Dana Gioia will be reading at Elliott Bay Book Company tomorrow evening (May 5) from his fourth collection of poetry, Pity the Beautiful: Poems, named presumably after this poem: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/241814
Gioia taught for a semester at Wesleyan University during my senior year, back in 1992, maybe 1993. I didn't study with him, but I did watch him lecture once to an intro to poetry class on the difference between poetry and prose. Apparently it all comes down to the line break... prose is based on the unit of the sentence, poetry on the unit of the line....I wonder if he still maintains that distinction.
Here Gioia talks about why reading matters: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UacmZTRvNs4&feature=related I wonder if poetry can still matter....or what else matters. Should be an interesting event.
From Elliott Bay's website:
Co-presented with IMAGE: A Journal of Art & Religion. One of
this country's most highly regarded poets—and one who has also played a
unique role in affecting arts policy in the U.S. as a former chair of
the National Endowment for the Arts—Dana Gioia makes this welcome
Elliott Bay return this evening, which we are pleased to be co-present
with Gregory Wolfe and others for Seattle-based IMAGE: A Journal of Art & Religion. Dana Gioia is here with his fourth collection, Pity the Beautiful
(Graywolf Press). "Dana Gioia's poems always reveal his narrative ease
and naturalness of diction; he's partly an old-fashioned storyteller and
partly a metaphysical poet of reflection and devotion. From his very
first book, which was published twenty-five years ago, he's always been
considered one of this country's formal masters." – David St. John.
"[Gioia] ... makes every collection worth the wait ...Great in riches in
remarkably few pages." – Booklist.
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