Michael Dana Gioia (born December 24, 1950) is an American poet and critic who retired early from his career as a corporate executive at General Foods to write full time. Since January 29, 2003, he has been chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, the United States government's arts agency, and has worked to revitalize an organization that had become gun-shy after the bitter controversies that surrounded it in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Gioia has sought to encourage what he calls the only uniquely American form of art, jazz, as well as promoting William Shakespeare and trying to increase the number of Americans reading literature. Before taking the NEA post, Gioia was a resident of Santa Rosa, California, and before that, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.

Early years

Michael Dana Gioia—he does not use his first name and pronounces his surname "JOY-uh" — was born in Hawthorne, California (although Who's Who says Los Angeles), the son of Michael and Dorothy (Ortiz) Gioia. He grew up in Hawthorne, "speaking Italian in a Mexican neighborhood," he said. His father was the son of immigrants from Sicily and his mother was a native Californian of Mexican heritage. He grew up amid a jumble of languages: English, Italian, Spanish, and the Latin of the Catholic church.

Gioia attended Junípero Serra High School in Gardena, California. He received his B.A. from Stanford University in 1973, an M.A. from Harvard University in 1975, and an M.B.A. from Stanford Business School in 1977. After college, he joined General Foods Corporation and served as vice-president of marketing from 1977 to 1992. He was on the team that invented Jell-O Jigglers.

In 1992, he quit to write full-time. But even when at General Foods, he was writing, producing several books of poetry. He won the Frederick Bock Award for poetry in 1986, and his 1991 poetry collection The Gods of Winter won the 1992 Poets' Prize. Gioia is classed as one of the "New Formalists", who write in traditional forms and have declared that this return to rhyme and more fixed meters is the new avant-garde.

From 1971 to 1973 Gioia was editor of Sequoia Magazine and its poetry editor from 1975 to 1977. From 1977 to 1979, he was literary editor of Inquiry Magazine and its poetry editor from 1979 to 1983.

He has two sons: Michael and Theodore "Ted" Jasper Gioia.

Writing full time

Since becoming a full-time writer, Gioia has served as vice-president of the Poetry Society of America from 1992 and as music critic for San Francisco magazine from 1997. He also wrote the libretto of the opera Nosferatu (2001).

Gioia objects to how marginalized poetry has become in America, faulting university English departments for appropriating the field from the public:

The voluntary audience of serious contemporary poetry consists mainly of poets, would-be poets, and a few critics. Additionally, there is a slightly larger involuntary and ephemeral audience consisting of students who read contemporary poetry as assigned course work. In sociological terms, it is surely significant that most members of the poetry subculture are literally paid to read poetry: most established poets and critics now work for large educational institutions. Over the last half-century, literary bohemia had been replaced by an academic bureaucracy.

Better known as a critic than as a poet, he wrote a book about these issues, Can Poetry Matter? and lectured widely on his thesis, which provoked a spirited debate on the topic.

NEA chairman

Gioia was President George W. Bush's second choice to lead the NEA, the first, composer Michael P. Hammond, having died only a week after taking office as the NEA's eighth chairman in January 2002. "I found an agency that was demoralized, defensive, and unconfident. It had been under constant assault for about fifteen years and it was suffering from the institutional version of battered child syndrome," said Gioia. "I don't think the NEA has done a very good job of serving America," he declared.

Gioia brought a new visibility to the agency and wooed Congressional Republicans, actually getting a sizable increase in his agency's budget. "Dana is a superb politician. He knows how to talk to Congress and to the arts community, and to state and federal agencies and to the complex, gigantic, fire-breathing beast called the White House," said David Gelernter of Yale University.

At the NEA, Gioia created new programs such as Shakespeare in Communities, bringing the Bard to small towns, and NEA Jazz Masters, promoting jazz music. The NEA presents an annual award for jazz that Gioia would like to see become the jazz equivalent of a Pulitzer Prize. "We have a generation of Americans growing up who have never been to the theatre, the symphony, opera, dance, who have never heard fine jazz, and who increasingly don't read," said Gioia in justifying his new efforts.

