Dana Gioia Quotes

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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.

Dana Gioia

Art, Real, Successful

Commencement speech, Stanford University, June 17, 2007.

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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.

Dana Gioia

Song, Art, Stories

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Art is an irreplaceable way of understanding and expressing the world.

Dana Gioia

Art, Understanding, World

Dana Gioia's commencement address at Stanford University, news.stanford.edu. June 17, 2007.

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

Dana Gioia

Mouths, Knows

Dana Gioia (2016). “99 Poems: New & Selected”, p.91, Macmillan

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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

What Matters, May, Remember

"Paradigms Lost", interview with Gloria Brame, ELF: Eclectic Literary Forum, Spring 1995.

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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

Dragonflies, Pieces, Half

Dana Gioia (2016). “99 Poems: New & Selected”, p.47, Macmillan

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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.

Dana Gioia

Art, Race, Class

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Everyone enjoys stories of double lives and secret identities. Children have Superman; intellectuals have Wallace Stevens.

Dana Gioia

Children, Secret Identity, Stories

Dana Gioia (2002). “Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture”, Graywolf Pr

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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?

Dana Gioia

Punishment, Catholic, Dumb

"The Catholic Writer Today". www.firstthings.com. December 2013.

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Teach us the names of what we have destroyed.

Dana Gioia

Names, Teach, Destroyed

Dana Gioia (2016). “99 Poems: New & Selected”, p.50, Macmillan

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Poetry offers a way of understanding and expressing existence that is fundamentally different from conceptual thought.

Dana Gioia

Art, Poetry, Understanding

"Poetry as Enchantment". 20th anniversary issue of The Dark Horse, www.thedarkhorsemagazine.com. Summer 2015.

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Poetry is not a creed or dogma. It is a special way of speaking and listening.

Dana Gioia

Listening, Special, Way

"Paradigms Lost", interview with Gloria Brame, ELF: Eclectic Literary Forum, Spring 1995.

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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

Prayer, Loss, Past

Dana Gioia (2016). “99 Poems: New & Selected”, p.65, Graywolf Press

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The new year always brings us what we want Simply by bringing us alongto see A calendar with every day uncrossed, A field of snow without a single footprint.

Dana Gioia

New Year, Years, Snow

Dana Gioia (2016). “99 Poems: New & Selected”, p.25, Macmillan

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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

Cousin, Real, Names

Dana Gioia (2016). “99 Poems: New & Selected”, p.22, Macmillan

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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

Cutting, Views, Names

Dana Gioia (2016). “99 Poems: New & Selected”, p.49, Macmillan

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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.

Dana Gioia

Names, Earth, Landscape

Dana Gioia (2016). “99 Poems: New & Selected”, p.50, Macmillan

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What we conceal Is always more than what we dare confide. Think of the letters that we write our dead.

Dana Gioia

Writing, Thinking, Letters

Dana Gioia (2016). “99 Poems: New & Selected”, p.70, Macmillan

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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

Wise, Real, Blessed

Dana Gioia (2016). “99 Poems: New & Selected”, p.49, Macmillan

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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.

Dana Gioia

Summer, Hate, Rain

Dana Gioia (2016). “99 Poems: New & Selected”, p.35, Macmillan

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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

Literature, Proportion, Interpretation

Dana Gioia (2002). “Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture”, Graywolf Pr

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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

Culture, Loyal, Speak

Dana Gioia (2002). “Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture”, Graywolf Pr

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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

Dark, Voice, Unbroken

Dana Gioia (2016). “99 Poems: New & Selected”, p.14, Macmillan

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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

Voice, Age, Purpose

"Fallen Western Star". Denver Quarterly, Fall 1998.

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To speak from a particular place and time is not provincialism but part of a writer's identity.

Dana Gioia

Identity, Speak, Particular

"My California: Journeys by Great Writers". Book edited by Donna Wares, 1999.

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Born: December 24, 1950
Occupation: Poet
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