YESTERDAY, the White House announced the choice of 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.
It’s going to be a struggle for even determined opponents of President Bush’s appointments to complain about the 51-year-old Mr. Gioia. The son of blue-collar Italian and Mexican immigrants in California, he has both an M.A. in literature from Harvard and an M.B.A. from Stanford. For 15 years, he worked as an executive, rising to become a vice president of General Foods–and then abandoned his business career in 1992 to begin writing and promoting poetry fulltime. Along the way, he’s published three books of poetry, translations of Montale’s Italian and Seneca’s Latin, a long series of music reviews, and the libretto for a well-received neo-romantic opera called “Nosferatu.”