Gioia is not without critics, however. Many Congressmen believe the government wants the NEA abolished because it exceeds the Constitutional functions of government. In the arts community, some fault the NEA for abandoning its grants to individual artists that were terminated after controversy over Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano, and others; though, "Fellowships in prose (fiction and creative nonfiction) or poetry are available to published creative writers of exceptional talent." And Gioia's new programs, for which the NEA has sought corporate and foundation support, worry other arts organizations because the NEA is now competing with them for funding.

Gioia has also sought to promote reading among Americans. In July 2004, the NEA released a study showing how little time Americans were dedicating to literature. In 2005, he began what he called the "Big Read" program, seeking to get Americans to reading serious literature, akin to the city-wide reading programs undertaken by several American cities such as Seattle, Cincinnati, and Chicago.

Gioia is keen to do anything that can make the arts more available to the public. "Arts are not a luxury," he says.

In 2007, Gioia was named the 2007 commencement speaker for his alma mater, Stanford University. His selection was a source of controversy between the class of 2007 and the administration. In his commencement address, he lamented the fallout from the dominance of celebrity and fame as societal values: ". . . we live in a culture that barely acknowledges and rarely celebrates the arts or artists . . . When virtually all of a culture's celebrated figures are in sports or entertainment, how few possible role models we offer the young . . . There are so many other ways to lead a successful and meaningful life that are not denominated by money or fame. Adult life begins in a child's imagination, and we've relinquished that imagination to the marketplace.

Books

Poetry

• Daily Horoscope (1986)
• The Gods of Winter (1991)
• Interrogations at Noon (2001)

Criticism

• Can Poetry Matter? (1992)
• Barrier of a Common Language: An American Looks at Contemporary British Poetry (Poets on Poetry) (2003)
• Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture (2004)

Translation

• Eugenio Montale's Motteti: Poem's of Love (translator) (1990)
• The Madness of Hercules (Hercules Furens) (translator). Included in Seneca: The Tragedies, Volume II, published by Johns Hopkins (1995)

Edited

• New Italian Poets (editor, with Michael Palma) (1991)
• Certain Solitudes: On the Poetry of Donald Justice (editor, with William Logan) (1998)
• California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (California Legacy) (editor, with others) (2003)
• The Misread City: New Literary Los Angeles (editor, with Scott Timberg) (2003)

Contributor

• My California: Journeys by Great Writers (contributor / 2004)

Gioia has also written or co-written a number of texts used in college courses, including the anthology (edited with Dan Stone) 100 Great Poets of the English Language (2004). He is also the author of countless many essays and reviews.

Writings about Dana Gioia and His Work

• April Lindner. Dana Gioia (Boise State University Western Writers Series, No. 143) (2003)
• Jack W. C. Hagstrom and Bill Morgan. Dana Gioia: A Descriptive Bibliography with Critical Essays (2002)

Notes

References

• American Perspectives. C-SPAN. February 21, 2004. (Presentation of talk Gioia gave at the Agassi Theatre, Harvard University, February 9, 2004).
• Cynthia Haven. "Dana Gioia Goes to Washington". Commonweal. November 21, 2003
• Cynthia Haven. "Poet Provocateur", Stanford Magazine, July/August 2000.
• Belinda Lanks. "Bush Picks Poet for NEA", ARTnews December 2002
• John J. Miller. "Up from Mapplethorpe". The National Review. March 8, 2004.
• Jim Milliot. "Gioia vows to change America's reading habits." Publishers Weekly. June 27, 2005.
• "Reviving the Bard" (editorial). The New Criterion. December 2003.
• Bruce Weber. "Poet Brokers Truce in Culture Wars." The New York Times. September 7, 2004.
• World Authors 1990-1995 New York: H.W. Wilson, 1999

See also

• Poetry of the United States

External links

• His official NEA page, with photo
• Dana Gioia Online (archive and reference site)
• Text of 2007 Stanford Commencement address