National Endowment for the Arts Chair Dana Gioia to get back to first love: penning poems
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Though no statistics are available on this subject, we’re guessing that Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, remains the only George W. Bush appointee who is also a professional poet.
Californian Gioia, 57, is announcing plans to step down as chairman of the NEA effective in January 2009, more than a year before his current term ends. He’s taking a part-time job as the first director of the Aspen Institute’s Harman-Eisner (H/E) Program in the Arts, heading up the Washington, D.C.-based think tank’s first arts initiative.
During a recent conversation with The Times, Gioia joked that he took the part-time Aspen Institute gig to be able to pay for his sons Ted, 19, and Mike, 15, to go to college. Also, he said, he didn’t want the kids to think they had a deadbeat dad who was jumping entirely out of the cultural rat race to return full-time to his first love -- writing poetry -- an activity that would seem to call for a lot of solo brooding on the beach and perhaps a full beard.
Gioia plans to do the cultural-leader thing at the institute in D.C., but fly home to Sonoma County to write: ‘Virginia Woolf wanted ‘a room of one’s own’; I wanted a state of one’s own,’ Gioia says.
Since we’ve written a lot about Gioia as government honcho, less about his literary role, we thought it was time to ask him for a few of his favorite poems about California. He obliged with these evocative titles: ‘Los Angeles After the Rain,’ ‘Cruising with the Beach Boys,’ ‘In Chandler Country’ and ‘California Hills in August.’
Gioia’s poems, however, are not haiku; in fact, some go on for several pages -- so they’re too unwieldy to reprint here. But if you want to read ‘California Hills,’ it’s there for the downloading on Gioia’s website, where you can also see more of Gioia’s work.
-- Diane Haithman