Everyone enjoys stories of double lives and secret identities. Children have Superman; intellectuals have Wallace Stevens.
Dana GioiaPoetry offers a way of understanding and expressing existence that is fundamentally different from conceptual thought.
Dana GioiaPoetry speaks most effectively and inclusively (whether in free or formal verse) when it recognizes its connection - without apology - to its musical and ritualistic origins.
Dana GioiaEven 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 GioiaAnd 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