Dana Gioia and the NEA

Jack Foley

Word has just been released that poet Dana Gioia has been chosen as the intended nominee to head the National Endowment for the Arts. It is a rare pleasure to find oneself in whole-hearted agreement with anything implemented by the current administration in Washington. But then, Gioia himself is a rarity: a public intellectual of substance and originality. A loud hooray is issuing from these quarters!

For the first time in its history, the National Endowment for the Arts will be headed by a poet. Gioia's credentials as an artist are impeccable. He has published three full-length books of poetry: Daily Horoscope (1986), The Gods of Winter (1991), and Interrogations at Noon (2001). The Gods of Winter was chosen by London's Poetry Society Book Club as their main selection, an honor rare for American authors. In the United States, the book was co-winner of the Poets' Prize. Reviewing Interrogations at Noon, British critic William Oxley described Gioia as "probably the most exquisite poet writing today in English." Susan Balée, writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer, called the book "achingly good." Gioia has also been active as a translator and has produced translations from Latin, Italian, German, and Romanian. Mottetti, his translation of work by the Italian Nobel Prize-winning poet Eugene Montale, appeared in 1990. Gioia's opera, Nosferatu, written for composer Alva Henderson, has been published and performed around the country.

For many readers Gioia is primarily known as a critic of considerable power and originality. When his essay, "Can Poetry Matter?" appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1991, it sparked an international debate on the status of poetry in our culture. The Atlantic received more responses--overwhelmingly favorable ones--to this piece than it had to anything it had published in recent history. The essay was collected in Gioia's book, Can Poetry Matter?, which was a finalist for the 1992 National Book Critics Award in Criticism and which has recently been re-issued in a special tenth-anniversary edition. The title essay--like all the book's essays--raises major questions about culture in general and repeatedly asks how culture may be related to that often-maligned figure, the "general reader." General readers, writes Gioia, "constitute the audience that poetry has lost":

United by intelligence and curiosity, this heterogeneous group cuts across lines of race, class, age, and occupation. Representing our cultural intelligentsia, they are the people who support the arts...However healthy poetry may appear within its professional subculture, it has lost this larger audience, who represent poetry's bridge to the general culture.

Much of the burden of Can Poetry Matter? deals with ways it is possible to reconnect poetry to the world at large. "To regain poetry's readership," he goes on, "one must begin by meeting [poet William Carlos Williams's] challenge to find what 'concerns many men,' not simply what concerns poets":

The most serious question for the future of American culture is whether the arts will continue to exist in isolation and decline into subsidized academic specialties or whether some possibility of rapprochement with the educated public remains.

It is Gioia's deep awareness of such problems that makes him an ideal choice to head the National Endowment for the Arts. Though an accomplished artist, Gioia is far from being an ivory tower type. Of Italian and Mexican descent, he was the first member of his family to attend college. He received his B.A. from Stanford University and then went on to an achieve an M.A. in Comparative Literature at Harvard University. A practical man as well as a poet, he then returned to Stanford to earn an M.B.A. In 1977 he began a career in business in New York. In his essay, "Business and Poetry," Gioia remarks that the most important lesson to be learned by the businessman-poet is "that poetry is only one part of life, that there are some things more important than writing poetry":

This is an obvious statement to anyone but a writer, yet it is one that few American poets have ever learned because it addresses life and not art. It has nothing to do with writing poetry, and knowing it will never help a writer gain fame or perfect his craft. But learning it may help him or her survive.

Gioia worked for fifteen years as a business executive and eventually became a Vice President of General Foods. Writing at night and on weekends, he began to establish a major literary reputation. In 1984, while he was still at General Foods, his literary work led Esquire magazine to name him as one of "The Men and Women Under Forty Who Are Changing America." Gioia left business in 1992 to become a full-time writer. In 1996 he returned to his native California, where his working-class parents still lived.

Though hardly an academic, for the past ten years Gioia has been a hands-on educator working in various ways to promote an understanding of his all-too-neglected art form. With X.J. Kennedy he edited four popular anthologies, including Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama--the nation's best-selling college literature textbook. He has taught as a visiting writer at Colorado College, Johns Hopkins, Sarah Lawrence, Mercer, and Wesleyan University, and he is Vice-President of the Poetry Society of America. He has given innumerable talks and lectures. He is founder and co-director of two major literary conferences: the West Chester University Summer Conference on Form and Narrative, now the largest annual all-poetry writing conference in the United States, and "Teaching Poetry," a conference in Santa Rosa, California, dedicated to improving high school teaching of poetry.

Throughout these various activities, Gioia has always maintained both high intellectual standards and a common touch which allows him to communicate clearly, convincingly, and without a trace of pretension. Though a genuinely original thinker, he is a "people person" who can boast a large network of friends and supporters. He is, in short, a one-man band that is always recruiting new members, one of the least isolated professional intellectuals in the United States.

To paraphrase Dana Gioia's most famous title: Can the National Endowment for the Arts Matter? With Gioia at the helm, I have no doubt that it can. Cheers to President Bush for noticing.

Jack Foley