More on Dana Gioia.
>Reply-To: "Wilfred M. McClay" <[log in to unmask]>
>X-PH: V4.4@cecasun
>From: "Wilfred M. McClay" <[log in to unmask]>
>To: "KimEdwardRenz" <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: 10-24 Gioia clips
>Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2002 10:33:45 -0400
>
> Rhyme and Reason: An NEA Nominee Who's a Perfect Fit In the Fray
By J. BOTTUM
>Yesterday, President Bush announced his intention to nominate the poet
>Dana Gioia for chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. This is
>the job that Mr. Gioia was born for -- or perhaps that's better put the
>other way around: Mr. Gioia is the kind of person for whom the job of
>chairing the NEA was first created. He is a major figure in American
>letters, an experienced business executive and a man with a passion for
>great art. There's something satisfyingly ironic in this. It sometimes
>seems that aspiring artists are required to take an oath to oppose the
>Bush administration. And now those philistine Republicans have put
>forward one of the nation's finest writers: an American Book Award
>winner, a best-selling textbook editor, and a critic of distinction.
>However one wants to construct the list of America's best poets, Dana
>Gioia ranks somewhere very high. His confirmation will mean the return of
>something missing in Washington since Archibald MacLeish was Librarian of
>Congress. ""The arts community, however, will almost certainly hunt
>for something to object to. Mr. Gioia has always been a careful manager
>of his poetic reputation. But he has nonetheless consistently been a
>lightning rod for whatever thunderbolt has been about to strike the world
>of arts and letters.
"" These were the poets, particularly in the pages
> of the New Criterion and the Formalist magazines, who had mastered the
> difficult trick of writing traditional verse in contemporary language --
> and were widely denounced by much of the poetry establishment as
> reactionaries who would return us to those horrible, constricting
> Victorian days before free verse came along to, well, set us free.
>
> Dana Gioia, poet.
"""" But when Mr. Gioia laid much of the blame on the transformation of
poets into college writing-program professors, he caught the imagination
of middle-brow America, and the letters to the Atlantic Monthly poured in
for months. What fits Mr. Gioia for the job at the NEA, however, is all the
work he's done to promote an alternate vision of the arts in America. His
annual poetry festivals on the West and East coasts, his promotion of
younger poets and musicians, his ceaseless schedule of lectures and
readings have all aimed to provoke a sense that art can, in fact, matter.
It's not a question of corporate or government sponsorship. Indeed, the
lesson of writing-school poetry is that such things always fail. It's
rather a matter of using whatever pulpit can be found to insist that
serious art has serious purposes, that those purposes can be conveyed to a
large portion of the population, and that traditional forms are
traditional precisely because they have proved over centuries that they
actually work.
The astonishingly high demands made for the arts by Mr. Gioia are, in fact,
far more populist than the feel-good, anything-is-art positions of recent
NEA heads, from the actress Jane Alexander to the folklorist William Ivey.
If his experience in business and the arts combine to make him the perfect
candidate for the NEA, it's less clear what the NEA offers Mr. Gioia. A
chance to speak from one of the few bully pulpits for the arts in America,
maybe even a chance to gain a bigger audience for his own work.
"""""""""""" From now on, Mr. Gioia's life is going to be different.
&"&"
>
>
Gioia To Be Named National Endowment For The Arts Chief
> DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
in the chaotic world of politics. But Gioia, a 51-year-old poet, critic
and translator, is U.S. President George W. Bush's choice to head the
National Endowment for the Arts, the federal agency that channels aid to
artists and arts groups. And the California native, who insists he has no
political agenda, is thrilled."" he said, scratching the chin of Tarzan,
his cat, who pounced onto Gioia's lap in his spotless, book-lined office.
explores poetry's place in American culture. He also is a longtime
commentator for the British Broadcasting Corp. If confirmed by the Senate
to a four-year term, Gioia would succeed Michael P. Hammond, who died in
January after just a week as chairman. The NEA has generally strong support
on Capitol Hill, a far cry from a decade ago when conservatives sought
unsuccessfully to kill the agency because it financed projects some said
were obscene and blasphemous.
