|
|
 |
 |
Poet Dana Gioia Goes to Washington
February, 2003 I’m probably the only person in human history who decided to go to Stanford Business School to become a poet,” Dana Gioia, MBA ’77, once joked in the Santa Rosa Democrat. Now that education may pay off in a different way, as President Bush has nominated the Sonoma County poet and critic to run the National Endowment for the Arts, the organization that at least since the Reagan administration has been a lightning rod for impassioned debates about the direction of culture in this country. Gioia seems an ideal candidate, having set off several cultural debates himself with essays such as “Can Poetry Matter?,” published in 1991 around the time he quit being a vice president of General Foods. The essay argued that a clubby academic subculture was preventing poetry from being widely available to the mainstream. His last poetry volume, Interrogations at Noon, won the American Book Award last year, and his experience in management should help him manage the agency’s $115 million budget and periodic controversies over how it is spent. Gioia told the Washington Post that he accepted the nomination because, “I think it is important for American artists to play some role in making a case for the arts in the public world.” In Sonoma, where he lives with his wife, GSB classmate Mary Hiecke, and their two sons, Gioia has been the force behind an annual county book fair and a national poetry teaching conference. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Previous Spreadsheet
