Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry
Research assistance: Stacey Balkun, Festival Assistant

Iraqi-born Dunya Mikhail was only fifteen-years-old when Saddam Hussein’s armies invaded western Iran in 1980. Just awakening to the possibilities of her own potential as a poet, she had little time to indulge in writing on the themes we might expect to preoccupy someone so young. The Iran-Iraq war would drag on for eight years, and be followed two years later by the first Gulf War with the United States. Because war was the norm in her homeland throughout her teens and early twenties, she emerged as a poet of witness almost out of necessity.

Mikhail has no delusions that writing about war will heal her or her country. Shedding light on a wound doesn’t necessarily heal it. But she believes that poetry can provide a way to see and tell the truth, to force us to look at what we might otherwise turn away from. This can be a dangerous practice in a country whose leader expects its poets and artists to praise every act of their government. Under Hussein, even neutrality was not an option. It suggested a refusal to endorse his regime and was considered an act of defiance.

In 1995, after the publication of Dairy of a Wave Outside the Sea, her fourth collection containing anti-war poems, Mikhail faced increasing harassment. A friend warned her that she needed to leave the country as soon as possible. When two newspaper editors were publicly humiliated and executed, she took that as the final warning it was time for her to flee.

She credits poetry with saving her life.  She was working for the Baghdad Observer at the time, and her passport listed her as a journalist. This presented a problem: For a journalist to leave Iraq, an official leave of absence was required, which could take months. A friend knew someone in the passport office who changed her profession to “poet.” Because poets didn’t need an official leave, this allowed her to make her escape quickly.

After nine months in Jordan, she emigrated to the United States, where she has lived in exile ever since. What she discovered, once she returned to writing, was an unexpected change in her work. No longer worried about the Iraqi censors, her poems, like “The War Works Hard,” became more direct. It was a strange shift, coming from a country where a poet’s words were under careful government scrutiny, to one where it seemed possible to write poetry about anything.

And poetry, she says, allows her to feel at home in her new country. No matter where she is, once she starts writing, poetry makes her feel at home. Living in the United States, she continues to bear witness. Mikhail points out that the first known poet in history was an Iraqi woman, named Enheduanna, who had an official title, “Keeper of the Flame.” That, she believes, is the poet’s role, to be the keeper of the flame.

Author of four poetry collections in Arabic, Dunya Mikhail’s collections available in English are The War Works Hard, and Dairy of a Wave Outside the Sea.

Please use the “Share your thoughts with us” box below to share other resources you may have found for this poet. In this way, we can build together a mini-wiki-encyclopedia on the 2010 Festival Poets.

Return in the weeks ahead as we continue to profile the 2010 Festival Poets.

The third in our four-part guest series from our friends and partners at the Morris Museum and their “The Shoe Must Go On!” exhibit. If you haven’t seen it yet, you have until August 29th!

By Linda Moore
Chief Operating Officer and co-curator of the exhibit

As plans for The Shoe Must Go On! progressed, I realized that this exhibition could continue to evolve beyond the initial opening. Interest grew as more visitors saw the show, and we sensed that more special objects might “walk in” and become part of the exhibition. We saw this as an opportunity to foster deeper connections with our visitors because everyone has a favorite shoe story.

New York Giants’ George Martin’s shoes

Seeing the shoes in the gallery, visitors often thought about unusual shoes or individuals who may have some shoe-worthy accomplishments. One Morris Museum Trustee had this reaction – and reached out to former New York Giants defensive end George Martin. Martin walked across the United States to raise money for medical care for the first responders to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States. He walked from New York City’s George Washington Bridge to San Diego, from September 16, 2007 to June 21, 2008, covering over 3000 miles, using 27 pairs of shoes, and raising $2 million dollars. A pair of Martin’s shoes that made the journey is now on display at the museum, along with a football commemorating his walk. (Take a look at this picture, and consider – how does your shoe compare to the size of a football!)

New York City-based artist Madeleine Appell is a quilter who, earlier this year, made her first visit to the Morris Museum for the popular exhibition, Art Quilts: Contemporary Expressions from the Collection of John M. Walsh III. When she heard about the upcoming shoe exhibition, she promised herself a return visit. When she came to see The Shoe Must Go On! earlier this summer, she brought her quilt, Fancy Footwork, with her. Serendipity was at work that day, as I happened to be available when she inquired at the admissions desk if she could meet me and show me the work. Now Fancy Footwork is hanging on the gallery wall, in close proximity to the “Shoe Madness” display case. “Shoe Madness” is a display of shoe-inspired objects ranging from a cookie jar to a silk scarf to a collection of miniature shoes.

