Dana Gioia is announcing today that in January he will be leaving the National Endowment for the Arts, which he has chaired for the past six years. “Six years is a long time in a job,” he told the Washington Post. “I have done most of the things I set out to do. I really want to go back to writing. I haven’t had time for my own writing. I write all the time for the NEA, official writing. Since I have become chairman, I have not published a poem.”
As readers of this blog know, President Bush nominated me to sit on the National Council on the Arts, and the Senate confirmed me unanimously to a six-year term in 2004. It was, of course, Dana’s idea that I should serve on the NCA–we are old friends–and I accepted unhesitatingly, albeit a little nervously. Since then, though, I’ve seen from the inside how the NEA operates, and I’ve been very impressed. As for Dana, I recently told a colleague of mine that I thought he might well be remembered as the Bush administration’s single most effective appointee. The Post says that he is “credited with helping revitalize” the NEA. That’s putting it mildly.
Be that as it may, it also happens that Dana is a marvelous poet, and it strikes me that the world is more in need of poets than administrators. To be sure, one of his most beautiful poems, “Words,” questions the importance of poetry itself:
The world does not need words. It articulates itself
in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path
are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.
The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.
The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.
True enough–but a man who can write like that ought not to spend too long in the stony wilderness of bureaucratic endeavor, no matter how worthy the cause may be. So hit the road, Dana, and don’t forget to bring your pad and pencil! You have work to do.
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The Post story announcing Dana’s departure is here.