Badass Republican Poet Dana Gioia Scores Dream Job as Head of National Endowment for the Arts

A little old poetry news from 2003: This could turn out very well or very ugly...he did already score the Arts another 10 mil but who are we kidding... some of this crap is like the National Book Awards: elitest bullshit back patting sessions for the upper-tier literati and art hounds. Please do write this gentleman a letter (I'm sure he could stand to hear form more radicals, anarchists, and liberals) regarding your personal views of poetry and art and how $132 million dollars should be spent on them! Check out his books Can Poetry Matter and Disappearing Ink, they're quite good. Dana Gioia's pretty cool personal site is here.

"For 15 years, Dana Gioia was a man whose heart was pulled in two directions. As he rose through the marketing ranks at General Foods, resurrecting the Jell-O brand and ultimately reaching the position of vice-president, he also was writing serious poetry. His first collection was published in 1986, and in 1991, when his controversial essay "Can Poetry Matter?" ran in The Atlantic Monthly -- the essay argued that current poetry, trapped in the "intellectual ghetto" of academia, needed to have its "vulgar vitality" restored and made available to all -- it elicited 400 letters from readers and a flurry of media attention." Read More...

Again, thanks Bookslut!