MAKE A GIOIAFUL NOISE:

Poet-leader takes NEA 'beyond the controversies': Arts agency enjoys renewal of support (Toby Eckert, March 19, 2005, COPLEY NEWS SERVICE)

As a group of Marines, some battle-hardened in Iraq, gathered recently at Camp Pendleton to swap stories and get pointers on crafting them into fiction pieces, poems and memoirs, Dana Gioia was observing with a mixture of awe and pride.

The workshop was part of Operation Homecoming, one of Gioia's high-profile initiatives as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. It has brought writers like Tobias Wolff and Tom Clancy to military bases nationwide to coach veterans on their writing, some of which will be published in an anthology.

"I was enormously impressed by these young men and women who were enormously reflective and articulate in talking about their experiences," said Gioia, a noted poet and critic who grew up in the blue-collar enclave of Hawthorne. "It made me understand, even more dramatically, the human importance of these writing workshops."

Back in Washington a couple of weeks later, Gioia was working on another initiative.

"What could we do in the Inglewood-Westchester area of L.A., where we only had one grant last year?" he said he wondered. "I met with some people, we've made phone calls to some of the civic institutions, to try to make sure that we have more applications from that area."

In public and behind the scenes, Gioia (pronounced JOY-ah) has been on a mission the past two years: to rebuild the NEA after more than a decade of being politically and financially battered in the nation's culture wars.

The two prongs of his strategy have been launching popular initiatives like Operation Homecoming and spreading grant funding to more communities, such as Inglewood.

"I would say that the major reform I've made at the endowment can be summarized pretty easily," Gioia said. "Historically, the National Endowment for the Arts thought of itself as a federal agency that served artists. Today, the NEA sees itself as a federal agency which serves the American public by bringing the best of the arts and arts education to all Americans."

Any bureaucrat who serves the people who dole out the money instead of those who receive will be effective, but despised by the latter.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 21, 2005 6:55 AM