Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

Naomi Shihab Nye’s poems are known for their cherishing of everyday objects and acts. She has said that writing poetry requires giving attention to the world. But what is a poet to do in a time of war, when giving such attention requires confronting horrors?

A poet could avoid the dilemma by taking the position that poetry shouldn’t be “political.” But Nye’s poems are attempts to stay connected to the world and to others. She refuses to abandon the attempt despite the violence and injustice she must therefore bear witness to. It is almost as if she discovers how we are connected through the act of bearing witness. Perhaps for Nye poetry itself is our humanity’s survival mechanism.

Nye has also said the courage she most admires is that of people who keep giving attention to the simple acts of everyday life—talking over coffee, getting kids ready for school, sweeping the front porch stoop—while there is chaos and danger all around them.

The simple creative act of writing a poem in the midst of destructive forces also requires courage. It is easy in the face of the last century of human history to proclaim that poetry changes nothing, that it never stopped a war, never halted any atrocity, and therefore does not matter. But the same charge could be levied against music, religion, philosophy, psychology, science, human reason and love.

Love requires that we give our attention to another, however difficult it may sometimes be. We must love them, with all their human flaws and foibles, and not some idealized, false image. Nye reminds us that loving the world, and one’s own country, requires the same quality of attention.

“Letters My Prez Is Not Sending” and “Ted Kooser Is My President” can be found in Naomi Shihab Nye’s newest collection, Honeybee. Visit the 2008 Dodge Poetry Festival Poet Pages for a biography of Naomi Shihab Nye.

Be sure to return for upcoming Poetry Fridays, when we will feature many poets from past Dodge Poetry Festivals in the weeks ahead, including Sharon Olds, Linda Pastan, C. D. Wright and others.

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Michelle Knapik, Environment Program Director

Choosing a starting place for the story of the opening of Nat Turner Park, the largest City-owned park in Newark, is challenging. This is a rich, multi-layered story, filled with numerous champions, diverse entry points and, finally (after nearly 30 years), the realization of many hopes and dreams. (more…)

Michelle Knapik, Environment Program Director

In mid-July I took my grandmother out for a ride through the rolling hills and farmlands of central Pennsylvania. She was anxious to see if the corn was knee high (by the 4th of July – just to finish the old adage) and concerned that the record June rains might have delayed the growing season. As we drove, her field assessments were mostly positive and she felt quite content knowing that she would soon being buying corn from a nearby farm stand. This has been the pattern of her life – connecting farmers, weather, and growing seasons to available fresh (delicious) food.

Today, thanks to organizations like Isles, residents of our urban centers are starting to identify with “knee high by 4th of July,” as well as other notions of gardening and farming as vehicles of neighborhood transformation and community and personal health and wealth. (more…)

Listen to Maxine Kumin read “After Love,” “Summer Meditation,” and “The Final Poem.” She challenges all our assumptions about what we categorize as “nature poetry.”

In Mardi, Herman Melville wrote, “As well hate a seraph, as a shark. Both were made by the same hand.” Melville had worked on a whaling ship. He knew from first-hand experience that William Wordsworth’s “Nature never did betray the heart that loved her” was an unrealistic romanticized view.

Maxine Kumin, too, having worked a farm most of her adult life and survived a near-fatal riding accident, knows that sudden violence and death are constants in nature. Yet she discovers, in poem after poem, that we don’t have to deny nature’s brutality to love it.

Kumin introduces, “Summer Meditation” as “a farm poem.” Yet, from the startling first line, “It isn’t gunfire that wakes me,” through the revelation that one of the farmhand’s sons is fighting in Iraq, to the closing speculations on the experience of death, the poem meditates on concerns that extend far beyond the boundaries of the little farm.

Or do they? Perhaps the larger violence of war is as much a part of nature as the killings of insects is a fact of daily life on the farm. Kumin refuses to turn a blind eye to anything she sees, but she also refuses to surrender to hopelessness. Her careful observations and her own experiences have shown her that nature is also the place of constant rebirth and repair.

“After Love” appears in Selected Poems, “Summer Meditation” in Jack and Other New Poems, and “The Final Poem” in Still to Mow. Visit the 2008 Dodge Poetry Festival Poet Pages for a biography of Maxine Kumin.

Be sure to return for upcoming Poetry Fridays, when we will feature many poets from past Dodge Poetry Festivals in the weeks ahead, including, Naomi Shihab Nye, Sharon Olds, C. D. Wright, Franz Wright and others.

Wendy Liscow, Program Officer

I was still hearing Harmonium Choral Society’s haunting and powerful May concert in my head when we received the good news: Chorus America, a non-profit service organization dedicated to building a dynamic national choral community, awarded Harmonium Choral Society the 2009 Education Outreach Award at their 32^nd Annual Conference in Philadelphia last week.

The $2,500 award recognizes Harmonium’s 12-year commitment to encouraging New Jersey high school students to compose choral works through their New Jersey High School Student Choral Composition Contest.

It was especially exciting because I had recently heard the 12^th Annual Contest winners’ compositions performed at Harmonium’s “Worlds Untraveled: Music of the Soul” concert.  The gifted young artists honored at the concert definitely made the case for the award. The grand prize winner, Michael Rosin, is a junior at Westfield High School and has been composing for five years.  The sophistication of his work was evident in his evocative piece “Sapientia Pacis,” which incorporated the Old Testament verses Wisdom 3:1-3 in Latin, one of four texts provided by Harmonium for the contest.

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