The father of two sons, ages 9 and 13, Gioia received a bachelor's degree
in English from Stanford University, where he returned to earn a master's
degree in business administration. He also received a master's degree in
comparative literature at Harvard University, where he studied with poets
Robert Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Bishop. Gioia decided to pursue a business
career and keep writing as his hobby, serving as vice president for
marketing at General Foods Corp. He eventually left the company a decade
ago.
Yet Gioia said he initially hid his intellectual pursuits from his General
Foods colleagues."" Gioia joked. Gioia has translated poetry from Latin,
German, Romanian and Italian, including a volume of verse by Eugenio
Montale, the Italian Nobel prize winner. with composer Alva Henderson.
Gioia
>has taught as a visiting writer at Johns Hopkins University, Sarah
>Lawrence College and Wesleyan University. Last year he founded Teaching
>Poetry, a conference on improving high school poetry instruction. All
>in pursuit of his passions, he said. """"
> URL for this article:
> http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,BT_CO_20021024_002006.djm,00.html
>
> NEA Nominee Gioia Has Roots In Arts, Poetry, Business (WPost) By
>Jacqueline Trescott The Washington Post, October 24, 2002 President Bush
>yesterday announced his intention to nominate Dana Gioia, a nationally
>known poet and controversial literary critic, for a four-year term as the
>chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. The nomination must be
>confirmed by the full Senate. No timetable for the process has been
>announced. The NEA, a small but highly visible agency that provides grants
>to artists and institutions, has been without a permanent chairman since
>the death of Michael Hammond last January. "" """""" was a finalist for
>the 1992 National Book Critics Award in criticism. Gioia, a native of
>Southern California of Italian and Mexican descent, earned a BA and MBA
>from Stanford University and an MA from Harvard University. He worked as an
>executive for General Foods for 15 years before leaving to pursue a
>full-time writing career. He is also a commentator for BBC Radio and the
>classical music critic for San Francisco magazine. """" "" Bush Taps
>Poet To Lead Arts Endowment (WTimes) By Julia Duin The Washington Times,
>October 24, 2002 Poet Dana Gioia, who insists poets produce work the
>public actually wants to read, was nominated yesterday by the White House
>to be chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. If confirmed by the
>Senate to the four-year position, Mr. Gioia (pronounced JOY-uh), 51, would
>be the first poet to lead the NEA since its founding in 1965. He was
>considered a dark horse for a job that normally goes to experts in music,
>fine art or theater. President Bush selected Mr. Gioia to fill the
>position that has been vacant since Michael Hammond, former director of
>Rice University's music department, died of a heart attack after only a few
>days on the job. He had replaced Bill Ivey, who retired more than a year
>ago. """" Mr. Gioia, who lives in Santa Rosa, Calif., is declining all
>interviews until after the yet-to-be-scheduled Senate hearings. He did say
>he voted for Mr. Bush and Mr. Bush's father, but has never met the
>president. """" "" won a 2002 American Book Award. He regularly reviews
>books for several publications, including The Washington Times, and writes
>for the Hudson Review, a literary quarterly, and is a music critic for San
>Francisco magazine. He has a bachelor's degree and a master's in business
>administration from Stanford University, as well as a master's degree in
>comparative literature from Harvard. """" (1991) - to become a full-time
>writer in 1992. "" among poets. "" that claimed American poetry belongs
>to a subculture of specialists whose craft is increasingly irrelevant to
>the general public. """" Mr. Gioia is married and the father of two sons,
>Ted, 13, and Mike, 9. A third son, his firstborn child, died in 1987 from
>sudden infant death syndrome at the age of four months. He could not
>write for a year after that, he says. Attachment Converted:
>"c:\eudora\attach\image0015.jpg"
Kim Edward Renz
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Fine Arts Center, Department 1351
615 McCallie Avenue
Chattanooga, Tennessee 37403
423-425-4379 Office
423-425-5249 Facsimile
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