Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

There are certain winter nights when the sky is so clear we can see that the Milky Way is not only spread across the sky, but has depth: layers of stars beyond the first stars we perceive. Such moments force us to stop and look. We are at once delighted by the brilliance of the stars, but also frightened that we are peering into an ever deepening dark.

Perhaps our fear is held in check by the knowledge it is a distant dark, light years away from us and our daytime lives. We know, because of the years it took the light of the visible stars to reach us, that the night sky we are looking at is already long past. This is, paradoxically, unsettling and comforting.

There is something of this feeling in reading Mark Strand’s best poems. We do have the foreboding sense that we are looking into darker places than we may typically allow ourselves to explore. (It is appropriate that one of his collections is simply titled Darker.) Yet, we are willing to look with Strand pointing the way.

We know, reading a Mark Strand poem, that it is the result of protracted and patient looking. There has been a long time invested in the making of these poems. Whatever he first saw, whether his gaze was turned inward or outward, has been examined, explored and changed. We understand his poem is not the actual darkness. It is not the winter sky. It is a made thing. But it is not assembled out of literary devices. It has emerged from the intensity and persistence of his looking. The poem is how Strand allows us to experience such looking.

A former United States Poet Laureate and MacArthur Fellow, Mark Strand’s most recent collection is New Selected Poems, which includes work from his eleven earlier collections. Visit the Poetry Foundation’s Mark Strand page for a sampling of poems and a detailed biography that reviews his entire career.

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Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

Claudia Rankine will use anything and everything to make her poems. She is not limited by notions of genre, and will blur the lines between poetry, prose and theater. Her style is not restricted by any particular “school” of poetry: she absorbs what she needs from every poetic tradition that has ever spoken to her, and her work bears the mark of lyrical, modernist and language poets. Notions regarding what is appropriately elevated “poetic diction” do not seem to interest her: she will employ the language of pop culture, science and advertising as readily as that of the academy. Nor is she confined by notions of self and other: She will use the autobiographical details of her own life as well as the stories she’s absorbed from friends, family, acquaintances, history and the mass media.

The results may appear experimental at times, but it would be a misnomer to call Rankine an experimental poet. Inquisitive or investigative would be more accurate. John Dewey once defined the difference between recognizing and seeing. When we recognize something or someone, we absorb just enough of the obvious details to allow us to name or catalogue them: sister, forest, accident, neighbor. But to really see, we must stop and look beyond the familiar markers.

Claudia Rankine’s poems are attempts at this kind of seeing. But such attempts require we look long enough to see beyond our own assumptions and prejudices. Because she is willing to take this time, her poems tend to spread out into extended explorations and meditations. In the case of her collection, The End of the Alphabet, each poem expands into several sections. In Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, although the individual sections can stand on their own, this book-length poem builds like an extended dramatic monologue. The thread of the speaker’s thought–intellectual, personal, philosophical and political–is as suspenseful to follow as the plot of a mystery novel. It is Rankine’s own curiosity, and the power of her need to understand, that compels the reader.

Claudia Rankine’s most recent collection is Plot, published in 2007. For a biograghy of Claudia Rankine and audio recordings of her reading, visit the Academy of American Poets Claudia Rankine 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.

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Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry
Research Assistance: Rebecca Gambale, Festival Assistant

In a publishing career that has spanned nearly six decades, Marie Ponsot has written poems ranging from some so short and compressed they make haikus seem verbose, to others of near Whitmanesque scope. She is equally adept in free verse and in the most challenging traditional forms, and the tone of her poems ranges from despondent, to deeply philosophical, to romantic, to whimsical.

What remains consistent in her body of work is the clarity of her vision and the quality of her ear. Her poems often build by moving from one exact, concise image to the next, and she is attentive to all the senses. But Ponsot also seems to possess the poet’s equivalent of what is called perfect pitch among singers and musicians.

Whether writing formal or free verse, each line, each word, each syllable is carefully weighed and measured for how it contributes to the shape of the whole. Ponsot has said “There’s a human desire to put the body’s pulse into the poem,” and she pays close attention to the rhythms of the body, of speech and of the natural world. The vital connection to poetry as something that moves, physically, through the body, the vocal chords and the air is present in all her poems.

