Sherry Chandler

Arts Funding

I got an e-mail yesterday under the signataure of Lori Meadows, Executive Director of the Kentucky Arts Council. She reports that she has been in Washington lobbying for “the President’s recommendation for a budget increase of $4 million for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).”

It amazes me that the current government has been, relatively speaking, generous to the arts when they are eager to slash all other government programs unrelated to the “war on terror.” And when conservatives have always tended to lump the NEA in with NPR as the evil-doing enemies in the culture wars.

Dana Goodyear, in The Moneyed Muse, puts forward one explanation:

Some of Gioia’s most visible initiatives at the N.E.A. have involved arranging for Shakespeare and opera to be performed on military bases; Operation Homecoming, which received funding from Boeing, established writers’ workshops for soldiers who have fought in Iraq and in Afghanistan. A recent article in Business Week cited the endowment’s “focus on programs with patriotic themes” as one reason that its budget has increased seven and a half per cent under Gioia….A forthcoming piece, by Steve Evans, in The Baffler, a leftist Chicago magazine, asserts, “Through men like Dana Gioia, John Barr, and Ted Kooser, Karl Rove’s battle-tested blend of unapologetic economic elitism and reactionary cultural populism is now being marketed in the far-off reaches of the poetry world.”

Goodyear is not a disinterested reporter, of course. And Ted Kooser, who has taken a lot of flak, is a good if perhaps not a ground-breaking poet. I sort of hate to see him condemned as a Rovian tool. (I noticed this week that one of Lexington’s free alternative newspapers, Nougat, picks up Kooser’s newspaper column. Guess that speaks volumes about the state of the counterculture in sleepy old Lexington.) Though Ron Silliman would no doubt put him firmly in the School of Quietude, he reaches many people in the circles I travel in, regional poets like himself. Like me. Asked to choose between Eastern elitism (Goodyear) and regionalism (Kooser), I shall bestride the fence the way the Colossus bestrode the harbor in Rhodes. (Notice how the one at right is modestly breech-clothed. I wonder whether Martin Heemskerck took government funding back in the 16th Century.)

But I’ll have to admit that there is something a bit youth-brigadish about Poetry Out Loud, though I can’t really fault any program that pays children for interpreting poetry and brings money to school libraries. I’m not so sure about making it a competition, but that’s just my bleeding heart. Anyway, I’m probably projecting my own boredom at having to memorize a doggeral poem a week in the eighth grade —”‘Tis the schoolhouse that stands by the flag.”* I doubt that Mrs. Broadus thought I’d ever see anything negative in that statement.

Art in the service of patriotism is, of course, the aim of every authoritarian government, and artists who serve a cause are apt to be subsumed by that cause. I am reminded of this passage I read last night (sitting in Ruby Tuesdays, of all places) in Kenneth Rexroth’s American Poetry in the Twentieth Century:

We have now moved to a later literary generation, people born in the early years of the century who came to maturity in the troubled times after 1929. It was a lean season for American poetry. Hundreds of young intellectuals who started out as writers were consumed and cast aside by the Communist Party. Most of them became political activists and gave up writing. The strong-willed ones obeyed the Party Line and dutifully wrote Proletarian literature and Socialist Realism. The stultifying effects of bureaucratic control are more than conclusively shown by the fact that all this passionate activity and commitment produced, in poetry, almost nothing of enduring value.

So has Dana Gioia, and with him John Barr of the Poetry Foundation, pulled the teeth of American poetry? Did it have any teeth to be pulled? Can former Wall Street executives and ad men also be poets of worth? Can a poet in the employee of The New Yorker be a poet of worth?

More on that later.

Here are the ways Lori Meadows says that NEA money serves the arts in Kentucky:

Kentucky is the beneficiary of NEA funding in three ways. The first is through grants to the Kentucky Arts Council for operational and administrative support; funding earmarked for arts education, folk arts and underserved populations; and funding and technical assistance to participate in the national initiatives such as Poetry Out Loud, American Masterpieces and Challenge America. The Kentucky Arts Council ranks 14th out of 56 state and territorial arts agencies in the amount of funding received from the NEA according to the National Association of State Arts Agencies. The second benefit is in grants and awards made directly to Kentucky arts organizations and Kentucky artists. And the third benefit is through grants, programs and services available to Kentuckians through the Southern Arts Federation (also funded by the NEA).

Meadows also says we are a bit underserved (emphasis added):

I would like to encourage our Kentucky arts organizations and artists to take advantage of these direct grants and awards as well as the offerings of the Southern Arts Federation. The number of Kentucky organizations receiving funding is very low compared to other states and the data indicates that it is simply because applications are not being submitted to the NEA and the SAF.

Are Kentucky artists contrary? Well, yes, but probably not too contrary to take government money. I think artists are pretty pragmatic.

*I remember this snippet from childhood but have never been able to find the poem and I have no idea who may have written it. I don’t think I made it up because, for some reason, my thirteen-year-old self resented this one above all. And we had to copy the poems into a notebook and find a suitable illustration. Anybody out there ever heard of a poem like this?

Corollary: from the NYTimes this morning, Play about Iraq War Divides a Connecticut School:

But even as 15 student actors were polishing the script and perfecting their accents for a planned April performance, the school principal last week canceled the play, titled “Voices in Conflict,” citing questions of political balance and context.

…

In response to concerns that the script was too antiwar, Ms. Dickinson reworked it with the help of an English teacher. The revised version is more reflective and less angry, omitting graphic descriptions of killing, crude language and some things that reflect poorly on the Bush administration, like a comparison of how long it took various countries to get their troops bulletproof vests. A critical reference to Donald H. Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, was cut, along with a line from Cpl. Sean Huze saying of soldiers: “Your purpose is to kill.”

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