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Dana Gioia

80 quotes

“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 (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Money. You don't know where it's been, but you put it where your mouth is. And it talks.”
Dana Gioia (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The music that of common speech but slanted so that each detail sounds unexpected as a sharp inserted in a simple scale.”
Dana Gioia (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are not as we were. Death has been our pentecost.”
Dana Gioia (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We lived in places that we never knew. We could not name the birds perched on our sill, Or see the trees we cut down for our view. What we possessed we always chose to kill."We claimed the earth but did not hear her claim, And when we died, they laid us on her breast, But she refuses us — until we earn Forgiveness from the lives we dispossessed.”
Dana Gioia (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Teach us the names of what we have destroyed.”
Dana Gioia (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What we conceal Is always more than what we dare confide. Think of the letters that we write our dead.”
Dana Gioia (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1950) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Anonymity of the Regional Poet: Ted Kooser," from Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture (1992)
“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 (born 1950) first seen 1993 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Notes Toward a New Bohemia," 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)
“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 (born 1950) first seen 1997 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Most Unfashionable Poet Now Alive: Charles Causley," published in The Dark Horse (Summer 1997 and Spring 1998)
“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 (born 1950) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: James Tate and American Surrealism," BBC Radio 3, published in Denver Quarterly (Fall 1998)
“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 (born 1950) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Fallen Western Star," Denver Quarterly (Fall 1998)
“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 (born 1950) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Fallen Western Star," Denver Quarterly (Fall 1998)
“To speak from a particular place and time is not provincialism but part of a writer’s identity.”
Dana Gioia (born 1950) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Being a California Poet" (1999) , from My California: Journeys by Great Writers, ed. Donna Wares (2004)
“Old empires always appeal to modern poets more than new ones.”
Dana Gioia (born 1950) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Rise of James Fenton," published in The Dark Horse (Autumn 1999 and Summer 2000)
“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 (born 1950) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Lonely Impulse of Delight: One Reader's Childhood," The Southern Review (Winter 2005)
“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 (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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" (10).”
Dana Gioia (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If Catholic literature has a central theme, it is the difficult journey of the sinner toward redemption" (14).”
Dana Gioia (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If the soul of Roman Catholicism is to be found in partisan politics, then it's probably time to shutter up the chapel" (24).”
Dana Gioia (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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" (27).”
Dana Gioia (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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" (28).”
Dana Gioia (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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” (29).”
Dana Gioia (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We necessarily bring the whole of our hairy and heavy humanity to worship” (29).”
Dana Gioia (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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?” (30).”
Dana Gioia (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Two great poets are stronger than two thousand mediocrities” (31).”
Dana Gioia (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Catholic writer really needs only three things to succeed: faith, hope and ingenuity" (31).”
Dana Gioia (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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." (34).”
Dana Gioia (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The writer needs good works—good literary ones” (33).”
Dana Gioia (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is time to renovate and reoccupy our own tradition" (35).”
Dana Gioia (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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" (10).”
Dana Gioia (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source