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Michael Dana Gioia ist ein US-amerikanischer Lyriker, Essayist und Literaturkritiker.

Gioia studierte Literatur an der Stanford University und bis 1975 vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft bei Robert Fitzgerald und Elizabeth Bishop an der Harvard University 1977 erwarb er an der Stanford University den Grad eines Master of Business Administration. Danach begann er bei General Foods in White Plains zu arbeiten und stieg dort bis zum Vizepräsidenten auf.

Bereits in dieser Zeit veröffentlichte er Gedichte und Essays in Zeitschriften, insbesondere im The New Yorker und in der The Hudson Review. Sein erster Gedichtband Daily Horoscope erschien 1986. 1991 erschien im The Atlantic Monthley sein Essay Can Poetry Matter. Dieser war titelgebend für seine erste Essaysammlung Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture, die 1992 unter den Finalisten des National Book Critics Award für Kritiken war. Ebenfalls 1991 erschien sein zweiter Gedichtband The Gods of Winter,

1992 gab er seine Arbeit bei General Foods auf, um sich ganz der Literatur zu widmen. Es entstanden weitere Lyrik- und Essaybände. Außerdem schrieb Gioia zwei Opernlibretti , übersetzte Eugenio Montales Mottetti , war Mitherausgeber von zwei Anthologien italienischer Lyrik und Herausgeber von vier Textbüchern für den Literaturunterricht. Mit Interrogations at Noon gewann er 2002 den American Book Award.

2001 organisierte Gioa in Santa Rosa die Konferenz Teaching Poetry, die der Förderung des Hochschulunterrichts für Lyrik gewidmet war. Daneben unterrichtete er als Gastautor u. a. am Colorado College, der Johns Hopkins University, am Sarah Lawrence College, der Mercer University und der Wesleyan University. Von 2003 bis 2009 leitete er das National Endowment for the Arts. 2011 wurde er Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture an der University of Southern California. Im Jahr 2015 wurde er als Poet Laureate des Staates Kalifornien geehrt. Wikipedia  

✵ 24. Dezember 1950
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“As long as poets belonged to a broader class of artists and intellectuals, they centered their lives in urban bohemias, where they maintained a distrustful independence from institutions. Once poets began moving into universities, they abandoned the working-class heterogeneity of Greenwich Village and North Beach for the professional homogeneity of academia.”

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Dana Gioia

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

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

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Dana Gioia

"The Rise of James Fenton," http://www.danagioia.net/essays/efenton.htm published in The Dark Horse (Autumn 1999 and Summer 2000)
Essays

“Dante and Hopkins, Mozart and Palestrina, Michelangelo and El Greco, Bramante and Gaudi, have brought more souls to God than all the preachers of Texas”

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Dana Gioia

29
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

“If Catholic Christianity does not offer a vision of existence that transcends the election cycle, if our redemption is social and our resurrection economic, then it’s time render everything up to Caesar.”

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Dana Gioia

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

“"Between 1945 and 1965 Catholic novelists and poets received 11 Pulitzer Prizes and 5 National Book Awards (6 NBAs if one counts O'Connor's posthumously published Complete Stories in 1972)" (18).”

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Dana Gioia

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

“Forty years ago, when Dylan Thomas read, he spent half the program reciting other poets' work. Hardly a self-effacing man, he was nevertheless humble before his art. Today most readings are celebrations less of poetry than of the author's ego. No wonder the audience for such events usually consists entirely of poets, would-be poets, and friends of the author.”

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Dana Gioia

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

“The second observation is that poetry is a universal human art. Despite post-modern theories of cultural relativism that assert there are no human universals, there exists a massive and compelling body of empirical data, collected and documented by anthropologists, linguists, and archeologists that demonstrates there is no human society, however isolated, that has not developed and employed poetry as a cultural practice. Most of this poetry, of course, has been oral poetry. Many of these cultures never developed writing. But the fact remains—and it is a demonstrable fact, not mere opinion—that every society has developed a special class of speech, shaped by apprehensible patterns of sound, namely, poetry”

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9-10
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), Poetry as Enchantment (2015)

“Poets serious about making careers in institutions understand that the criteria for success are primarily quantitative. They must publish as much as possible as quickly as possible. The slow maturation of genuine creativity looks like laziness to a committee. Wallace Stevens was forty-three when his first book appeared. Robert Frost was thirty-nine. Today these sluggards would be unemployable.”

