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#Dana Gioia
firstfullmoon · 1 year
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Dana Gioia, “The Letter”
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contremineur · 2 months
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Of course it was doomed. I know that now, but it ended so quickly, and I was young. I hardly remember that summer in Seattle— except for her. The city seems just a rainy backdrop. From the moment I first saw her at the office I was hooked. I started visiting her floor. I couldn’t work unless I caught a glimpse of her. Once we exchanged glances, but we never spoke. Then at a party we found ourselves alone. We started kissing and ended up in bed. We talked all night. She claimed she had liked me secretly for months. I wonder now if that was true. Two weeks later her father had a heart attack. While she was in Chicago, they shut down our division. I was never one for writing letters. On the phone we had less to say each time. And that was it—just those two breathless weeks, then years of mild regret and intermittent speculation. Being happy is mostly like that. You don’t see it up close. You recognize it later from the ache of memory. And you can’t recapture it. You only get to choose whether to remember or forget, whether to feel remorse or nothing at all. Maybe it wasn’t really love. But who can tell when nothing deeper ever came along?
Dana Gioia, Being Happy (from ‘99 Poems’, Graywolf Press 2016)
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mythologyofblue · 1 year
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The world does not need words. It articulates itself in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted. The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.
-Dana Gioia, Interrogations at Noon: Poems
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apoemaday · 2 years
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Insomnia
by Dana Gioia
Now you hear what the house has to say.   Pipes clanking, water running in the dark,   the mortgaged walls shifting in discomfort,   and voices mounting in an endless drone of small complaints like the sounds of a family   that year by year you’ve learned how to ignore. But now you must listen to the things you own,   all that you’ve worked for these past years,   the murmur of property, of things in disrepair,   the moving parts about to come undone,   and twisting in the sheets remember all the faces you could not bring yourself to love. 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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infinitesofnought · 2 months
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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. Until about thirty years ago most poetry appeared in magazines that addressed a nonspecialist audience on a range of subjects. Poetry vied for the reader’s interest along with politics, humor, fiction, and reviews— a competition that proved healthy for all the genres. A poem that didn’t command the reader’s attention wasn't considered much of a poem. Editors chose verse that they felt would appeal to their particular audiences, and the diversity of magazines assured that a variety of poetry appeared. The early Kenyon Review published Robert Lowell’s poems next to critical essays and literary reviews. The old New Yorker celebrated Ogden Nash between cartoons and short stories. A few general-interest magazines, such as The New Republic and The New Yorker, still publish poetry in every issue, but, significantly, none except The Nation still reviews it regularly. Some poetry appears in the handful of small magazines and quarterlies that consistently discuss a broad cultural agenda with nonspecialist readers, such as The Threepenny Review, The New Criterion, and The Hudson Review. But most poetry is published in journals that address an insular audience of literary professionals, mainly teachers of creative writing and their students. A few of these, such as American Poetry Review and AWP Chronicle, have moderately large circulations. Many more have negligible readerships. But size is not the problem. The problem is their complacency or resignation about existing only in and for a subculture. What are the characteristics of a poetry-subculture publication? First, the one subject it addresses is current American literature (supplemented perhaps by a few translations of poets who have already been widely translated). Second, if it prints anything other than poetry, that is usually short fiction. Third, if it runs discursive prose, the essays and reviews are overwhelmingly positive. If it publishes an interview, the tone will be unabashedly reverent toward the author. For these journals critical prose exists not to provide a disinterested perspective on new books but to publicize them. Quite often there are manifest personal connections between the reviewers and the authors they discuss. If occasionally a negative review is published, it will be openly sectarian, rejecting an aesthetic that the magazine has already condemned. The unspoken editorial rule seems to be, Never surprise or annoy the readers; they are, after all, mainly our friends and colleagues. By abandoning the hard work of evaluation, the poetry subculture demeans its own art. Since there are too many new poetry collections appearing each year for anyone to evaluate, the reader must rely on the candor and discernment of reviewers to recommend the best books. But the general press has largely abandoned this task, and the specialized press has grown so overprotective of poetry that it is reluctant to make harsh judgments.
– Dana Gioia, "Can Poetry Matter?", 1991 [x]
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femmepathy · 10 months
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dana gioia
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Midnight Rain
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that one Dana Gioia poem that ends with “And memory insists on pining / For places it never went, / As if life would be happier / Just by being different.”
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aemperatrix · 2 years
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havingapoemwithyou · 9 months
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summer storm by Dana Gioia
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tonreihe · 1 year
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“I am prepared to believe in miracles, but the notion that the Catholic hierarchy will make literature and the arts a priority and then exercise good judgment in supporting them exceeds all credulity.”
—Dana Gioia, “The Catholic Writer Today”
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waitingforthebus · 11 months
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Maze without a Minotaur by Dana Gioia
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This has the tone of poetry being an unforgivable, firable offense.
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dk-thrive · 2 years
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Then close your eyes and gently set it free
Whoever you are: step out of doors tonight, Out of the room that lets you feel secure. Infinity is open to your sight. Whoever you are. With eyes that have forgotten how to see From viewing things already too well-known, Lift up into the dark a huge, black tree And put it in the heavens: tall, alone. And you have made the world and all you see. It ripens like the words still in your mouth. And when at last you comprehend its truth, Then close your eyes and gently set it free.
(After Rilke)
—Dana Gioia, Poem #171: Entrance (Library of Congress) (via The Hammock Papers)
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mythologyofblue · 1 year
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Unsaid So much of what we live goes on inside- The diaries of grief, the tounge-tied aches Of unacknowledged love are no less real. For having passed unsaid What we conceal Is always more than we dare confide. Think of the letters we write our dead.
-Dana Gioia
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child-in-her-eyes · 2 years
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How shall I hold my soul that it does not touch yours? How shall I lift it over you to other things? If it would only sink below into the dark like some lost thing or slumber in some quiet place which did not echo your soft heart’s beat. But all that ever touched us — you and me— touched us together like a bow that from two strings could draw one voice. On what instrument were we strung? And to what player did we sing our interrupted song?
Rainer Maria Rilke, tr. Dana Gioia
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infinitesofnought · 2 months
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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.
– Dana Gioia, "Can Poetry Matter?", 1991 [x]
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