Can you remember your first experience with art and feeling creative? I can still close my eyes and smell the green thick paint that my kindergarten teacher squirted on a blank shiny white piece of paper and how elated I was when she gave me permission to paint with my fingers. Such freedom, such ecstasy I felt as I proceeded to get messy and create beautiful art. As my years in school progressed, those opportunities became rarer and rarer, but I continued to look forward to any art class I could squeeze in, making the campaign posters for just about anyone who asked, and turning a research project into a shoebox diorama whenever possible. (more…)
A hundred years have passed since the free-verse revolution. Yet the question still emerges of what makes a piece of writing that doesn’t rhyme a poem, and how does it differ from prose. It helps if you begin with a simple distinction: The basic building block of prose is the sentence; the basic building block of poetry is the line. Now listen to Jane Hirshfield read five short poems.
Yes, these five poems are written in recognizable sentences. But the movement and pacing of the language, which creates the rhythmic shape of each poem, is determined by the line. Hirshfield is so attentive to the shape of language that you can almost hear the poem progress, line by line, as she reads.
That we can’t see the printed lines to know where they break on the page offers an opportunity to experience more fully the difference between the line and the sentence. (more…)
Paula Crossfield (pictured above) persuaded the board members of her co-op in New York City to put a 400 square-foot garden on the building’s recently renovated roof.
Whew! Grant letters for three dockets (Arts, Environment and Livable Morristown) just went out the door, and the Education grant letters went out in March. That’s a year’s worth of grantmaking in six months. Team Dodge did this to make room for some serious Q2 time (i.e., the time for organizational development activities that are important, but not urgent, and all too often do not get done) . (more…)
Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry
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In the video below, filmed at the 2008 Festival, Edward Hirsch stands before a capacity crowd of more than 2,000. Hirsch is halfway through a day of poetry conversations with educators who have come from all over the country to participate in Teacher Day. His excitement is palpable as he reads two of his poems, “A Partial History of My Stupidity” and “The Widening Sky.”
It is not surprising that Hirsch is so obviously delighted at being part of the group gathered under the Concert Tent. He deeply values the sense of community we can experience through poems. For Hirsch, poetry is eternal and global: When a poem speaks to us, even one written hundreds of years ago, we join with everyone who has ever read or heard that poem.
His poems almost seem acts of gratitude for having been allowed into this community. With that gratitude comes a deep respect for the difficulty of writing a poem. Hirsch has said that once he knew he wanted to be a poet, he thought “reading everything” was part of the job description. He understood that in order to make your own poems, you have to know how other poets made theirs.
Yet he wears his erudition lightly. “A Partial History of My Stupidity” opens with gentle humor concerning an immediately recognizable predicament: making a wrong turn that gets him hopelessly stranded in traffic. The language seems direct enough, and yet, as the poem progresses, the speaker’s self-indictments grow increasingly troubling.
The revelations in this poem, and in the closing lines of “The Widening Sky,” take us in directions we are not quite prepared for. In this, they are like most self-discoveries. Listening to Hirsch, it is easy to imagine he wasn’t ready for these revelations either. But once they emerged, he had to share them. Because that’s what poems are: one human being speaking to other human beings. And what we say to each other should matter.
Be sure to return for upcoming Poetry Fridays, when we will feature many poets from past Dodge Poetry Festivals in the weeks ahead, including Jane Hirshfield, Ted Kooser, Maxine Kumin, Naomi Shihab Nye, Sharon Olds and others.
