Dana Gioia has had a 50-plus year career in the arts, education and business, and was both a former poet laureate of California and chair of the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA). After various addresses along the way, from New York to Los Angeles, Boston, Washington and Vienna, he now makes his home nearby. “Sonoma County is where I have chosen to live,” he said recently. “It’s the loveliest place in the world when it’s not on fire.”
On Tuesday, July 28, Gioia will lead a discussion of the poems of Elizabeth Bishop at the Healdsburg Library. He has said that Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) “stands as the most highly regarded American poet of the second half of the 20th century.”
Gioia took grad classes at Harvard from Bishop, and they tried to stay in touch. “She asked me to visit her when I came to Boston, but I never saw her again,” he said. “She died a few years later in 1979.” It was a starting point for our conversation.
Simons: How does your knowing Bishop as a professor and as a person affect your approach to her as a poet?
Dana Gioia: If you know a writer personally, you see things that would take an outsider greater effort to discover. I knew Bishop well for a short period. I saw her in public and in private … I can hear her physical voice in the poems. The key thing to remember reading her poetry is that every word matters. Nothing is accidental or provisional.
You became chair of the NEA in 2002, and were later called “the man who saved the NEA.” What do you see in the NEA now, and in arts funding in these contentious times?
In politics, the arts require constant advocacy. At present, there is no effective public voice in Washington advocating the arts.
Let me bring the problem home. No place in human history has produced so much wealth as Silicon Valley. But unlike other periods of prosperity, this bounty has produced almost no meaningful support of the arts. Private philanthropy has been the engine that built the American arts. In California, that great tradition has stopped. San Jose should be our new Florence. Instead, it can hardly measure up to the old San Jose.
As the cynic might ask, does poetry still matter? Why?
Poetry will matter as long as human beings use words to communicate. Poetry is our most concise, moving and memorable way to use language to describe our existence.
[But] literary life in Sonoma County is fragile. It depends almost entirely on the effort and dedication of unpaid individuals such as Denise Low [of The 222], Steve Trenam [of SRJC] or Iris Jamahl Dunkle. There will be years of wonderful events in towns like Sebastopol or Occidental. Then suddenly they stop when someone moves away or dies.
Dana Gioia will lead a discussion of the poems of Elizabeth Bishop in the Forum Room of the Healdsburg Library on Tuesday, July 28, starting at 6pm. Free and open to the public; online registration is suggested at tinyurl.com/bdh6kzhv.
