When I first started taking my writing seriously, I saw the Bill Moyer’s special on the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, The Language of Life. I remember seeing the rain and hearing the patter of the water on the canvas of the white tents . . . seeing water roll off the corners. I also remember seeing lots of poets who I was just starting to read and seeing people, smiling, with armloads of poetry books waiting in line to get their copies signed. For many years since then, I continued to hope that I would find the opportunity to participate in such a gathering as an audience member. And when I received the invitation to participate in the 2010 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, I couldn’t believe it. I remember reading the e-mail from Martin Farawell over and over again. I was thrilled.

So when I arrived in Newark, NJ a day before the festival launch, I knew that I was going to have trouble sleeping. There’s something about the energy of the Festival . . . the adrenaline rush, the thrill . . . that superseded my conscious need for a good night’s rest. And unfortunately, I had brought with me a slight cold that would only grow over the next few days and nights.

I hit the ground running. I met up with some of my old friends who were also Festival Poets: Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Rigoberto Gonzàlez, Tyehimba Jess, and Santee Frazier, and we had dinner. I couldn’t help but look around the dining facilities and marvel at all the poets I admired who were participating: Sharon Olds, Kwame Dawes, Bob Hicok, Dorrianne Laux, and a host of others. We were in the same tent that housed all the poetry books, and I couldn’t help but remember The Language of Life video that I had seen years before.

What became abundantly clear to me while I was chatting, dining, book browsing, and people watching was that there was no way I was going to be able to sleep at all during the weekend. I wanted to see and experience everything. We quickly went from the dining area to New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC) for the Festival launch and Poetry Sampler. NJPAC’s Prudential Hall is an astoundingly gorgeous place to hear a poetry reading and I couldn’t help but look around in wonder. I got to hear poets whom I had never heard read before—MartÍn Espada, Amiri Baraka, and many others. Meanwhile the scratch in my throat was beginning to make me slightly hoarse from all the talking and carousing.

I could go on and on and give you the play-by-play of what happened during the Dodge Poetry Festival, but here are the highlights for me. The best audience for a poetry reading that I have ever experienced is the audience during the Dodge Poetry Festival’s High School Student Day. Busloads and busloads of students from surrounding towns, counties, and states came to Newark to listen to poets read and talk about poetry. I had a wonderful tandem reading with poets whose work was new to me: Michael Cirelli, an exquisite and spirited reader; and Dunya Mikhail whose harrowing poetry provided the audience with a palpable understanding of how dangerous being a writer can be. I watched these poets read from the backstage wing of the theater and could see that there was not a single empty seat. The audience packed the auditorium, some of them having to stand in the back. I could also see how rapt the audience was in the readings by these poets. The air was definitely charged. I could feel the current rise from my feet to my shiny, bald head.

Later that day, I held a Poets on Poetry discussion with a group of fun-loving high school students at Peddie Baptist Church. I read a few poems, but mostly I talked about what it was like to be a writer and what it was like to do what I do. I think this was the particular moment that consolidated my early experience as a beginning poet watching the Bill Moyer’s special to being an active participant.  I treated the talk as if I were talking to my younger self who had wanted so badly to become a writer. I looked around the church. The sunlight was flooding the pews with the colors from the stained glass windows. Everywhere I looked, someone was touched by the color of the glass. It was a marvelous venue for an intimate talk about what I do and what I love.

I did a lot of spirited talking and reading on High School Student Day. I was having such a great time that when I woke up the next morning, I realized that I had lost my voice. I had laryngitis. Unfortunately, I was to be a part of the Main Stage Reading in the evening at the NJPAC. There are all sorts of anxiety dreams that public speakers have: the naked dream, the heckler dream . . . this was the laryngitis dream. I was so worried that I wouldn’t be able to read for much of the day, but all the participating festival poets, old friends and new, as well as many audience members showed me great support. I can’t tell you how many people offered throat lozenges, cough drops, and an assortment of throat remedies.  I managed to read my poems and get a hug from Sharon Olds that evening (another highlight). After, Matthew Dickman made me a Hot Toddy to help soothe my throat.

Despite my cold and despite my laryngitis, participating in The Dodge Poetry Festival as both a Festival Poet and a poetry lover is one of the highlights of my life. Much like the Bill Moyer’s feature on the Festival, I saw happy people carrying armloads of books. I saw poets chatting with audience members, signing autographs, and having lunch together. I drank my first Hot Toddy. I reconnected with old friends and made new ones. The literary community that assembles at the festival is so profoundly generous in spirit and I’ve never experienced anything quite like it. While my long-time hope of attending The Dodge Poetry Festival was met, I have a new set of hopes—I hope can attend again and again. Only when I do, I’ll leave my cold behind.

