President Bush has nominated Dana Gioia to head the National Endowment for the Arts, a decision that is likely to raise a firestorm of protest from poets and academics. Gioia's credentials are impeccable -- he is a published poet and essayist, has taught writing at Johns Hopkins and Wesleyan, and won an American Book Award this year for his collection of poems Interrogations at Noon. However, the academic left will complain loudly about his corporate background (his resume lists an MBA from Stanford alongside a master's in comparative literature from Harvard, and he worked as vice president of General Foods before becoming a full-time writer); they will also point to his Atlantic Monthly article (and book-length essay of the same name) "Can Poetry Matter?" as evidence of Gioia's, and by extension, Bush's, unreconstructed academic conservatism. In that article, Gioia lambasted the insularity of American poetry circles and creative writing programs:

Decades of public and private funding have created a large professional class for the production and reception of new poetry comprising legions of teachers, graduate students, editors, publishers, and administrators. Based mostly in universities, these groups have gradually become the primary audience for contemporary verse. Consequently, the energy of American poetry, which was once directed outward, is now increasingly focused inward. Reputations are made and rewards distributed within the poetry subculture. To adapt Russell Jacoby's definition of contemporary academic renown from The Last Intellectuals, a "famous" poet now means someone famous only to other poets. But there are enough poets to make that local fame relatively meaningful. Not long ago, "only poets read poetry" was meant as damning criticism. Now it is a proven marketing strategy.

Scorning poets' sense of self-importance and questioning the wisdom of funding their insular, self-enclosed fiefdoms, Gioia hints that his NEA chairmanship will pay neither lip service nor public dollars to the pretentious, fashionably inaccessible versifying so popular among today's academic poets. No doubt there will be heated debates about the role of the poet in society and about the aesthetic validity of contemporary poetic production. We can be sure that Gioia will continue to express doubts about the smug insularity of America's academic and literary subcultures. We can also be sure that the high poetic priesthood will resist and protest Gioia's challenges with all its might, refusing above all to make its writing appeal to those whom Wendy Steiner condescendingly calls "the laity." Feels like the culture wars all over again....