Dana Gioia's Advice on Writing: Why Poetry Matters and How to Read Like a Writer

Dana Gioia is a poet, literary critic, and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. His 1991 essay "Can Poetry Matter?" is one of the most influential essays about poetry in the twentieth century. He wrote the poetry collections Daily Horoscope, Interrogations at Noon, and 99 Poems: New & Selected. He also spent years as a business executive at General Foods before becoming a full-time writer.

He has a Harvard education and an MBA from Stanford. He ran a major federal agency. He worked in corporate America for fifteen years while writing poetry in secret at night. He has written opera libretti, literary criticism, and textbooks.

Here are the key principles from his appearance on the How I Write podcast, his essay "Can Poetry Matter?", and additional interviews.

1. Poetry Matters for All Writers, Not Just Poets

Poetry's decline is not just a problem for poets. It is a problem for everyone who uses language.

"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."

Ezra Pound: "If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays." Poetry trains the ear for rhythm, compression, and precision. Writers who never read poetry tend to write prose that is flabby, rhythmless, and emotionally inert.

Gioia describes the goal of all good writing as "creating a magic spell of heightened attention and sensitivity in the reader." Poetry is where you learn to cast that spell.

Ward Farnsworth catalogs the specific techniques - antithesis, parallelism, chiasmus - that poets and prose writers share. Gioia approaches the same territory from the inside: not analyzing the techniques but inhabiting them through practice and memorization.

2. Memorize Poems That Move You

At USC, his poetry class had 215 students. Every one of them had to memorize poems and recite them in public.

"They were terrified at first. But by the end of the class, it became part of the class culture. The most self-conscious, shy person would come up."

He brought students to events with the USC Board of Trustees. He made them embody the language, not just analyze it. A conversion experience for 90-95% of the class.

Memorization trains a different faculty than analysis. You learn the rhythms, the sounds, the physical sensation of great language. "Poetry is a way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget," quoting Robert Frost. The poems you carry in your memory become part of your equipment. They inform your ear the way years of listening inform a musician's sense of rhythm.

3. First Drafts Are Quasi-Mystical. Revision Is Where the Craft Lives.

"When I'm doing literary writing, my inspiration is involuntary. My artistic process consists of confusion followed by madness, exhilaration, and despair. I feel the inspiration physically. When I have a poem coming, I feel it in my temples and I feel it in my throat."

He writes first drafts in a frenzy. Thirty minutes, forty-five minutes, and then the inspiration vanishes. He is left with a mess on the page. The poem is hidden in the mess. His job in revision is to find it.

"An easy poem takes fifteen drafts. A hard one takes fifty. I've taken some poems into a hundred drafts."

Do not try to write well on the first pass. Capture what arrives. Then switch modes. Become the critic. What is the worst line in this piece? Cross it out. Where does the energy peak? Where does it fall off? Cut the dead patches.

"You throw yourself back into it. You just forget all the critical things. Make it better. Then you see what's wrong. You just keep doing it, degree by degree by degree."

4. Leave Things Out

He tells a story about a poet who introduces his poem at a reading by explaining the entire backstory. "I was in Cleveland and it was raining and I had just broken up with Trudy and I was walking down McLean Avenue in the rain." By the time you get to the poem, you are worn out. Worse, the poem is now his poem, not yours.

When Gioia reads his poem "Pity the Beautiful" - "Pity the beautiful, the dolls and the dishes, the babes with big daddies granting their wishes" - every listener enters by a different door. The beautiful girl in the audience thinks about pretty privilege. The plain girl thinks about the unfairness. The old man thinks about faded glory.

"Leave enough out so people can bring their own life into the poem. That is where I took my work to the next level. Not solving the mystery. Keeping things out."

He wrote a poem called "Reunion" about returning to his Stanford reunion and not recognizing anyone. A decade later, a woman showed him a framed copy. On the back was a photo of her father, who had Alzheimer's. "She said, 'This poem explained my dad to me.' I said to myself, this is not how I intended the poem to mean, but it's exactly what I intended the poem to do."

5. Your Writing Must Have a Tune

"A poem is made up of great phrases, great sentences, great sounds, sequences of emotions. The intellectual content of a poem is real, but it's not the major reason we read poetry. We're reading poetry to have an intensity and authenticity of feeling."

Poetry is "pre-analytical language." It speaks to you as a whole person: someone who thinks, feels, has physical senses, memory, intuition, and imagination. Academic education tries to divide those capacities. Poetry insists they stay together.

