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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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Dana Gioia: Zitate auf Englisch

“When poetry loses its ability to enchant, it shrinks into what is just an elaborate form of argumentation. When verse casts its particular spell, it becomes the most evocative form of language.”

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Dana Gioia

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

“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?”

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Dana Gioia

30
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

“Raw artistic talent is abundant. What is truly rare are the cultural circumstances, attitudes, and institutions to develop and perfect it. Few American cities have ever managed to foster a vibrant literary milieu of international significance — perhaps only Boston, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. American literature has most often been an affair of isolated genius or small coterie.”

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Dana Gioia

"Fallen Western Star," http://www.danagioia.net/essays/ewestern.htm Denver Quarterly (Fall 1998)
Essays

“Third and finally, poetry originated as a form of vocal music. It began as a performative and auditory medium, linked to music and dance and associated with civic ceremony, religious ritual, and magic. (The earliest poetry almost certainly served a shamanistic function.) Most aboriginal cultures did not distinguish poetry from song because the arts were so interrelated as to be porous. Nor did the classical Greek or Chinese cultures two or three millennia ago differentiate poetry from song”

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

“If the soul of Roman Catholicism is to be found in partisan politics, then it's probably time to shutter up the chapel”

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Dana Gioia

24
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

“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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Dana Gioia

"James Tate and American Surrealism," http://www.danagioia.net/essays/etate.htm BBC Radio 3, published in Denver Quarterly (Fall 1998)
Essays

“In oral culture, there is no separation between the poet and the poem. The author is a performer who vocalizes the words. Creation and performance are inseparably linked. Without writing, a ‘text’ has no existence outside the auditory performance”

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

“This is not work
but a kind of workmanship.
First out of paper, then from the body.
To provoke thought into form,
molded according to a measure.
I think of a tailor
who is his own fabric.”

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"Homage to Valerio Magrelli" (After the Italian of Valerio Magrelli), vi
Poetry, Interrogations at Noon (2001)

“Several dozen journals now exist that print only verse. They don't publish literary reviews, just page after page of freshly minted poems. The heart sinks to see so many poems crammed so tightly together, like downcast immigrants in steerage. One can easily miss a radiant poem amid the many lackluster ones. It takes tremendous effort to read these small magazines with openness and attention. Few people bother, generally not even the magazines' contributors. The indifference to poetry in the mass media has created a monster of the opposite kind — journals that love poetry not wisely but too well.”

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Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

“Poetry is the art of using words charged with their utmost meaning. A society whose intellectual leaders lose the skill to shape, appreciate, and understand the power of language will become the slaves of those who retain it — be they politicians, preachers, copywriters, or newscasters.”

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Dana Gioia

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

“The great and present danger to American literature is the growing homogeneity of our writers, especially the younger generation. Often raised in several places in no specific cultural or religious community, educated with no deep connection to a region, history, or tradition, and now employed mostly in academia, the American writer is becoming as standardized as the American car--functional, streamlined, and increasingly interchangeable”

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27
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

“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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"The Next Poem" http://www.danagioia.net/poems/thenextpoem.htm
Poetry, The Gods of Winter (1991)

“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.”

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Dana Gioia

"Words" http://www.danagioia.net/poems/words.htm
Poetry, Interrogations at Noon (2001)

“Poetry is not a creed or dogma. It is a special way of speaking and listening.”

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Dana Gioia

"Paradigms Lost," interview with Gloria Brame http://www.danagioia.net/about/brame.htm, ELF: Eclectic Literary Forum (Spring 1995)
Interviews

“"A New York leftist and an Alabama Pentecostal may not agree on much, but too often they share a dislike of Catholics" (22).”

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Dana Gioia

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

“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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"Fallen Western Star," Denver Quarterly (Fall 1998)
Essays

“Life is experienced holistically with sensations pouring in through every physical and mental organ of perception. Art exists embodied in physical elements—especially meticulously calibrated aspects of sight and sound—which scholarly explication can illuminate but never fully replace. However conceptually incoherent and subjectively emotional, the amateur response to poetry comes closer to the larger human purposes of the art—which is to awaken, amplify, and refine the sense of being alive—than does critical commentary”

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19
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), Poetry as Enchantment (2015)

“Society has already told us that poetry is dead. Let's build a funeral pyre out of the desiccated conventions piled around us and watch the ancient, spangle-feathered, unkillable phoenix rise from the ashes.”