Judy Rowe Michaels, Princeton Day School
High School Student Day Coordinator

Jamier approaches NJPAC on the tips of his toes. Anticipation, maybe, but he’s found this the least painful way to walk, after a recent football injury and a week of wheelchair and crutches. He’s one of our best slam poets but told me, “I need to stop writing about love and break-ups. I’m stuck in the same old images.” For Jamier, the high point of Festival turns out to be Kwame Dawes—his reading and craft lecture. Back at school the next day, he tells us, “Kwame says, ‘You need to pay attention to a lot of other poets to find your own originality.’ He’s right, man. That’s what I need to do.”

In twelve Dodge Festivals, our school’s never had more students of color sign up. The Newark venue? The range of African American and Latino poets and musicians? The Dodge staff’s Friday blogs? All these factors helped us not just announce the event but recruit. We even called parents. “We’ll arrange for a wheel chair, but he needs to go!” “I know you’re catching a plane for college visiting, but she could go to Festival for three hours first. It’s near the airport. She wants to hear Sharon Olds.” Students went to the blogs and reported back on their favorites, sent us to websites, read poems aloud to each other.

Our fifteen students traveled happily in their three groups all Friday but met to picnic on the grass, share poets they heard, and buy books, posters, CD’s. They raved about the teenage jazz musicians who opened the morning. They admired the crowd, the styles, the peaceful energy. “You can tell everybody’s here because they want to be. Because they want to hear poems,” said one. Back home next day, the five from my poetry class reported their findings. Dan posted favorite quotes: from Kathleen Graber: “Write against the grain—different reactions for the same situation: the gray area has more texture.” “Begin with an image, not an idea.” From Billy Collins: “Get creative: Things don’t have to be as they seem.”

And, again from Collins, “Poetry is the only way to access the revelation at its end; you don’t know where it will take you.”

***

NJPAC’s square was an inviting space for Festival-goers
to relax between readings

Vendors and their tents surrounding the green on the sunny, autumn days

The wonderful audience inside Prudential Hall

Evening at NJPAC

Rigoberto González reading at the beautiful First Baptist Peddie Memorial Church

Former Poets Laureate Mark Strand, Kay Ryan, Rita Dove and Billy Collins

Tyehimba Jess performs at Aljira: A Contemporary Center for Art

All images courtesy of T. Charles Erickson Photography

Keep an eye on our website for even more photos coming soon!

We had an amazing time at the 2010 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, and for those who were able to come, we hope you did too. Who could forget performances by US Poets Laureate Kay Ryan, Rita Dove, Billy Collins and Mark Strand? Or Galway Kinnell reading his translation of Rilke’s Duino Elegies? Who didn’t love the depth of talent and diversity among all of our Festival Poets, and the youthful enthusiasm of 5,000 high school students on Friday? We were thrilled to see people tweeting from the Festival and sharing it with the larger Twitter community. And if you weren’t able to make the Festival, we hope you were able to enjoy the live stream on Thursday and Sunday through our partnership with NJN. We will make the recordings of those events available very soon.

We want to give special thanks to Mayor Booker and the City of Newark and to the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, who brought this Festival to its first ever urban location, to a city we love and support through our work at the Dodge Foundation.

Thanks also to our presenting sponsors: the Prudential Foundation, Berkeley College, Fidelity Investments, PSE&G, Bank of America, Chase Bank, New Jersey Monthly, NJ Transit, the Robert Treat Hotel, the Sagner Family Foundation, the Victoria Foundation, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, and the Poetry Foundation, as well as to all of our Friends of the Festival.

This Festival couldn’t have happened without the hard work and support of hundreds of people – the fantastic team of NJPAC volunteers and the helpful NJPAC ushers, the City of Newark’s police department, and our Green Team volunteers who helped sort through all of the Festival trash to divert waste from landfills and make this our greenest Festival yet. It was so terrific to see those compost bins fill up! There are too many people to thank by name here, but you should know that we know who you all are, and we are thankful for your contributions to the Festival.

Billy Collins and Sharon Olds, “Conversation on the Life of the Poet” at the First Baptist Peddie Church

Dodge’s commitment to poetry is year-round. Even while we are planning for each Festival, we are also offering our Poetry-in-the-Schools program, which includes the 6-week Clearing the Spring, Tending the Fountain sessions for New Jersey teachers, mini festivals, and poet visits to schools. You can keep up-to-date with Dodge’s Poetry Program a number of ways throughout the year: subscribe to our YouTube channel to see past Festival performances and be the first to see videos of performances from the 2010 Festival, which will be coming soon. Look also to our Facebook fan page for a Festival round-up and the latest updates, and follow us on Twitter for all the latest links to videos, programs, photos and current Poetry Program news.