How does Gioia know when lines are right? His studio is designed so he can walk in a circle. He walks, muttering like a madman, reciting lines until they feel right - not in his mind but in his body. "It's intuition and physical intelligence."

"I find the Psalms read silently, you just miss something fundamental about their essence. They're trying to be songs."

6. Find Your Subject by Finding Your Life

Gioia spent twenty years trying to figure out what to write about. He grew up in a working-class, urban landscape that felt unremarkable. He wished he could write about the birch woods of Robert Frost or the ocean of Joseph Conrad.

"I didn't realize that around the corner from my high school, one of the great literary movements of the modern age would happen: rap. They found a way of taking their crummy neighborhood and turning it into a kind of poetry."

"When you hit the right note, you realize: I was composing that in my mind for the last ten years. I didn't recognize it as a poem because I didn't take this part and this part and put them together."

Everyone's life is trite and boring seen from some angle. The writer's job is to find the angle that reveals the poetry underneath.

7. Take Yourself Out of the Marketplace to Find Your Voice

As a young poet working in business, Gioia stopped sending work out for six or seven years. The poems that magazines accepted were the ones that sounded like other poets.

"I took myself out of the marketplace so I could discover who I was as a poet. What did I sound like? What did I want to write about?"

Other young writers thought he was failing. "They assume everything you've written has been refused. They feel sort of sorry for you."

When he finally started submitting again, the Hudson Review accepted seven poems at once. Then the editor of the New Yorker called and asked why Gioia had not sent those poems to him.

8. Study Paragraphs the Way Musicians Study Solos

"You've got to sit down and look at a paragraph that you think is a great paragraph and figure out why the hell you think it's a great paragraph."

His models: George Orwell for moral control of tone. Randall Jarrell for weaving the personal in and out of argument. Clive James for knockout sentences. T.S. Eliot for intellectual slyness where ideas arrive sideways. D.H. Lawrence for magnificence on the edge of madness.

Great paragraphs are much simpler and shorter than you remember. "You see something that's just tremendous and you've got a thousand ideas coming from this paragraph. Then you go back and look at it. It's much simpler. It's much shorter than you remember."

"You have radiant details and these things suddenly create all kinds of associations. It's this battery, and when you link into it, it electrifies your consciousness."

9. Write Every Day, Even If Only a Line

Gioia keeps a piece of paper in his studio with a Latin phrase from Pliny the Elder: Nulla dies sine linea. Not a day without writing a line.

"A line is not much to write. A sentence is not much to write. But if you can write a good sentence, you'll write another good sentence after it."

He also writes in the opposite mode: waiting and meditating until the inspiration becomes so overpowering that he cannot prevent it. Wallace Stevens said people talk about writing but never talk about the meditation that precedes writing.

"I don't date the Muse via a dating site. I just go to places the Muse might hang around. If she shows up, great. If not, she'll show up eventually."

10. Suffering Will Not Be Wasted

Gioia lost his first son to sudden infant death syndrome. The child was four months old, had never been sick a day in his life, and died roughly a week before Christmas.

He watched other men who had lost sons repress the grief. "They shut off a significant portion of their own humanity to cope." He went wherever the grief led him. It led him to the cemetery, where he cleaned up the graves and met other bereaved parents sitting on tombstones, telling stories about the children they lost.

"Here am I, Stanford-Harvard-educated MBA executive, doing yard work, talking to an old immigrant woman. And we were equal. We were equal in our grief."

The experience changed his writing. It became simpler, more emotionally direct, and more musical. "To write a very small, calm poem requires years of suffering and years of joy. Everything you've suffered, everything you've experienced, will not be wasted if it creates the way of seeing the world that comes into your work."

"Most people in the course of their life will have something absolutely appalling happen to them. You've got to make a choice of how you deal with it. You don't do it by denying it. You take that as part of what it means to be human."

Gioia spent fifteen years in corporate America writing poetry at night. He stopped publishing for seven years to find his voice. He took a hundred drafts on poems that would earn him no money. And he built a body of work that will outlast every bestseller that came and went during the decades he was laboring in obscurity.

For more on the rhetorical techniques that poetry and prose share, see Ward Farnsworth's advice on classical rhetoric. And for another perspective on deep reading as the foundation of writing, read Ted Gioia on distraction, reading, and why culture is declining.

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