetry that can learn as much from popular culture as from serious culture. A poetry that seeks the pleasure and emotionality of the popular arts without losing the precision, concentration, and depth that characterize high art. I want a literature that addresses a diverse audience distinguished for its intelligence, curiosity, and imagination rather than its professional credentials. I want a poetry that risks speaking to the fullness of our humanity, to our emotions as well as to our intellect, to our senses as well as our imagination and intuition. Finally I hope for a more sensual and physical art — closer to music, film, and painting than to philosophy or literary theory. Contemporary American literary culture has privileged the mind over the body. The soul has become embarrassed by the senses. Responding to poetry has become an exercise mainly in interpretation and analysis. Although poetry contains some of the most complex and sophisticated perceptions ever written down, it remains an essentially physical art tied to our senses of sound and sight. Yet, contemporary literary criticism consistently ignores the sheer sensuality of poetry and devotes its considerable energy to abstracting it into pure intellectualization. Intelligence is an irreplaceable element of poetry, but it needs to be vividly embodied in the physicality of language. We must — as artists, critics, and teachers — reclaim the essential sensuality of poetry. The art does not belong to apes or angels, but to us. We deserve art that speaks to us as complete human beings. Why settle for anything less?”

Dana Gioia

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

Pleasure , Hope , Art , Music

“How many voices have escaped you until now,
the venting furnace, the floorboards underfoot,
the steady accusations of the clock
numbering the minutes no one will mark.
The terrible clarity this moment brings,
the useless insight, the unbroken dark.”

Dana Gioia

"Insomnia" http://www.danagioia.net/poems/insomnia.htm
Poetry, The Daily Horoscope (1986)

“Teachers and writers share a responsibility to create the next generation of readers. We need to create and cultivate in our classrooms a dialectic of intellect and intuition, of mental attention and sensory engagement. In poetry, intellectual-ity without physicality becomes dull and barren, just as intuition untethered by intellect quickly becomes sloppy and subjective. We need to augment methodology with magic”

Dana Gioia

36
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), Poetry as Enchantment (2015)

Teachers

“Teach us the names of what we have destroyed.”

Dana Gioia

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

“The purpose of arts education is not to produce more artists, though that is a byproduct. The real purpose of arts education is to create complete human beings capable of leading successful and productive lives in a free society.”

Dana Gioia

Commencement speech, Stanford University (2007-06-17)
Speeches and lectures

Education , Art , Success

“When poetry loses its ability to enchant, it shrinks into what is just an elaborate form of argumentation. When verse casts its particular spell, it becomes the most evocative form of language.”

Dana Gioia

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

“Current Catholic worship often ignores the essential connection between truth and beauty, body and soul, at the center of the Catholic worldview. The Church requires that we be faithful, but must we also be deaf, dumb, and blind? I deserve to suffer for my sins, but must so much of that punishment take place in church?”

Dana Gioia

30
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

Truth , Faith , Beauty , Soul

“Raw artistic talent is abundant. What is truly rare are the cultural circumstances, attitudes, and institutions to develop and perfect it. Few American cities have ever managed to foster a vibrant literary milieu of international significance — perhaps only Boston, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. American literature has most often been an affair of isolated genius or small coterie.”

Dana Gioia

"Fallen Western Star," http://www.danagioia.net/essays/ewestern.htm Denver Quarterly (Fall 1998)
Essays

Literature , Perfection

“Third and finally, poetry originated as a form of vocal music. It began as a performative and auditory medium, linked to music and dance and associated with civic ceremony, religious ritual, and magic. (The earliest poetry almost certainly served a shamanistic function.) Most aboriginal cultures did not distinguish poetry from song because the arts were so interrelated as to be porous. Nor did the classical Greek or Chinese cultures two or three millennia ago differentiate poetry from song”

Dana Gioia

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

Art , Music , Dance

“If the soul of Roman Catholicism is to be found in partisan politics, then it's probably time to shutter up the chapel”

Dana Gioia

24
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

Soul , Time

“In America, the term younger poet is applied with chivalric liberality. It can be used to describe anyone not yet collecting a Social Security pension.”

Dana Gioia

"James Tate and American Surrealism," http://www.danagioia.net/essays/etate.htm BBC Radio 3, published in Denver Quarterly (Fall 1998)
Essays

“In oral culture, there is no separation between the poet and the poem. The author is a performer who vocalizes the words. Creation and performance are inseparably linked. Without writing, a ‘text’ has no existence outside the auditory performance”

Dana Gioia

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

“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.”

Dana Gioia

"Homage to Valerio Magrelli" (After the Italian of Valerio Magrelli), vi
Poetry, Interrogations at Noon (2001)

Thinking

“Several dozen journals now exist that print only verse. They don't publish literary reviews, just page after page of freshly minted poems. The heart sinks to see so many poems crammed so tightly together, like downcast immigrants in steerage. One can easily miss a radiant poem amid the many lackluster ones. It takes tremendous effort to read these small magazines with openness and attention. Few people bother, generally not even the magazines' contributors. The indifference to poetry in the mass media has created a monster of the opposite kind — journals that love poetry not wisely but too well.”

Dana Gioia

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

Love , People , Effort , Reading

“Poetry is the art of using words charged with their utmost meaning. A society whose intellectual leaders lose the skill to shape, appreciate, and understand the power of language will become the slaves of those who retain it — be they politicians, preachers, copywriters, or newscasters.”

Dana Gioia

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

Art , Understanding