Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

Robin Robertson savors the flavor and texture of words as much as he does their capacity to connect us to the physical world through the carefully wrought image. Listen to his reading of four short poems during the Saturday Night Poetry Sampler at the 2008 Dodge Poetry Festival.

Words are corporeal for Robertson. It is as if the oral/aural qualities of syllables themselves—pitch, tone, texture, duration—were the characteristics of physical objects. One can almost feel him weighing words in his hands to find the perfect fit.

He is just as careful in choosing the exact detail. Robinson reminds us that imagery extends beyond the visual. His poems are full of tactile, olfactory, and auditory images that engage all the senses. We can almost taste the “Artichoke” in his poem.

But he does not relish the shape and feel of words for their own sake, and his attention to detail is about more than technique. A poem like “Ghost of a Garden” reminds us that living in the world means living with irreparable loss. Robertson brings the same quality of careful attention to this poem as he does to “Artichoke” and “Wedding the Blacksmith’s Daughter,” two poems that celebrate sensual pleasures.

For Robertson, the act of cherishing just the right syllable or descriptive detail is the act of cherishing the world. This act is even more important in those poems, like “Donegal,” which confront the truth that we are transitory creatures.

“Artichoke” is from Robertson’s first collection, The Painted Field. “Wedding the Locksmith’s Daughter” appears in Slow Air. “Ghost of a Garden” and “Donegal” are from his latest collection Swithering. Robertson has also written a modern translation of Euripides’ Medea. A biography of Robin Robertson can be found in the 2008 Festival Poet Pages.

Return to Poetry Fridays in the weeks ahead, when we will feature video clips of readings by Patrcia Smith, Kevin Young and others.

David Grant, President and CEO

We lost a great educator last week. I suspect that many of us in the boomer generation who went into teaching paused over Ted Sizer’s obituary in The New York Times with appreciation for the man who dominated our sense of what good schools – and good teaching – should be like.

One of Sizer’s metaphors was “teacher as coach.” It is a profound notion if you contrast it with the unspoken alternative in the schools where I first learned to teach – teacher as star. When you have a good coach, the students become the stars. It was at the center of Sizer’s vision of a good school – the students are the stars. As someone who experienced the seduction of the other model, I felt as if he saved me.

In one of his books, he wrote that in good schools, “students feel known and know where they are going.” Simply being known set the stage for commitment and achievement. That has affected my ideas about scale and about how communities should work ever since.

The coalition of schools inspired by Sizer’s work are called “Essential Schools,” and the adjective “essential” is most often used to modify “questions.” Sizer believed you should build your curriculum around questions that don’t have right answers. You never get to the end of essential questions, in school or in a lifetime of learning. But the pursuit of these questions is at the heart of a liberal education. Here too I feel his influence in my daily work: What is effective philanthropy? What does a humane and sustainable society look like?

My work as co-founder of The Mountain School in Vermont brought me together with Ted Sizer over the years. Once, in a speech he gave at The Putney School, he cited The Mountain School as an example of how independent schools should use their independence. For me, it might as well have been God saying, “And it was good.”

When my wife Nancy and I visited Ted at his home to talk about how to measure the impact of The Mountain School on its students – how to “prove” its effectiveness — he said, “Don’t bother. The sample is too small. The students self-select. There is no control group.” Then he grinned, “But you have your graduates. Just tell their stories.” So that’s what we did.

And I tell this story, too, the week after his death, with deep respect and gratitude.

photo: John Foraste/Brown University

Laura Aden Packer, Program Director, Arts

It’s not easy being a nonprofit arts organization in New Jersey according to the latest results of a survey done by ArtPride/New Jersey, our state’s arts advocacy organization. And it’s really tough being an employee of a nonprofit arts company. Ann Marie Miller, ArtPride’s Executive Director, surveyed the arts field back in February, at the height of the economic downturn. She re-surveyed the field in early September and the results were quite interesting, although not surprising.

An excellent cross-section of organizations responded, 139 in all. This cohort:

• Had budgets ranging from under $100,000 to over $10 million.
• Had great geographic distribution: 28% of the respondents were organizations based in south Jersey; 33% central Jersey; and 39% north Jersey.
• Was diverse: one-third focused on performing arts, one-third on community/arts education; 19% were visual arts oriented; and 13% were service organizations and/or local arts councils.

Here are some of the key findings from the survey:

Income:

Earned income (such as ticket sales) has stayed relatively flat – that’s the good news. 56% reported a decrease in foundation support; 63% received decreased support from corporations (32% of which were down by 25% or more); 77% saw less government dollars (not surprising, considering the New Jersey State Council on the Arts suffered a 25% cut this year); and 46% reported that support from individuals had declined.

Programming:

• 27% had eliminated some programs; 28% had decreased programming
• 92 programs, 20 exhibitions, 18 productions and 127 performances had been cancelled. And what was most frequently cited as eliminated? Free programs in the schools.

Staffing:

• 39% of organizations had reduced their staff in the prior six months; 17% more expected to within the next six months.
• 132 positions had been eliminated, running the gamut from receptionist to executive director.
• 29% had reduced administrative hours and/or hours open to the public. An additional 17% expected to do so in the next six months.
• Many organizations reported using salary decreases, furloughs, reduced hours and moving from 5-day to 4-day work weeks (with 20% cuts in pay) as strategies for survival.

Finances:

• 40% predicted that they would not have a deficit in FY ’09. 25% weren’t sure yet. 35% thought they would have an ’09 deficit.
• Organizations were predicting anywhere from a 10% to a 50% cut in their operating budgets for 2010.