While it’s still fresh in your mind, we want your feedback: Which poets were your favorites? What did you like best about the Festival? Did you find the Poetry Village in Newark easy to navigate? What about the Festival needs improvement? Leave us a comment here and/or send us an email to poetryprogram@grdodge.org. Also, if you wrote a blog post about the Festival, we would love to read it. Please share your links via Facebook, Twitter, email or as a comment on the blog.

Also, it’s never too early to start planning for the 2012 Festival, and your partnership is vital to making it happen. Please consider becoming a Friend of the Festival.

From the entire staff of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, we thank you for a successful and memorable 2010 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival.

Images courtesy of New Jersey Symphony Orchestra and Cohn Dutcher Associates

A Life Together/Poets for Teachers
Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar
Thursday, October 7, 3:00-5:00 p.m.
New Jersey Performing Arts Center

A Life Together/Poets for Teachers is being offered free of charge exclusively to New Jersey teachers who will also be attending the October 7 Poetry Sampler that evening.

Join poets Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar for an intimate reading and conversation with two poets and teachers who have made a life together while making a life in poetry

Earn 5 Professional Development Hours

Attend A Life Together/Poets for Teachers and the Poetry Sampler, and fill out a simple survey, and earn 5 Professional Development Hours.

Call the NJPAC Box Office at 1-888-466-5722, and mention the “Teach Poetry” promotion. You will be offered the option of purchasing either a Thursday night ticket or a Four-Day Pass at the discounted teacher rate. Using the “Teach Poetry” promotion when ordering tickets will automatically generate a ticket for you for A Life Together/Poets for Teachers.

If you have already purchased a Thursday evening ticket or Four-Day Pass, simply call the box office and tell them you want to add the “Teach Poetry” event. The ticketing staff will be able to call up your sales record and generate a ticket for the afternoon event.

You must have a valid New Jersey teacher’s ID to participate.

DORIANNE LAUX’s fourth book of poems, Facts about the Moon, is the recipient of the Oregon Book Award and was short-listed for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Earlier collections include Awake; What We Carry, finalist for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award; and Smoke, as well as two small press editions, Superman: The Chapbook and Dark Charms. Her fifth collection of poetry, The Book of Men, will be published by W.W. Norton in 2011. Laux is the recipient of two Best American Poetry Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Widely anthologized, her work has appeared in The Body Electric: America’s Best Poetry from The American Poetry Review, The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and The Best of the Net Anthology. Laux has been teaching poetry in private and public venues since 1990 and currently teaches poetry in the M.F.A. program at North Carolina State University.

JOSEPH MILLAR‘s first collection, Overtime (2001), was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and his second, Fortune, was published in 2007. A native of Pennsylvania, Millar attended Johns Hopkins University and spent 25 years in the San Francisco Bay area working at a variety of jobs, from telephone repairman to commercial fisherman. It would be two decades before he returned to poetry. His work has won him a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2008 Pushcart Prize and has appeared in magazines such as DoubleTake, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, American Poetry Review and Ploughshares. In 1997, he gave up his job as a telephone-installation foreman to try his hand at teaching. A new chapbook, Bestiary, is now available from Red Dragonfly Press, and a third collection, Blue Rust, will be published by Carnegie-Mellon University Press in fall 2011. Millar is on the core faculty at Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA Program and lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with his wife, the poet Dorianne Laux.

Read on to see how teachers can
Earn up to 20 Professional Development Hours
at the Dodge Poetry Festival

Professional Development Hours

For each day you wish to earn 5 Professional Development Hours, you will need to pick up a PDH form, which can be filled out during the day and dropped off before you leave the Festival.

On Thursday, pick up a blue PDH form in the lobby of NJPAC’s Victoria Theater as you enter for A Life Together/Poets for Teachers. Please be sure to drop off the completed form at the end of the Poetry Sampler reading in the evening. You may give the form to any NJPAC usher as you leave.

On Friday, High School Student Day, pick up a green PDH form at the Information Tent in the courtyard in front of NJPAC. Please be sure to drop off the completed form at the Information Tent as you leave the Festival or by 4:30 p.m. If you are staying for evening events, you may give the form to any NJPAC usher as you leave.

On Saturday, pick up a purple PDH form at the Information Tent in the courtyard in front of NJPAC. Please be sure to drop off the completed form at the Information Tent as you leave the Festival or by 4:30 p.m. If you are staying for evening events, you may give the form to any NJPAC usher as you leave.