Fancy Footwork quilt by Madeleine Appell

Talking about this quilt, Appell said, “My love of shoes, fashion and making art quilts meshed when I decided to make the Fancy Footwork quilt in 2008. The quilt represents a range of shoe styles that were aesthetic, unique, well-designed and personally appealing.” One of her inspirations for the work was the 2008 exhibition Sole Desire: The Shoes of Christian Louboutin at the Fashion Institute of Technology in March 2008. Louboutin “trash mules” made from recycled materials are on view in the “Green Shoes” section of the exhibition.

Many shoes attract interest because of the historic importance or celebrity status of the owner, rather than the style or uniqueness of the shoe itself. General David Petraeus has been prominently featured in the front page news recently. His well-worn Army boot can be seen in the History and Politics section of the exhibition. Did you know that General Petraeus is a distinguished representative of the great state of New Jersey, where he earned a Masters in Public Affairs and Ph.D. in International Relations from Princeton University?

General David Petraus’ boot

And just added to the exhibition is this high heeled shoe featuring icons of the New York City skyline. I came across these shoes in the collection of a vintage costume dealer and was fascinated by their mixture of high style and novelty – a sort of “Sex and the City”-inspired glamour! The skyline includes the Empire State Building, Statue of Liberty, and World Trade Center Towers. Check them out in the Art & Sole section of the exhibition.

Heels with custom New York City skyline design

Keep an eye out for more shoes in the news!

* * *
The Morris Museum is open Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursdays from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., and Sundays 1 to 5 p.m. We are closed Mondays and Tuesdays.

Admission: $10 for adults; $7 for children/students/seniors.
General admission is free on Thursdays from 5 to 8 p.m.

Guided tours of the exhibition are offered every Saturday at 1 p.m.

When you visit the Morris Museum’s The Shoe Must Go On! exhibition, donate a pair of shoes and receive $1.00 off admission. All shoe donations go to “CUMAC – Feeding People and Changing Lives” in Paterson, NJ.

Please note, the museum will be closed to the public from August 9 to August 15, inclusive.

Today is the last of our Future of Fine Crafts guest series from our friends at the Peters Valley Craft Center, which is set to celebrate its 40th anniversary as a national center for fine craft education.

Special thanks to the contributors to this series: Kristin Muller, Kathe Brannon and Susan Kornacki, as well as today’s guest blogger Julia Whitney who shares with us her assistantship experience from the last 10 weeks. All we have to say is: wow, what a list!

My name is Julia Whitney and I have lived and worked for ten weeks in the Delaware River Gap, assisting nine workshops for the Ceramic Department at Peter’s Valley Craft Center. There are student assistants for each department, chosen by applications, from all over the country.

Traveling from Alton, Illinois a small river town and suburb of St. Louis Missouri, my experience at PV has far exceeded my expectations. I work facilitating ceramic workshops, helping instructors and students, and maintaining equipment, and overall studio conditions. This includes eight to twelve hour days, six days a week. After a long days work I enjoy speeding off on my bicycle to meet fellow assistants to pick black raspberries, and swim in the eddies of the Delaware River. Afterwards we head back to our residence for long conversations at the ever-popular picnic table, or bike back to the studio to make art.

Being the final week of my assistantship at PV, I sat down to reflect on what made the experiences so worthwhile to my growth. Following is a list comprised of points that resonated with me from each workshop that I took directly out of my sketchbook. I think that each of these notations captures a little bit of the essence of the center and what it is that instructors, students and staff take back into their everyday lives.

