Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

Laura Aden Packer, Program Director, Arts

If we were playing a word association game about places in New Jersey, what would be the first thing you’d think of if I said “Camden”? Did you answer “community gardens”? No? Well, you might, after you finish reading this.

Last week, I had the pleasure of visiting with the folks from the Camden City Garden Club for a tour of community and faith-based gardens, organized by Mike Devlin and Glades Zambrana of the Camden City Garden Club and the Reverend Floyd White of the Woodland Avenue Presbyterian Church.

Along for the ride, on the old school bus freshly painted white, were several community gardeners, Jasmine Hall Ratliff from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, New Jersey’s Secretary of State Nina Mitchell Wells, Edward LaPorte, Director of the New Jersey Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, Mark Smith, the chef/owner of Tortilla Press in Collingswood who’s always looking for local sources of food for his restaurant, and an assortment of other interested and interesting people.

We first visited Reverend White’s two gardens, one on 9th and Sylvan and the other on Woodland Avenue, and from there, we made ten more stops over the next three hours, meeting with local gardeners and pastors and their congregants, all of whom so proudly showed off their gardens and described the power of planting and producing nature’s bounty. The food from these gardens is shared between parishes and between neighbors. (more…)

Martin Farawell, Poetry Director

Ted Kooser’s poems are often praised for their clarity and accessibility. His poem “Pearl” might appear at first to be direct and plain speaking. But by the time he reads those closing lines, the listener has been drawn into the realm of the mysterious and inexplicable.

One of the major movements in poetry over the last century was toward a return to common speech. If we listen carefully to how people talk to one another, as Kooser obviously does, we notice they are often most reticent when they have the most to say. This is a familiar personality trait among the Midwestern communities where Kooser has lived much of his life. It is only natural that the silences that pervade the speech of these people should appear in his poems.

But Kooser is not simply transcribing a conversation. Poems get much of their power from what is left unsaid. Kooser accomplishes this compression of language by crafting the features of common speech to his purpose. The results sound so natural to our ear it is easy to forget they were created by an artist.

Kooser’s introduction to “Pearl” does much to help us forget. He tells us the exact date of his mother’s death, and that the poem he’s about to read is an account of his bringing the news to his mother’s last surviving first cousin. In the poem itself, he says through the door when he arrives at Pearl’s house, “It’s Ted. It’s Vera’s boy.” So it is easy to believe this is a true story being told directly and simply.

But notice how closely the description of Pearl first coming to the door is echoed in the description of “the others” at the end of the poem. How much of what we are told occurs are we meant to believe as literally true? And what about the final line of the poem?

Robert Frost used the Biblical term “Dark Sayings” to describe the poems he admired. These are poems that do not appear difficult by drawing attention to a surface complexity, but which appear deceptively direct at first and reveal their deeper layers with each reading. He would find much to admire in Kooser.

“Pearl” appears in Ted Kooser’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, Delights & Shadows. Visit the 2008 Dodge Poetry Festival Poet Pages for a biography of Ted Kooser.

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

David Grant, President and CEO

In her blog post on June 20th, Michelle Knapik invited you to “peer in” as we on the Dodge staff were “peering out” to see what we could learn about the themes of Creativity and Sustainability.

I want to continue in that vein and recommend a book we’ve been talking about, John Ehrenfeld’s Sustainability by Design.

If you think the book is going to be about green buildings or cars that get eighty miles a gallon, you are quickly set straight by its subtitle: “A Subversive Strategy for Transforming Our Consumer Culture.”

In fact, if you’ve been feeling good about driving your Prius to a green office building, he says, in effect, that’s not even half of it. “Reducing unsustainability,” he writes, “although critical, does not and will not create sustainability.” He goes on, “The world is awash with books and news items touting the importance and advantages of ‘green’ products, housing, and institutional practices, but such practices and artifacts are at best only Band-Aids, and at worse they divert our attention from sustainability.”

It is sobering to think you can work around the clock trying to promote sustainability but be losing ground because you are focused on the wrong things.

What does Ehrenfeld focus on? Well, it’s a long book, and we haven’t finished it yet. But it is clear from page one that his own vision of sustainability centers on the word “flourishing” and on the capacity of each individual to push back against some of the assumptions of modernity, particularly that the good life is defined by economic output, that human well-being is separable from that of the natural world, and that technology will solve our problems. In regard to our individual lives, he writes, “We must shift back to the flourishing fullness of ‘Being’ from its impoverished modern form of ‘having.’”

When he writes “shift back,” one worries whether he is romanticizing some time in the past: pre-industrial? pre-urban? pre-computer? But Being with a capital B — that’s a Big Idea (with a capital B) worth pursuing at any time. As I head out today with the Dodge Poetry Committee, visiting possible sites for a 2010 Dodge Poetry Festival, I can’t help but think that’s what we are doing.

Molly de Aguiar, Program Associate

One of the amazing things about Twitter is the instantaneous access to a wide variety of resources, including all kinds of articles we at Dodge think are useful and interesting, not just to us,  but also to our grantees. Often, we tweet about them on Twitter, but in case you’re not a Twitter user yet, here are a few recent social media links we think are worth reading:

Mashable: The Social Media Guide is a go-to resource for social media article and how-tos. Yesterday they posted an interesting article about collaborative blogging. Their list of really informative How-To guides is here.

The Connections blog by Steve MacLaughlin has a great article on social media strategy: Creating a Social Networking Strategy (Part 0). And a useful follow-up: Social Media is a Big Waste of Time. He also has an Online Guide for Nonprofits that you might find useful.

The Case Foundation tells us that nonprofits are taking the lead in using social media – far outpacing universities and businesses. They also link to a great Social Media Strategy Handbook written by Wendy Harman for the Red Cross.

We mentioned last week that Dodge is on Twitter now; you can find us @grdodge. We’re discovering that Twitter is the perfect tool for communicating all of the useful pieces of information that come to us in our field visits, as well as through invitations and emails we receive from our grantees and peers, and through articles and books we’re reading – most of which we’re often not able to get up on our website quickly enough. Twitter, moreso than our website and blog, is the tool that helps us redistribute this information in a very timely way.

Are you on Twitter? Are you struggling with how to best use social media? How can Dodge help you sort through and learn what you need to know about social media? We’d love to know.

Hello from the Dodge Foundation! We’re in the process of upgrading our equipment and migrating our website and blog this week, so we’re taking a brief break from posting to the blog. We hope to have everything up and running by early next week, so that we can get back to our regular schedule, including Poetry Fridays and Ted Kooser, which we promised.

In the meantime, if you’re on Twitter, please follow us @grdodge.

Thank you for taking the time to read our posts and visiting our website. We’ll see you back here in a few days.