Excerpt from

Rough Country



Give me a landscape made of obstacles,
of steep hills and jutting glacial rock,
where the low-running streams are quick to flood
the grassy fields and bottomlands.
                  A place
no engineers can master--where the roads
must twist like tendrils up the mountainside
on narrow cliffs where boulders block the way.


Dana Gioia's home page
Dana Gioia audio on NPR


Dana Gioia interviewed by Maggie Paul at Poetry Santa Cruz

Words are imperfect, but they are all we have as writers. And they work well enough in the right hands to do the job. Part of poetry's job is to make language work better than it does in everyday conversation or writing. That is why poetry is so hard to write well.

"The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet"


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