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Dana Gioia

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

“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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Dana Gioia

"A California Requiem"
Poetry, Interrogations at Noon (2001)

“Until quite recently poetry was taught badly—at least according to current academic standards. Poetry was used to teach grammar, elocution, and rhetoric. It was employed to convey history, both secular and sacred, often to instill patriotic sentiment and religious morality. Poetry was chanted in chorus at female academies. It was copied to teach cursive handwriting and calligraphy. It was memorized by wayward schoolboys as punishment. It was recited by children at public events and family gatherings. Being able to write verse was considered a social grace in both domestic and public life. Going to school meant becoming well versed.”

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Dana Gioia

24
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), Poetry as Enchantment (2015)

“To speak from a particular place and time is not provincialism but part of a writer’s identity.”

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Dana Gioia

"Being a California Poet" http://www.danagioia.net/essays/ecalifornia.htm (1999) , from My California: Journeys by Great Writers, ed. Donna Wares (2004)
Essays

“The schism between Christianity and the arts has had two profound consequences, two vast impoverishments--one for the arts world, the other for the Church. First, for the arts world, the loss of a transcendent religious vision, a refined and rigorous sense of the sacred, the breaking and discarding of the two thousand years of Christian mythos, symbolism, and tradition has left contemporary American art spiritually diminished. The shallow novelty, the low-cost nihilism, and the vague and sentimental spiritual pretensions of so much contemporary art—in every medium—are the legacy of this schism, as well as the cynicism that pervades the arts world”

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Dana Gioia

26
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

“It is time to renovate and reoccupy our own tradition”

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Dana Gioia

35
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

“I can’t think of better ways to learn than through pleasure and curiosity. I guess the reason these two qualities play so small a role in formal education is that they are so subjective and individual. Curiosity and delight can’t be institutionalized.Childhood and adolescence form our sensibilities. By the time I arrived in college, I had already developed a deep suspicion of all theories of art that did not originate in pleasure.”

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"Lonely Impulse of Delight: One Reader's Childhood," http://www.danagioia.net/essays/elonely.htm The Southern Review (Winter 2005)
Essays

“Catholic writers tend to see humanity struggling in a fallen world. They combine a longing for grace and redemption with a deep sense of human imperfection and sin. Evil exists, but the physical world is not evil. Nature is sacramental, shimmering with signs of sacred things…. Catholicism is also intrinsically communal, a notion that goes far beyond sitting at Mass with the local congregation, extending to a mystical sense of continuity between the living and the dead. Finally, there is a habit of spiritual self-scrutiny and moral examination of conscience”

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Dana Gioia

10
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

“Tradition is not, as post-modernists maintain, a library or museum the artist plunders. It is the endless conversation between the living and the dead. Young artists enter into this conversation passionately — not merely intellectually, though study and analysis play a part. They live and breathe it. Tradition is not a public building. It is a love affair.”

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Dana Gioia

"Paradigms Lost," interview with Gloria Brame, ELF: Eclectic Literary Forum (Spring 1995)
Interviews

“America's first great surrealist artists were named Walt Disney, Max Fleischer, and Tex Avery. Their artistic medium was cartoon animation, though we must remember that cartoons of this era were seen not only by children but by a mixed audience, consisting mainly of adults. These men took — quite literally — the principles of surrealism and turned them into mass entertainment. As Fleischer's scantily clad Betty Boop ran through a phantasmagoric underground landscape to the driving beat of Cab Calloway's "Minnie the Moocher," moviegoers of the Thirties saw surrealist dream-logic unfold more powerfully than in any experimental poem created in Greenwich Village. To this day the greatest moment of North American surrealism is probably Dumbo's drunken nightmare choreographed to the demonic oom-pah-pah of "Pink Elephants on Parade" from Walt Disney's 1941 movie. When the surrealist style was so quickly assimilated into mass-media comedy, what avant-garde poet could consider it sufficiently chic?”

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"James Tate and American Surrealism," BBC Radio 3, published in Denver Quarterly (Fall 1998)
Essays

“Audiences and critics acknowledge that a play or concerto gains force in great rendition. A good play may overcome bad staging. A great concerto may survive a poor soloist. But it is naturally assumed that a more accomplished performance intensifies the impact of the work. The play's text or concerto's score does not change, but the right actors and musicians help realize its full potential. Among contemporary literary critics, however, one never encounters this notion in regard to books and printing. To recognize the sensual contributions of the physical elements of a book is somehow assumed to demean the spiritual purity of the text. To notice the book itself smacks of philistinism, and to make distinctions based on paper, binding, and typography brings accusations of elitism or decadence.”

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"Designing Literature: Creative Collaboration" http://www.danagioia.net/essays/ecreative.htm (1992)
Essays

“In social terms the identification of poet with teacher is now complete. The first question one poet now asks another upon being introduced is "Where do you teach?" The problem is not that poets teach. The campus is not a bad place for a poet to work. It's just a bad place for all poets to work. Society suffers by losing the imagination and vitality that poets brought to public culture. Poetry suffers when literary standards are forced to conform with institutional ones.”