1. Peters Valley is about educating our intuition to create more freely
2. It is about making a safe place to work, and to share
3. To think about words, and what you want to communicate
4. To express gratitude
5. To ask questions
6. PV is about working for discovery rather than product
7. To develop ideas and use fundamental building blocks to complete the work
8. It is a place to try everything, and figure out what you are doing
9. It is a place to understand when art does and does not work
10. It is a place to build around others, and in doing so, build confidence
11. To be aware of our sensitivities
12. To address concepts of form, surface, and idea
13. To balance between the physical and the visual
14. Students are pushed to ask where their sense of beauty and taste originate
15. To find beauty in organization
16. To use simple materials
17. To work hard, and see results
18. To engage in peer review, research, and discussion
19. It is a place to meet new friends, and reconnect with old acquaintances
20. It is a place to foster your love of learning
21. To practice patience with developing technique
22. To test your limits and break through boundaries
23. Peters Valley encourages engagement in the natural world
24. To make mistakes intentional
25. And to master a material
26. To disregard what you are good at and focus on what you may learn
27. It is a place to create themes, initiate and investigate
28. To build your bibliography
29. And to focus on the sweep of a bowl
30. To collect what happens beyond a photograph.
31. To be resourceful
32. To make “do-dads”
33. To be considerate
34. To heal
35. To help others
36. It is about working with the earth to become connected to the community
37. To increase your vocabulary
38. To understand what you are trying to get back to
39. To seek truths
40. To begin with an idea
41. And then stop to think
42. It is a place to understand the meaning of different
43. To be dependable and selfless
44. To take a technique and push it until it becomes your own
45. To understand an object’s story, and our own personal stories
46. To create metaphor
47. Peters Valley allows you a place to make work for you!
48. To appreciate small gestures
49. To gain inspiration
50. To see the stars
51. It is a place to continually try new things
52. It is a place to question levels of information versus wisdom
53. To focus on the details
54. To realize the full potential of a curve
55. PV is a place to create something done before, and something new
56. To capture visual breadth
57. It is about understanding how you relate to art and life
58. To play
59. To find your voice
60. To put your notes away
61. To develop a personal rhythm
62. To let go of insecurities
63. To let your competitive nature out with a healthy dose of badminton, kick ball, or basketball
64. To open your heart and mind to others
65. And to speak confidently.

I want to say thank you to Peters Valley for making this list possible, as well as to all the instructors I gained these insights from; they include: Kristin Muller, Shanna Fliegel, Joyce Michaud, Chris Staley, Jeff Oestreich, Leigh Taylor-Mickelson, John Dix, Arthur Gonzalez, and Takeshi Yasuda. Thank you to my fellow assistants, as well as the students for creating such a rich and fun learning environment! And a very special thanks to the department head of ceramics, Bruce Dehnert and his wife Kulvinder Kaur Dhew for allowing me the opportunity to grow as an artist and as a person. It has truly been a unique and invaluable experience.

Please visit the Peters Valley Craft Center website for complete information about the center, including their workshops, craft fair and store.

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry
Research assistance: Stacey Balkun, Festival Assistant

In the poem “Last Words” from her collection Smoke, Dorianne Laux asks, “How many losses does it take to stop a heart,/to lay waste to the vocabularies of desire?” Later, in the same collection, in “Stairway to Heaven,” which describes an adolescent listening raptly to the title song on the car radio during a long drive, she writes:

     I’m beholden to any boy brave enough
     to be stunned, to sit still and hushed
     while the grievous tones wash through him
     like dusk.

Laux’s poems thrive in the complex landscape between these two extremes: One, the constant questioning why some lives are worn to death by terrible suffering; the other, the persistence to keep on crafting tiny acts of gratitude for the human capacity for beauty.

Essentially, her poems are prayers to the present; tiny rituals to keep us engaged with the earth, our own lives and other living beings. They make no distinction between the sacred and profane. The act of honoring the specific physical details of living a life on earth is the act of recognizing the mundane is sacred. And so, Laux’s poems are richly sensual. Their sensuality extends far beyond the physical pleasures shared by lovers, which they often celebrate.  In her poems, the scratchy voices of trees in wind, the carved face on a decomposing pumpkin buckling into itself, a cold can of soda held between a driver’s knees all, through our senses, re-attach us to the world.

Laux knows it is a world where some people are crushed: by brutality, poverty, hopelessness, disease. She’s well aware that some people are capable of horrific cruelty, and that others suffer through that cruelty in nightmarish childhoods. She was one such child, with some terrible stories to tell, and tells them with the same unflinching attention she brings to all her work.

But Laux is also an unflinching witness to acts of kindness and the possibility of redemption. Her poems are alive with people who have suffered cruelty and yet have hearts of compassion, and others guilty of brutal acts who are still capable of great tenderness. In the face of these paradoxes, she does not distance herself with irony or offer facile answers. Instead, she returns relentlessly to questions regarding our humanity, and our lack of it. In the process, she helps herself, and us, to find some.

Dorianne Laux’s most recent collection is Facts About the Moon. For a detailed bio and audio recordings of Laux reading two poems, visit the Academy of American Poets’ Dorianne Laux Page.

