For your information, the latest press reports regarding the author of
Nosferatu, and nominee for the NEA Chair, Dana Gioia. Tickets for
performances of Nosferatu here at UTC this coming Friday and Sunday nights,
with Gioia himself taking part in the performance, are still available.
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October 28, 2002
Poet Is Viewed as a Calm Fit for Arts Post
By ROBIN POGREBIN
Announcing an intention to nominate a new chairman of the National Endowment
for the Arts is the White House's way of floating a name to see if it
engenders controversy or brings skeletons out of the closet.
Once made, the nomination wends its way through a process that allows
members of both parties to object, beginning with review by the Senate
Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. Senator Edward M.
Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, is the committee chairman, and Senator
Judd Gregg of New Hampshire is the ranking Republican member. Once
confirmed, the new chairman serves a four-year term.
At least at first glance, Dana Gioia, who was proposed by the White House
last week, seems to be a shoo-in. He is a writer with a background as a
businessman. He is a registered Republican who voted for George W. Bush and
for his father before that. His poetry is not political. His criticism,
essays and reviews are not polemical. Rather, Mr. Gioia (pronounced JOY-a)
appears to be someone with a wide range of artistic and intellectual
interests who is passionate about making poetry more accessible to the
public.
Yes, his essay "Can Poetry Matter?," which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly
in 1991 and then in a collection of his essays, angered academics because he
accused them of making poetry an insular enterprise. Yes, he offended some
people on the West Coast when he was quoted in an interview as saying that
no great poet ever came out of California. (He said he specified Los
Angeles.) And sure, some members of Congress might be curious about his
support of environmental groups or whether there is anything sinister in the
libretto he wrote for an opera — "Nosferatu" — since it is based on the
Dracula story.
But for the most part Mr. Gioia's fellow writers admire and respect him and
say his range of talents and mild temperament make him suited to lead the
often embattled art organization. They point out that his desire to bring
art to a broader audience fits in with the endowment's current emphasis on
education.
"Dana is a Renaissance man who is passionate about the literary arts but
also avidly dedicated to the opera, the theater, ballet and the music
world," said Elise Paschen, former executive director of the Poetry Society
of America, where Mr. Gioia is a vice president.
"He is someone who has always encouraged the work of young poets," Ms.
Paschen continued, "and wants to make the arts — and the literary arts in
particular — a part of the mainstream of American culture and not sequester
it at the university level."
Mr. Gioia, 51, is in many ways old school, given that his heroes are the
writers and thinkers of the 1930's and 40's: Lionel Trilling, George Orwell,
Edmund Wilson, Randall Jarrell.
Growing up in working-class Hawthorne, Calif. — his father drove a cab, his
mother worked behind the soda fountain at a drugstore — Mr. Gioia was
surrounded by people who did not go to college. But his uncle, who lived
with the family, had shelves of books, musical scores and records that Mr.
Gioia devoured: Goethe in German, Dante in Italian, Pushkin in Russian.
The youngster began to spend most of his time at the Hawthorne public
library, where he found himself drawn in particular to books about art. "I
was the only 14-year-old eighth grader in Hawthorne who had a subscription
to Art News," he said in a telephone interview. "My mother would make sure
it didn't have naked pictures."
Enamored with Thomas Mann's novels and George Bernard Shaw's music reviews,
Mr. Gioia made his mother drive him to museums on Sundays. "I was a culture
nerd," he said.
As a child, Mr. Gioia started taking music lessons: piano, alto clarinet,
bass clarinet, tenor saxophone. "The way other kids were excited about
baseball, I was excited about painting, music," he said. In high school Mr.
Gioia decided he wanted to be a composer. He also started writing for the
school paper and eventually became its editor.
At Stanford University, where he received a bachelor's degree in English, he
became editor of the literary magazine and began writing reviews for the
college newspaper. He spent his sophomore year abroad in Vienna. "I had
never been outside California," Mr. Gioia said. "It was like going from an
Annette Funicello movie to `The Third Man.' "
Vienna was an awakening; Mr. Gioia began reading poetry there and left
wanting to be a poet. "Away from English and America for the first time,
something just clicked," he said.
After graduating, Mr. Gioia earned a master's degree in comparative
literature at Harvard University. It was a heady time; he studied with
Elizabeth Bishop, Edward Said, Northrop Frye. "I realized I was being
trained to be a literary theorist," he said. "I was good at it."
He returned to Stanford for a master's degree in business administration,
although he continued to reserve three hours a day for reading and writing.
There he met his future wife, Mary Heicke, and together they joined General
Foods after graduation. "It was a really good company," he said. "But it was
hard for me in a lot of ways because so much of the work was quantitative."
Even his literary counterparts say Mr. Gioia's business experience will be a
plus in the endowment post. "It gives him a practicality, the ability to
handle people, the ability to talk to people from whom you need
appropriations," said Richard Wilbur, the poet.
Mr. Gioia spent 15 years at the company, now owned by Kraft, where he
handled the Kool-Aid account for a while and became a vice president before
leaving to write full time in 1992. One factor was the lingering effects of
a personal tragedy. He and his wife lost their first child in 1987 to sudden
infant death syndrome; the boy died in his crib at 4 months old.
"It's like a fire burning through your life, and there's very little that's
left standing at the end of it," Mr. Gioia said. "I realized how little my
accomplishments meant to me, besides the private, spiritual relationship I
had with my writing and my family." The couple, who live in Sonoma County in
California, subsequently had two other sons, now 9 and 13.
In addition to writing poetry and criticism, Mr. Gioia has been co-editor of
several anthologies and done translations. "He's an excellent translator,"
Mr. Wilbur said. "There's a translation of Seneca he's done that I very much
admire."
Mr. Gioia also helped found two different poetry conferences, writes and
narrates programs for BBC Radio and is the classical music critic for San
Francisco magazine.
"He's a coalition builder," said Michael Peich, a professor of English at
West Chester University in Pennsylvania who started a poetry conference
there with Mr. Gioia.
Many of Mr. Gioia's friends and associates say his low-key nature makes him
ideally equipped to head an agency that became controversial years ago when
it made grants to artists whose work upset conservatives.
"Aside from his intellectual qualifications, he has the personality that is
well suited to this kind of job because he's always interested in putting
people together who might help one another," said Frederick Morgan, founding
editor of The Hudson Review, to which Mr. Gioia has contributed.
Regarding his provocative essay, "Can Poetry Matter?," Mr. Gioia said he
stood by it. "If you put all visible poets in the academy, it tends to
impoverish the public culture," he said. What's the alternative? "To
reinvent public literary culture," he said. "That is what's been happening
in the last 10 years — an unleashing of populist energy."
As for his notorious California comment, published last fall in The Los
Angeles Times, Mr. Gioia said he was misquoted, that he was talking about
Los Angeles in particular, not California in general. "Los Angeles is
perhaps the only great city in the world that has not yet produced a great
poet," he said — like a Walt Whitman in New York, a Baudelaire in Paris —
"poets who capture the spirit of a place."
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