She developed her craft over decades spent writing in relative obscurity. Between the publication of her first collection, True Minds, in 1957, and her second, Admit Impediment, in 1981, she raised seven children. She worked actively as a translator throughout those years, publishing now classic versions of many traditional fables and fairy tales. But her poetry was often written at night, when she could grab a few minutes for herself at the end of the day. In this way, she developed her own unique voice, which, since her re-emergence as a publishing poet, has garnered her critical praise and numerous awards.

Marie Ponsot’s most recent collection is Easy, published in 2009. Springing: New and Selected Poems offers a generous selection from her first four volumes. Visit the OnLine NewsHour for a reading and interview with Marie Ponsot.

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.

Get acquainted with the conveniently walkable Downtown Newark Arts District through our newly added Festival Village page. Here you can see the layout of the charming and historically rich area which will be transformed into a Poetry Village for the duration of the Festival.

The  Festival will be taking place within the boundaries of the original village of “New Ark,” founded by a group of Puritan settlers led by Robert Treat in 1666. Looking out from NJPAC, you can see the greenery of Military Park, where the town’s Revolutionary militia would assemble. Predating the Revolutionary War is Trinity & St. Philip’s Cathedral, which  sits in one corner of Military Park and served as a field hospital for both British and Colonial armies during wartime.

In addition to the rich history of the area, the Downtown Newark Arts District is home to a rich  cultural heritage that continues today.  Just across the street from Trinity and St. Philip’s, Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Arts, features the work of local artists with a broad range of voices and perspectives.  And just two blocks from Aljira, there’s the Newark Museum, housing exhibits of both new and ancient works , including the largest collection of Tibetan Buddhist art in the Western hemisphere.

For those  who’ve attended past Festivals, you’ll be glad to know  the 2010 Festival  footprint is actually smaller, from end to end, than Waterloo Village.  You can see the scope of the footprint on our map, here. All the venues are within easy walking distance of each other, and only a 10 minute walk from Newark’s two major train stations.  But you don’t even have to take the walk to the train station if you don’t want to: the Newark Light Rail has a stop directly in front of NJPAC.

So keep it green and hop on public transportation and explore the venues which make up the 2010 Dodge Poetry Festival situated in the Newark Downtown Arts District.

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The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark is October 7 – 10
For more information, visit the Poetry website

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Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

Through nine collections of poems, Sharon Olds has turned an unflinching eye toward the ecstasies and sorrows of living in the human body. Every stage of life is meticulously observed and explored: childhood, adolescence and the awakening of sexuality, marriage, the birthing of children, divorce, the care-taking of aging parents, their deaths, and the confronting of ones own mortality.

Although a sharp observer, Olds has never allowed the fierceness of her looking to dull her compassion. Even describing acts of human cruelty, whether those of political leaders or of her own parents, it is her search for understanding that compels the reader to continue through revelations that, otherwise, might be unbearable.

In a Sharon Olds poem, attention to physical detail is the act of cherishing the world and the body in our brief moment of corporeality. Acknowledging the frailty of the body is part of this cherishing. In “Little Things,” an early poem, Olds writes, “I am/ paying attention to small beauties,/ whatever I have—as if it were our duty to/ find things to love, to bind ourselves to this world.”

While many of us might allow fear and shame to censor what we are willing to discover or reveal, Olds refuses to be so limited. It is as if for her fear and shame are absolutely reliable signals: Something is hidden behind them that we must explore if we are ever to understand our true selves. The deeper the fear or shame, the more tenaciously she will insist on exploring further.

So it is no surprise that Olds should be inspired by Neruda to write odes on such elemental subjects as “Poem for the Breasts” and “Ode to the Hymen.” Her odes, like all her poems, are unrelentingly inquisitive and tender. What may surprise some of her readers is her great sense of humor and obvious delight in sharing it.

Sharon Olds’ most recent collection is One Secret Thing. For a generous selection of poems from her first six books, see Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, 1980-2002.

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.