Dana Gioia Quotes on Writing
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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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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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What we conceal Is always more than what we dare confide. Think of the letters that we write our dead.
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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.
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To speak from a particular place and time is not provincialism but part of a writer's identity.
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Poetry is not a branch of analytical philosophy. It is a primal, holistic kind of human communication. A poet needs innocence as much as knowledge, emotion as much as intelligence, vulnerability as much as rigor. A poet can become too smart for his or her own good and forget the childlike pleasures of sound and story, sense, and sensuality that poetry should provide. The challenge for a writer is to master the medium of poetry without losing that inner innocence.