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Dana Gioia

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

“If Catholic literature has a central theme, it is the difficult journey of the sinner toward redemption”

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Dana Gioia

14
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

“What does an instinctively popular poet do in contemporary America, where serious poetry is no longer a popular art? The public whose values and sensibility he celebrates is unaware of his existence. Indeed, even if they were aware of his poetry, they would feel no need to approach it. Cut off from his proper audience, this poet feels little sympathy with the specialized minority readership that now sustains poetry either as a highly sophisticated verbal game or secular religion. His sensibility shows little similarity to theirs except for the common interest in poetry. And so the popular poet usually leads a marginal existence in literary life. His fellow poets look on him as an anomaly or an anachronism. Reviewers find him eminently unnewsworthy. Publishers see little prestige attached to printing his work. Critics, who have been trained to celebrate complexity, consider him an amiable simpleton.”

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Dana Gioia

"The Anonymity of the Regional Poet: Ted Kooser" http://www.danagioia.net/essays/ekooser.htm, from Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture (1992)
Essays

“Most editors run poems and poetry reviews the way a prosperous Montana rancher might keep a few buffalo around — not to eat the endangered creatures but to display them for tradition's sake.”

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Dana Gioia

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

“"Sixty years ago Catholics played a prominent, prestigious, and irreplaceable part in American literary culture…They included established fiction writers--Flannery O'Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Walker Percy, J. F. Powers, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Horgan, Jack Kerouac, Julien Green, Pietro di Donato, Hisaye Yamamoto, Edwin O'Connor, Henry Morton Robinson, and Caroline Gordon. (Sociologist Father Andrew Greeley had yet to try his formidable hand at fiction.)…also science fiction and detective writers such as Anthony Boucher, Donald Westlake, August Delerth, and Walter Miller, Jr."…in American poetry…Allen Tate, Robert Lowell, Robert Fitzgerald, Kenneth Rexroth, John Berryman, Isabella Gardner, Phyllis McGinley, Claude McKay, Dunstan Thompson, John Frederick Nims, Brother Antoninus (William Everson), Thomas Merton, Josephine Jacobsen, and the Berrigan brothers, Ted and Daniel…. There were even Catholic haiku poets, notably Raymond Roseliep and Nick Virgilio" (15-16).”

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Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

“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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"The Litany" http://www.danagioia.net/poems/litany.htm
Poetry, Interrogations at Noon (2001)

“I want a poetry that can learn as much from popular culture as from serious culture. A poetry that seeks the pleasure and emotionality of the popular arts without losing the precision, concentration, and depth that characterize high art. I want a literature that addresses a diverse audience distinguished for its intelligence, curiosity, and imagination rather than its professional credentials. I want a poetry that risks speaking to the fullness of our humanity, to our emotions as well as to our intellect, to our senses as well as our imagination and intuition. Finally I hope for a more sensual and physical art — closer to music, film, and painting than to philosophy or literary theory. Contemporary American literary culture has privileged the mind over the body. The soul has become embarrassed by the senses. Responding to poetry has become an exercise mainly in interpretation and analysis. Although poetry contains some of the most complex and sophisticated perceptions ever written down, it remains an essentially physical art tied to our senses of sound and sight. Yet, contemporary literary criticism consistently ignores the sheer sensuality of poetry and devotes its considerable energy to abstracting it into pure intellectualization. Intelligence is an irreplaceable element of poetry, but it needs to be vividly embodied in the physicality of language. We must — as artists, critics, and teachers — reclaim the essential sensuality of poetry. The art does not belong to apes or angels, but to us. We deserve art that speaks to us as complete human beings. Why settle for anything less?”

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Dana Gioia

"Paradigms Lost," interview with Gloria Brame, ELF: Eclectic Literary Forum (Spring 1995)
Interviews

“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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Dana Gioia

"Insomnia" http://www.danagioia.net/poems/insomnia.htm
Poetry, The Daily Horoscope (1986)

“Teachers and writers share a responsibility to create the next generation of readers. We need to create and cultivate in our classrooms a dialectic of intellect and intuition, of mental attention and sensory engagement. In poetry, intellectual-ity without physicality becomes dull and barren, just as intuition untethered by intellect quickly becomes sloppy and subjective. We need to augment methodology with magic”

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Dana Gioia

36
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), Poetry as Enchantment (2015)

“Teach us the names of what we have destroyed.”

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"A California Requiem"
Poetry, Interrogations at Noon (2001)

“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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Commencement speech, Stanford University (2007-06-17)
Speeches and lectures