Please use the “Share your thoughts with us” box below to share other resources you may have found for this poet. In this way, we can build together a mini-wiki-encyclopedia on the 2010 Festival Poets.

Return in the weeks ahead as we continue to profile the 2010 Festival Poets.

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

Like most of his contemporaries, Galway Kinnell  started out writing in traditional forms. The shape of formal verse, with its counted beats and pre-determined quatrains, octaves and couplets, is carried over from the sung lyric, where counted time and the shape of the melody determine the length of each line and stanza. But stanzaic structure was not the only feature borrowed from music. In much of the lyric poetry written in these forms there is also an attempt to imitate the mellifluousness of music itself. John Keats and William Butler Yeats are only two of the masters of this tradition whose influence is evident in Kinnell’s earliest poems.

Yet, in a publishing career that has spanned more than five decades, he has emerged as one of the most distinctive and influential poets of his generation, which includes Allen Ginsberg, W. S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton and James Wright. There is no mistaking Kinnell’s voice in these lines from “Little Sleep’s Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight”:

                                                                       Kiss
     the mouth
     which tells you, here,
     here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones.

     The still undanced cadence of vanishing.

How did such a transformation occur? Speaking with high school students at the first Dodge Festival in 1986, Kinnell said he reached a point in his life where he felt that counting syllables and searching for rhymes didn’t seem like the best way for a grown man to spend his time. Criticizing one of his early poems, “First Song,” he complained the rhyme scheme he’d created had forced him to end a line by describing frogs as singing of “their joy,” when it would have been better, he now felt, to have gone down to the frog pond and listened more closely to the frogs themselves.

When Kinnell, Ginsberg and their contemporaries began writing free-verse, they were influenced by incantation and the rhythms of Hebraic verse as they had come down through William Blake, Christopher Smart and Walt Whitman. But even then, Kinnell’s use of the long line was unique. Whitmanesque rhythms were counter-balanced by a cherishing of the pause, a respect for the power of silences learned from Emily Dickinson and William Carlos Williams, and rooted in Kinnell’s own insistent self-questioning. Since Flower Herding on Mount Manadnock (1964) and Body Rags (1968), his work has sustained a constant tension between the impulse to break out into ecstatic song and the knowledge of how easily a voice can be silenced.

During these years, through his translations of Yves Bonnefoy, Yvan Goll and Francois Villon, he learned to explore the potential of harsher and more jarring sounds and images. By the time Kinnell wrote The Book of Nightmares, Rainer Maria Rilke’s soaring and searching rhetoric had left a clear stamp on his work. But even with these many influences, a distinct voice was always present. For Kinnell, these often long-dead poets were beloved teachers and mentors, who nurtured his constant testing of himself and of the possibilities and limitations of the spoken word.

In all of his collections, but particularly in those of recent decades, there is a sense of a relentless striving toward a poetry that is not based on emulating music, chant, Hebraic verse or any other constructed model, but on the physicality of words themselves. For Kinnell, every word has its own weight, texture, taste and mouth feel, which, as he writes in “Blackberry Eating,” “I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well.” His poems have come closer and closer to a keen appreciation for the value of words for their own unique existence as corporeal things, a savoring of the pure languageness of language.

This is no mere aesthetic exercise, but part of a deeper attentiveness to the sounds of an actual life lived on this earth. On Sunday afternoon of that first Festival, an infant in the concert tent started wailing during Kinnell’s reading. As its young parents rose to leave, Galway stopped in mid-poem to call out “Oh, please don’t take that baby away! A baby’s cry is a tuning fork.” He is still listening. Still writing poems that stun us into silence for their authentic ring.

“Little Sleep’s Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight” appears in The Book of Nightmares and A New Selected Poems, which also includes “Blackberry Eating.” Galway Kinnell’s most recent collections include Strong is Your Hold and Imperfect Thirst.   A rare video of Kinnell reading “The Bear” from memory at Thomas Jefferson College in 1973 is available on YouTube.

Kinnell will read his translation of Rainer Marie Rilke’s Duino Elegies in its entirety on Saturday morning at the 2010 Dodge Poetry Festival.

Please use the “Share your thoughts with us” box below to share other resources you may have found for this poet. In this way, we can build together a mini-wiki-encyclopedia on the 2010 Festival Poets.

Return in the weeks ahead as we continue to profile the 2010 Festival Poets.