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Michael Dana Gioia is an American poet and writer. He spent the first fifteen years of his career writing at night while working for General Foods Corporation. After his 1991 essay "Can Poetry Matter?" in The Atlantic generated international attention, Gioia quit business to pursue writing full-time. He served as the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts between 2003 and 2009. 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 is the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California, where he now teaches, as well as a Senior Fellow at the Trinity Forum. In December 2015 he became the California State Poet Laureate. He currently divides his time between Los Angeles and Sonoma County, California. Wikipedia  

✵ 24. December 1950
Dana Gioia photo
Dana Gioia: 80   quotes 0   likes

Dana Gioia Quotes

“Two great poets are stronger than two thousand mediocrities”

Dana Gioia

31
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

“Twisting through the thorn-thick underbrush,
scratched and exhausted, one turns suddenly
to find an unexpected waterfall,
not half a mile from the nearest road,
a spot so hard to reach that no one comes —
a hiding place, a shrine for dragonflies
and nesting jays, a sign that there is still
one piece of property that won't be owned.”

Dana Gioia

"Rough Country" http://www.danagioia.net/poems/roughcountry.htm
Poetry, The Gods of Winter (1991)

“I did not want my son remembered by uncontrolled howls of pain. My wife and I suffered more than I can express, but to make poems merely out of the agony would have been self-pitying and dishonest. My son had been my greatest joy. His birth had left me awe-struck and humble before life. He turned me from a son into a father — and allowed me to understand my own father clearly for the first time. If I mourned him, I also wanted to preserve the joyful mystery of his existence. The sorrow could not be adequately appreciated without also expressing the joy and wonder.”

Dana Gioia

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

Life , Pain , Birth , Understanding

“The Catholic writer really needs only three things to succeed: faith, hope and ingenuity”

Dana Gioia

31
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

Faith , Hope

“Being so deeply rooted in one place and culture allows a genuine writer to experiment wildly with the material without ever losing touch with its essence.”

Dana Gioia

"The Most Unfashionable Poet Now Alive: Charles Causley," http://www.danagioia.net/essays/ecausley.htm published in The Dark Horse (Summer 1997 and Spring 1998)
Essays

“Like the intricately rational web of theology woven around the irrational mysteries of faith, the sober explanations of institutions for hoarding literary relics seem like elegant post-factum justifications for what is essentially a sense of sacred awe. An institution of learning seeks significant manuscripts because they possess qualities that scholarship cannot entirely reproduce — an authentic, holistic connection with the great writers of the past. It is not the intellectual content of the manuscript that is important but its material presence — ink spots, tobacco stains, pinworm holes, and foxing included.”

Dana Gioia

"The Magical Value of Manuscripts," http://www.danagioia.net/essays/ehop.htm The Hudson Review (Spring 1996); later published as an introduction to The Hand of the Poet: Poems and Papers in Manuscript, ed. Rodney Phillips (1997)
Essays

Faith , Sense , Learning , Past

“For thousands of years, poetry was taught badly, and consequently it was immensely popular”

Dana Gioia

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

“The marketplace does only one thing — it puts a price on everything.The role of culture, however, must go beyond economics. It is not focused on the price of things, but on their value. And, above all, culture should tell us what is beyond price, including what does not belong in the marketplace. A culture should also provide some cogent view of the good life beyond mass accumulation. In this respect, our culture is failing us.”

Dana Gioia

Commencement speech http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2007/june20/gradtrans-062007.html, Stanford University (2007-06-17)
Speeches and lectures

Life

“Once an author finishes a poem, he becomes merely another reader. I may remember what I intended to put into a text, but what matters is what a reader actually finds there — which is usually something both more and less than the poet planned.”

Dana Gioia

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

“Even if great poetry continues to be written, it has retreated from the center of literary life. Though supported by a loyal coterie, poetry has lost the confidence that it speaks to and for the general culture.”

Dana Gioia

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

Life , Confidence , Support

“Paradoxically, the simpler poetry is, the more difficult it becomes for a critic to discuss intelligently. Trained to explicate, the critic often loses the ability to evaluate literature outside the critical act. A work is good only in proportion to the richness and complexity of interpretations it provokes.”

Dana Gioia

"The Anonymity of the Regional Poet: Ted Kooser," from Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture (1992)
Essays

Intelligence , Literature , Training

“Like gladiator games and pyramid building, opera has always been a gloriously money-losing proposition. It is the most extravagant of arts, requiring the constant support of kings, dictators, plutocrats, and town councils. Box-office success is no solution. San Francisco Opera loses money at every sold-out performance. Sane business practices simply don’t suffice. Composer Richard Wagner’s patron, King Ludwig II of Bavaria, was the ideal operatic angel — very rich and certifiably insane. Mel Brooks’ shyster producer Max Bialystock need not have mounted Springtime for Hitler to score a surefire loss. Aida would have done just fine.”

Dana Gioia

"Drama at the Opera House," http://www.danagioia.net/essays/eoperahouse.htm San Francisco Magazine (September 2001)
Essays

Money , Art , Angels , Game

“Pop music provides useful perspective on Plato’s association of poetry with madness. There was something dangerously irrational in poetry that worried the philosopher. It wasn’t the semantic content but the visceral power of the sound and rhythm. Poetry compellingly communicates feelings that lie beyond or beneath rational discourse. The physicality of poetic speech separates it from the conceptual language of philosophy”

Dana Gioia

12
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), Poetry as Enchantment (2015)

Lie , Music , Feeling , Communication

“Poetry is not a branch of analytical philosophy. It is a primal, holistic kind of human communication. A poet needs innocence as much as knowledge, emotion as much as intelligence, vulnerability as much as rigor. A poet can become too smart for his or her own good and forget the childlike pleasures of sound and story, sense, and sensuality that poetry should provide. The challenge for a writer is to master the medium of poetry without losing that inner innocence.”

Dana Gioia

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

Pleasure , Intelligence , Communication , Knowledge

“Money. You don't know where it's been,
but you put it where your mouth is.
And it talks.”

Dana Gioia

"Money" http://www.danagioia.net/poems/money.htm
Poetry, The Gods of Winter (1991)

Money