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Dana Gioia

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

“I personally regret the shift in literary study from reading primary texts to reading critical and theoretical texts. The major problem today among students is that they simply have not read enough literature. Consequently they do not have the necessary background to take a critical attitude towards literary theory. One needs to test every abstraction against experience.”

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Interview with Robert McPhillips http://www.danagioia.net/about/mcphillips.htm (December 1991), published in Verse (Summer 1992)
Interviews

“Poetry is an art form that demands heightened attention and retention. It both invites and rewards more intense involvement than we normally give to other kinds of speech. Poetic technique, therefore, is never esoteric but eminently practical. It serves at least two purposes. First, it announces that a poem differs from other kinds of speech, that it requires the audience's special attention. A poem begins by attracting our attention through its sound, shape, typography, syntax, texture, or tone. Second, the technique maintains the audience's involvement. All poetic form is a way of keeping the audience's attention beyond what ordinary language requires. Meter, for example, creates a gentle trance state in the auditor. Since poetry is more intense, condensed, and expressive than ordinary language, it needs these techniques to carry the burden of its message.”

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Dana Gioia

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

“We necessarily bring the whole of our hairy and heavy humanity to worship”

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Dana Gioia

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

“The retreat of the nation's largest cultural minority from literary discourse does not make art healthier. Instead, it weakens the dialectic of cultural development. It makes American literature less diverse, less vital, and less representative”

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Dana Gioia

28
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

“Poems should be memorized, recited, and performed. The sheer joy of the art must be emphasized. The pleasure of performance is what first attracts children to poetry, the sensual excitement of speaking and hearing the words of the poem. Performance was also the teaching technique that kept poetry vital for centuries. Maybe it also holds the key to poetry's future.”

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Dana Gioia

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

“The reviewers of fifty years ago knew that their primary loyalty must lie not with their fellow poets or publishers but with the reader. Consequently they reported their reactions with scrupulous honesty even when their opinions might lose them literary allies and writing assignments. In discussing new poetry they addressed a wide community of educated readers. Without talking down to their audience, they cultivated a public idiom. Prizing clarity and accessibility they avoided specialist jargon and pedantic displays of scholarship. They also tried, as serious intellectuals should but specialists often do not, to relate what was happening in poetry to social, political, and artistic trends. They charged modern poetry with cultural importance and made it the focal point of their intellectual discourse.”

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Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

“The engines that have driven poetry's institutional success — the explosion of academic writing programs, the proliferation of subsidized magazines and presses, the emergence of a creative-writing career track, and the migration of American literary culture to the university — have unwittingly contributed to its disappearance from public view.”

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Dana Gioia

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

“The Catholic writer understands the necessary relationship between truth and beauty, which is not mere social convention or cultural accident but an essential form of human knowledge--intuitive, holistic, and experiential. Art is a form of knowing--distinct and legitimate--rooted in feeling and delight--that discovers, in the words of Jacques Maritain, "The splendor of the secrets of being radiating into intelligence.”

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34
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

“The time has probably come to admit that the notion of an avant-garde is no longer useful in discussing contemporary literature. How can there be an avant-garde without a mainstream? Avant-garde de quoi? one must ask. Establishment institutions — universities, museums, foundations, commercial galleries, even the state — have embraced the idea of experimental art for so long that the avant-garde is now a safely domesticated concept, just another traditional style.”

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"Notes Toward a New Bohemia," http://www.danagioia.net/essays/ebohemia.htm transcript of a 1993 talk at the Poet's House, New York City, published in Poetry Flash (November/December 1993) and revised for publication in Grantmakers in the Arts (Spring 1994)
Essays

“The aim of poetry—in this primal and primary sense as enchantment—is to awaken us to a fuller sense of our own humanity in both its social and individual aspects. Poetry offers a way of understanding and expressing existence that is fundamentally different from conceptual thought”

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22
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), Poetry as Enchantment (2015)

“There is a special irony that this disappearance [of Catholic artists visibility despite Catholics constituting one-quarter of the US population] has occurred during a period when celebrating cultural diversity has become an explicit goal across the American arts. Some kinds of diversity are evidently more equal than others.”

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

“What is the defining difference between passive and active citizens? Curiously, it isn't income, geography, or even education. It depends on whether or not they read for pleasure and participate in the arts. These cultural activities seem to awaken a heightened sense of individual awareness and social responsibility.”

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