Dana Gioia Quotes

• 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

  5175

• We are not as we were. Death has been our pentecost.

  Dana Gioia

  Pentecost   Has Beens  

  Dana Gioia (2016). “99 Poems: New & Selected”, p.67, Macmillan

  4244

• 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

  2725

• 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

  946

• 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  

  5078

• 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.

  3284

• 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.

  2259

• 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.

  4122

• 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

  2250

• 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.

  2128

• 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.

  Dana Gioia

  Art   Apology   Poetry  

  4896

• 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

  2918

• 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

  America   Poet   Social  

  "James Tate and American Surrealism". Denver Quarterly, Fall 1998.

  540

• 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.

  5057

• The new year always brings us what we want Simply by bringing us along—to 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

  1975

• 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

  435

• 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.

  981

• 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

  4161

• 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

  261

• Old empires always appeal to modern poets more than new ones.

  Dana Gioia

  Empires   Poet   Modern  

  Dana Gioia (2003). “Barrier of a common language: an American looks at contemporary British poetry”, Univ of Michigan Pr

  2565

• 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.

  3409

• Teach us the names of what we have destroyed.

  Dana Gioia

  Names   Teach   Destroyed  

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

  3045

• 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  

  3380

• 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

  815

• 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

  Essence   Culture   Losing  

  Dana Gioia (2003). “Barrier of a common language: an American looks at contemporary British poetry”, Univ of Michigan Pr

  2615

• The music that of common speech but slanted so that each detail sounds unexpected as a sharp inserted in a simple scale.

  Dana Gioia

  Simple   Sound   Details  

  Dana Gioia (2016). “99 Poems: New & Selected”, p.92, Macmillan

  1085

• 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

  1065

• 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

  1540

• 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.

  2993

• 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

  4490

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