Dana Gioia
Dana Gioia
Michael Dana Gioiais 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 also served as the chairman of the National Endowment for the Artsbetween 2003 and 2009. Gioia has published five books of poetry and three volumes of literary criticism as well as opera libretti,...
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth24 December 1950
CityHawthorne, CA
art understanding world
Art is an irreplaceable way of understanding and expressing the world,
pentecost has-beens
We are not as we were. Death has been our pentecost.
punishment dumb soul
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?
dark voice unbroken
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.
mouths knows
Money. You don't know where it's been, but you put it where your mouth is. And it talks!
along art associates deeply jazz native rest truly
Jazz is one of the great, truly native American art forms. Along with the movies, it's probably the art that the rest of the world associates most deeply with America.
audience center confidence continues general great half literary lost loyal past poetry readership speaks specialist steadily supported though
Over the past half century, as American poetry's specialist audience has steadily expanded, its general readership has declined. 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.
children secret-identity stories
Everyone enjoys stories of double lives and secret identities. Children have Superman; intellectuals have Wallace Stevens.
cutting views names
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.
wise real blessed
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.
prayer loss past
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.
america poet social
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.
art apology poetry
Poetry speaks most effectively and inclusively (whether in free or formal verse) when it recognizes its connection - without apology - to its musical and ritualistic origins.
dragonflies pieces half
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.