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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

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Dana Gioia
Age: 73
Born: 1950
Born: December 24
Journalist
Poet
Hawthorne
California
Dana Gioia
Gioia
Dana
Michael Dana Gioia
Whether
Verses
Free
Apology
Speak
Formal
Art
Speaks
Ritualistic
Without
Connection
Origins
Connections
Recognizes
Musical
Verse
Poetry
Effectively

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Everyone enjoys stories of double lives and secret identities. Children have Superman intellectuals have Wallace Stevens.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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The music that of common speech but slanted so that each detail sounds unexpected as a sharp inserted in a simple scale.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Money. You don't know where it's been, but you put it where your mouth is. And it talks!
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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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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.
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Teach us the names of what we have destroyed.
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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.
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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.
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What we conceal Is always more than what we dare confide. Think of the letters that we write our dead.
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To speak from a particular place and time is not provincialism but part of a writer's identity.
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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.
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Poetry offers a way of understanding and expressing existence that is fundamentally different from conceptual thought.
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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.
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Poetry is not a creed or dogma. It is a special way of speaking and listening.
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