Dana Gioia Quotes
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.
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.
Everyone enjoys stories of double lives and secret identities. Children have Superman; intellectuals have Wallace Stevens.
Poetry offers a way of understanding and expressing existence that is fundamentally different from conceptual thought.
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.
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.
The music that of common speech but slanted so that each detail sounds unexpected as a sharp inserted in a simple scale.
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.
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.
To speak from a particular place and time is not provincialism but part of a writer's identity.
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.
What we conceal Is always more than what we dare confide. Think of the letters that we write our dead.
