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
Poetry offers a way of understanding and expressing existence that is fundamentally different from conceptual thought.
It seems to me that awakening to the full potential of what your life might be - beyond the possibilities of your own family, your own class, your own race, your own neighborhood - that is one of the great gifts that art affords.
Art is an irreplaceable way of understanding and expressing the world,
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.
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.
People have to recognize that the arts are a major industry and need to be at the table for the recovery plan, ... There is no way for these local economies to recover unless we invest in the cultural life. Culture was Louisiana's second-biggest economy, right after oil. These organizations have suffered enormous losses.
The arts need social recognition. The money will come if people think it's important.
There are some truths about life that can be expressed only as stories, or songs, or images. Art delights, instructs, consoles. It educates our emotions.
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.
Teach us the names of what we have destroyed.
What we conceal Is always more than what we dare confide. Think of the letters that we write our dead.
We offer you the landscape of your birth -- Exquisite and despoiled. We all share blame. We cannot ask forgiveness of the earth For killing what we cannot even name.
Poetry is not a creed or dogma. It is a special way of speaking and listening.
And hate the bright stillness of the noon without wind, without motion. the only other living thing a hawk, hungry for prey, suspended in the blinding, sunlit blue. And yet how gentle it seems to someone raised in a landscape short of rain- the skyline of a hill broken by no more trees than one can count, the grass, the empty sky, the wish for water.