Yesterday, while channel surfing, I came across a Dana Gioia interview on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer. The conversation was wrapping up with an impromptu reading of Gioia's poem "Unsaid." I have a vague memory of Gioia: one of my friends in college was really into California poets and New Formalism and tried to encourage my interest in these works—to no avail. (I was seeped in Lispector et al. at the time.) This past January, Gioia became the Chairman of the NEA, the first time a poet has been appointed to that role:
The NEA chair has had an odd and varied image in the past. Some of its occupants have been visible defenders of the arts under fire-actress Jane Alexander comes to mind-while others have been low-key Washington bureaucrats whose names don’t elicit a blink of recognition. Gioia has already cornered the spotlight without the usual kerfuffle to provoke it. (Cynthia Haven, "Dana Gioia Goes to Washington")
Admittedly, I haven't paid any attention to the NEA since
Jane Alexander left in 1997. But it may be time to watch closely how the NEA operates under a poet with an MBA. Wearing a neat suit and tie, Gioia looks more like a banker than a
polemical artist, a Wallace Stevens without the girth. A "safe" choice for a controversial organization—or maybe not. In the course of the conversation, interviewer
Jeffrey Brown remarks:
JB: [To] take this a step further, Shakespeare is a dead, English writer. Why not, here you are, why not, in a government agency give that money to a contemporary American playwright to create something new?
DG: One of the beauties of the Shakespeare program is that we've gotten people so excited about it that we've been able to raise more money from congress, as well as places like the Department of Defense, The Sallie Mae Fund, so we've been able in a sense to create the largest program in our history while still doing all of our normal theater activities. In fact, last year, in addition to doing Shakespeare we were able to foster 135 world premiers of new American works. So the beauty is that we are able to do both of those things.
This is equation makes sense the way trickle-down economics made sense for about a nanosecond, until you begin to wonder just how quickly the DOD would rescind its financial support the minute an NEA grantee produces an anti-military piece. Save your pennies, New Artist!
In his 1991 essay "Can Poetry Matter?," Gioia makes the following observation:
[P]oetry is not alone among the arts in its marginal position. If the audience for poetry has declined into a subculture of specialists, so too have the audiences for most contemporary art forms, from serious drama to jazz. The unprecedented fragmentation of American high culture during the past half century has left most arts in isolation from one another as well as from the general audience. Contemporary classical music scarcely exists as a living art outside university departments and conservatories. Jazz, which once commanded a broad popular audience, has become the semi-private domain of aficionados and musicians. (Today even influential jazz innovators cannot find places to perform in many metropolitan centers—and for an improvisatory art the inability to perform is a crippling liability.) Much serious drama is now confined to the margins of American theater, where it is seen only by actors, aspiring actors, playwrights, and a few diehard fans. Only the visual arts, perhaps because of their financial glamour and upper-class support, have largely escaped the decline in public attention.
In his interview with Brown, Gioia reiterates his concern that most contemporary art occurs in disparate subcultures estranged from the general public. But what he doesn't acknowledge, either in his earlier essay or in this interview, is that, in art, margins are constantly generating new centers (take jazz for instance). The NEA's grandiose art initiatives are wonderful but what long-term measures is it going to take to protect smaller, radical projects? Gioia is
dismayed that U.S. adults don't read literature, "very broadly defined" says Brown, but I have to wonder—in light of his remarks on "subcultures"— if comic books, graphic novels, and cyber-fiction, for example, factor into the equation. I want to take his concerns seriously but I don't trust his parameters.
An audio recording of the interview (9 min) is currently available and well worth a listen.
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