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
voice age delight
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 ?
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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.
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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.
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.
new-year years snow
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.
mouths knows
Money. You don't know where it's been, but you put it where your mouth is. And it talks!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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America can no longer take active and engaged literacy for granted.
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Jazz may well be considered America's most treasured and most influential export, ... From its earliest days until now it has continued to grow creatively -- yet the people who have given us this art form deserve far greater recognition.
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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.
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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.