Dana Gioia: Trending quotes (page 3)

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“The great and present danger to American literature is the growing homogeneity of our writers, especially the younger generation. Often raised in several places in no specific cultural or religious community, educated with no deep connection to a region, history, or tradition, and now employed mostly in academia, the American writer is becoming as standardized as the American car--functional, streamlined, and increasingly interchangeable”

Dana Gioia

27
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

Education , Cars , History , Communication

“The music that of common speech
but slanted so that each detail
sounds unexpected as a sharp
inserted in a simple scale.”

Dana Gioia

"The Next Poem" http://www.danagioia.net/poems/thenextpoem.htm
Poetry, The Gods of Winter (1991)

Music

“Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot
name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica.
To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper —
metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa
carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.”

Dana Gioia

"Words" http://www.danagioia.net/poems/words.htm
Poetry, Interrogations at Noon (2001)

Reading

“Poetry is not a creed or dogma. It is a special way of speaking and listening.”

Dana Gioia

"Paradigms Lost," interview with Gloria Brame http://www.danagioia.net/about/brame.htm, ELF: Eclectic Literary Forum (Spring 1995)
Interviews

Way

“"A New York leftist and an Alabama Pentecostal may not agree on much, but too often they share a dislike of Catholics" (22).”

Dana Gioia

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

“In an age of global standardization, regional voices also remind both writer and reader that no life is lived generically. If the purpose of literature is truly, as the ancients insisted, to instruct and delight, then what better to understand and enjoy than the here and the now?”

Dana Gioia

"Fallen Western Star," Denver Quarterly (Fall 1998)
Essays

Life , Age , Literature , Understanding

“Life is experienced holistically with sensations pouring in through every physical and mental organ of perception. Art exists embodied in physical elements—especially meticulously calibrated aspects of sight and sound—which scholarly explication can illuminate but never fully replace. However conceptually incoherent and subjectively emotional, the amateur response to poetry comes closer to the larger human purposes of the art—which is to awaken, amplify, and refine the sense of being alive—than does critical commentary”

Dana Gioia

19
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), Poetry as Enchantment (2015)

Life , Art , Sense

“Society has already told us that poetry is dead. Let's build a funeral pyre out of the desiccated conventions piled around us and watch the ancient, spangle-feathered, unkillable phoenix rise from the ashes.”

Dana Gioia

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

Dead

“I personally regret the shift in literary study from reading primary texts to reading critical and theoretical texts. The major problem today among students is that they simply have not read enough literature. Consequently they do not have the necessary background to take a critical attitude towards literary theory. One needs to test every abstraction against experience.”

Dana Gioia

Interview with Robert McPhillips http://www.danagioia.net/about/mcphillips.htm (December 1991), published in Verse (Summer 1992)
Interviews

Literature , Problem , Study , Reading

“Poetry is an art form that demands heightened attention and retention. It both invites and rewards more intense involvement than we normally give to other kinds of speech. Poetic technique, therefore, is never esoteric but eminently practical. It serves at least two purposes. First, it announces that a poem differs from other kinds of speech, that it requires the audience's special attention. A poem begins by attracting our attention through its sound, shape, typography, syntax, texture, or tone. Second, the technique maintains the audience's involvement. All poetic form is a way of keeping the audience's attention beyond what ordinary language requires. Meter, for example, creates a gentle trance state in the auditor. Since poetry is more intense, condensed, and expressive than ordinary language, it needs these techniques to carry the burden of its message.”

Dana Gioia

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

Art , Way

“We necessarily bring the whole of our hairy and heavy humanity to worship”

Dana Gioia

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

“The retreat of the nation's largest cultural minority from literary discourse does not make art healthier. Instead, it weakens the dialectic of cultural development. It makes American literature less diverse, less vital, and less representative”

Dana Gioia

28
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

Art , Literature

“Poems should be memorized, recited, and performed. The sheer joy of the art must be emphasized. The pleasure of performance is what first attracts children to poetry, the sensual excitement of speaking and hearing the words of the poem. Performance was also the teaching technique that kept poetry vital for centuries. Maybe it also holds the key to poetry's future.”

Dana Gioia

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

Children , Pleasure , Art , Future

“The reviewers of fifty years ago knew that their primary loyalty must lie not with their fellow poets or publishers but with the reader. Consequently they reported their reactions with scrupulous honesty even when their opinions might lose them literary allies and writing assignments. In discussing new poetry they addressed a wide community of educated readers. Without talking down to their audience, they cultivated a public idiom. Prizing clarity and accessibility they avoided specialist jargon and pedantic displays of scholarship. They also tried, as serious intellectuals should but specialists often do not, to relate what was happening in poetry to social, political, and artistic trends. They charged modern poetry with cultural importance and made it the focal point of their intellectual discourse.”

Dana Gioia

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

Lie , Education , Communication , Loyalty

“The engines that have driven poetry's institutional success — the explosion of academic writing programs, the proliferation of subsidized magazines and presses, the emergence of a creative-writing career track, and the migration of American literary culture to the university — have unwittingly contributed to its disappearance from public view.”

Dana Gioia

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

Universe , Success

“The Catholic writer understands the necessary relationship between truth and beauty, which is not mere social convention or cultural accident but an essential form of human knowledge--intuitive, holistic, and experiential. Art is a form of knowing--distinct and legitimate--rooted in feeling and delight--that discovers, in the words of Jacques Maritain, "The splendor of the secrets of being radiating into intelligence.”

Dana Gioia

34
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

Truth , Secret , Beauty , Art

“The time has probably come to admit that the notion of an avant-garde is no longer useful in discussing contemporary literature. How can there be an avant-garde without a mainstream? Avant-garde de quoi? one must ask. Establishment institutions — universities, museums, foundations, commercial galleries, even the state — have embraced the idea of experimental art for so long that the avant-garde is now a safely domesticated concept, just another traditional style.”

Dana Gioia

"Notes Toward a New Bohemia," http://www.danagioia.net/essays/ebohemia.htm transcript of a 1993 talk at the Poet's House, New York City, published in Poetry Flash (November/December 1993) and revised for publication in Grantmakers in the Arts (Spring 1994)
Essays

Art , Literature , Idea , Universe

“The aim of poetry—in this primal and primary sense as enchantment—is to awaken us to a fuller sense of our own humanity in both its social and individual aspects. Poetry offers a way of understanding and expressing existence that is fundamentally different from conceptual thought”

Dana Gioia

22
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), Poetry as Enchantment (2015)

Way , Understanding , Sense

“There is a special irony that this disappearance [of Catholic artists visibility despite Catholics constituting one-quarter of the US population] has occurred during a period when celebrating cultural diversity has become an explicit goal across the American arts. Some kinds of diversity are evidently more equal than others.”

Dana Gioia

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

Art

“What is the defining difference between passive and active citizens? Curiously, it isn't income, geography, or even education. It depends on whether or not they read for pleasure and participate in the arts. These cultural activities seem to awaken a heightened sense of individual awareness and social responsibility.”

Dana Gioia

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

Pleasure , Education , Art , Sense