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 More Quotes by Dana Gioia More Quotes From Dana Gioia 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 real successful art 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 stories song art 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 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 snow years Money. You don't know where it's been, but you put it where your mouth is. And it talks! Dana Gioia mouths knows Poetry offers a way of understanding and expressing existence that is fundamentally different from conceptual thought. Dana Gioia understanding poetry art 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 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 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 Poetry is not a creed or dogma. It is a special way of speaking and listening. Dana Gioia special listening way 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 race class art 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 real blessed wise Everyone enjoys stories of double lives and secret identities. Children have Superman; intellectuals have Wallace Stevens. Dana Gioia secret-identity stories children Teach us the names of what we have destroyed. Dana Gioia destroyed teach names 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 hate summer rain 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 interpretation proportion literature 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 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 losing culture Art is an irreplaceable way of understanding and expressing the world. Dana Gioia understanding world art 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 loyal speak culture
