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
Through Great American Voices, the NEA is building bridges between the military and arts community, ... This tour gives singers a chance to perform for new audiences and brings great music in live performance to military families.
Art is an irreplaceable way of understanding and expressing the world,
Everyone enjoys stories of double lives and secret identities. Children have Superman; intellectuals have Wallace Stevens.
What we conceal Is always more than what we dare confide. Think of the letters that we write our dead.
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.
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.
We are not as we were. Death has been our pentecost.
The music that of common speech but slanted so that each detail sounds unexpected as a sharp inserted in a simple scale.
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.
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.
Teach us the names of what we have destroyed.
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?
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.
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.