But arts organizations are beginning to feel a bit more optimistic. When asked back in February what they thought the future would hold, 63% thought things would get worse in the next six months. By September, only 26% were thinking things were going to get worse; a healthy group of glass half-fullers – 28% – thought the economic climate would get better.

What kinds of measures did your organization take during the height of the economic crisis to contain costs and secure future financial stability? Which strategies worked and why? Which ones didn’t? Are you more optimistic now about the future of your organization than you were six months ago? What do you think the future holds for public funding of the arts in the next year? Leave your comments for us below – they could be extremely helpful to your fellow nonprofit organizations.

To find out more about our state’s arts community, visit ArtPride’s website. There you will find all kinds of up-to-date information, including the answers to questions regarding the arts that ArtPride posed to the three major candidates for governor. There is also a link to the gubernatorial debate which took place on Thursday, October 22 and was aired on WBGO and other public television stations. A question about arts funding was featured prominently, and the responses from the candidates are quite informative about their perspective on the importance of the arts and state arts funding.

Are you on Twitter? Dodge wants to connect with you, especially if you are a Dodge grantee. Find us @grdodge.

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

Poet Jack Wiler has been a part of the Dodge poetry community for over twenty years. He read at the 1988, 1996 and 2006 Poetry Festivals, and throughout those years worked with New Jersey teachers and high school students in our Poetry-in-the-Schools Program. All of us at Dodge are deeply saddened by the news of his passing.

Jack’s was a singular and unmistakable voice. His poems were fueled by a quest to understand what it meant to be a human being living in America in these particular times, by bewilderment at our capacity to wound ourselves and others, by an urgency that we embrace the possibilities of life while they are available to us, and by impatience that we so often fail to do so.

To hear Jack read his poems meant to laugh until you ached. His poems often startled and provoked even as they made us laugh because he refused to turn a blind eye to his own or others’ weaknesses.

“Chucklehead” was his favorite term of endearment for himself or anyone who’d blundered, and he treasured us and our blunders, mixed beratement with benediction, in poem after poem. And his poems will continue to berate and bless us.

Love Poem at the Beginning of Summer
by Jack Wiler

This is a love poem about empty places.
About blank walls.
About light in the night and noises on the street.
This is a love poem where no one is there.

This is a love poem for you.
This is your house.
This is the light you make.
The soft light of a summer night.

The noises from the bar down the block.
The girls screaming at their lovers.
Your clothes spread across the bed.
You spread across the bed.

The sun in the afternoon. Too hot sometimes to bear.
The smell of your skin.
You mixed carrots and soda for tanning cream.
That taste is this poem.

This is a poem without you in it.
Like every love poem should be.
A poem with an empty heart.
A poem with a smell you can’t quite name.

I say, you smell almost like cotton candy.
You show me your perfume and it’s cotton candy.
I say you smell like my life.
You show me getting up and going to work and coming home tired.

I say, I love you and you say, I love you
and we could say that over and over and over.
But what I know is the spray of tanning oil on the deck.
The spilled Corona.

The taste of your breath, thick with beer and tobacco.

This is a poem with no one in the house but me and two dogs.
This is a poem with the deep sighs of my dogs.
The breeze from a summer night.
The wail of a siren.
The music from my neighbor’s radio.
Cumbia.
Soft mountain music.
Music about places and islands I’ve never seen.

Your hair is scattered on the sink.
Clothes are tossed on the bed.
The dogs are snoring.
The girls and boys from the bar are yelling.
It’s a loud poem.
It’s a poem that won’t let me forget.

So I wander out and look at the pale Hudson County sky.
I can’t see a single star.
The moon is hazy with neglect.
The dryer is turning and turning.
The dogs are tossing.

Everything in the world is asking about you.

Jack Wiler’s most recent collection is Fun Being Me.  The photograph above of Jack at the 2008 Dodge Poetry Festival was taken by his friend Mark Hillringhouse.

Molly de Aguiar, Program Associate

On my block, there are four houses across the street from us. One of the houses is unoccupied, and the other three each have giant trampolines in their backyards. My husband and I had the same reaction when we realized this – couldn’t our neighbors have bought one trampoline that they all shared?

When I saw this story about NeighborGoods on Re-Nest last week, it made me think of the trampolines.

NeighborGoods is a newly-launched online marketplace which encourages people to get more use out of items they – or someone nearby – already own by lending, renting, borrowing, buying or selling stuff among their neighbors.

Why buy a brand new snow blower, when you can rent or borrow one from the neighbor? Why throw away your kid’s bike when you can sell it to the family down the street who wants it? Makes sense, right? And it keeps more trash out of landfills and more money in your pocket. NeighborGoods facilitates these kinds of transactions while also fostering a sense of community and sharing and reminding us that we can live less wasteful lives.

Micki Krimmel is the force behind NeighborGoods. She’s well-known for her Web 2.0 work which focuses on sustainable community development and authentic, participatory community dialogue. She was instrumental in leading interactive media efforts for Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and formerly worked as a columnist for WorldChanging.com – a website and its founder Alex Steffen whose work we follow here at Dodge.

Unfortunately for most of us, NeighborGoods is only available for southern California, but I know you can already imagine how useful a site like this would be in your neighborhood. If you’re interested in starting your own neighborhood sharing system, here’s another post from re-nest featuring the book The Sharing Solution, which teaches you how. Shareable is another useful online resource, which covers a wide range of topics about sharing beyond exchanging tangible goods.

If you’re already on Twitter, you can follow Dodge, NeighborGoods, Micki, Alex Steffen, Worldchanging and Shareable. If you’re not, what are you waiting for? Sign up and see what everyone is tweeting about!