On Sunday, pick up a pink PDH form at the Information Tent in the courtyard in front of NJPAC. Please be sure to drop off the completed form at the Information Tent as you leave the Festival.

When you pick up your PDH form each day, you will also receive written instructions for how to go online and submit a Festival questionnaire. The questionnaire must be completed by October 31, 2010, to qualify for Professional Development Hours. The Festival questionnaire will be available beginning October 11.

If we receive your questionnaire by October 31, your Professional Development Hour Certificate will be mailed by December 1. If you submitted a questionnaire and have not received a Professional Development Certificate by December 15, you must contact us via email at festival@grdodge.org or call 973-540-8442, ext.139.

Professional Development Hours for the 2010 Festival
will not be processed after January 1, 2011.

Even if you are not submitting for Professional Development Hours, please complete the questionnaire to help us plan Festival 2012. Teacher responses to past questionnaires have proven invaluable and led to important changes in the Poetry Kit for Teachers and the structure of High School Student Day.

Visit us as www.dodgepoetry.org
or write to us at festival@grdodge.org.

Take a look at the Festival Trolley map, which shows the many stops on the trolley route along popular Ferry Street in the Ironbound, and lists the eateries closest to each stop. The Ironbound is only a short trolley ride from the center of the Festival footprint, and stops right in front of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center.

The Trolley will also cover both Penn Station and the Broad Street Station for those taking mass transit, augmenting Newark’s Light Rail schedule. The Light Rail also stops at NJPAC.

For those who prefer to walk, the Greater Newark Convention and Visitors Bureau’s Hospitality Guide lists many restaurants in the Downtown Arts District, all within a few blocks of the Festival footprint.

NJPAC’s Theater Square Grill, Theater Square Bistro and Calcada restaurants will also be open during the Festival, as will a festive outdoor food court that will spill across the street into Military Park.

Take some time to visit the Around the Town pages on our website, and plan ahead to take advantage of the many opportunities to make your dining experiences as festive as the Festival itself.

If you haven’t purchased your Festival tickets yet, keep in mind that all events this year are taking place in performance venues that, unlike open-sided tents, have fixed seating capacities. If you want to guarantee a seat for the evening events, you should purchase your tickets in advance.

Return in the days ahead for the latest news on the 2010 Poetry Festival.

Held during each day at venues throughout the site, Conversations have always been a central feature of the Dodge Poetry Festival. Because the Festival is neither an academic conference nor a career symposium for writers, these conversations tend to be more intimate, casual and spontaneous than those you might encounter in other settings. Peruse the list below to learn about the Conversations offered this year—there’s sure to be topics of interest to you—and see our Full Schedule of Events for further details.

Conversations with One Festival Poet
These sessions are “conversations” between a single Festival Poet and the audience. The Festival Poet draws on their own experiences and poems, and some time is allotted for questions from the audience.

POETS ON POETRY
To paraphrase Gerald Stern, poets are readers who occasionally stop reading long enough to write something down. In these sessions, Festival Poets talk about their vital relationship to poetry as readers and artists. They may address their understanding of poetry, their experience of becoming a poet and how individual poems—both those written by themselves and others—have contributed to that process.

POETS FOR TEACHERS
Teachers have their own reasons for caring about poetry, and these sessions are intended for educators at all classroom levels. As in POETS ON POETRY, a Festival Poet will lead the conversation about poems and the art of poetry itself. Part of the aim is to renew teachers’ personal connections with poetry and thereby free up their confidence and flexibility when bringing poetry into their classrooms.

CONVERSATIONS ON CRAFT
What is the larger purpose of craft itself? What is the reward of mastering this hard-earned skill? Festival Poets consider and discuss questions related to the craft of making poems, from the general (such as work schedules and patterns of revision) to the specific (for instance, the uses of traditional forms, the subtleties of line breaks or the place of sound and phrasing in composition).

Conversations Involving Several Festival Poets
These discussions are “conversations” between two to five poets on a broad range of poetry topics, each speaking from personal experience and often using poems as examples. Time is often set aside for questions from the audience.

ON THE LIFE OF THE POET
What goes on behind and around a life that produces poems? How does one find a way to make a life as a poet? Festival Poets share their personal observations and experiences, outlining their own challenges and rewards, delights and disappointments.

WHEN POLITICS IS PERSONAL
Most poets, even those who don’t write political poems, agree that, if a political matter is of personal importance to a particular poet, it is a valid topic for poetry. But some have taken the position that political debate never has a place in poetry. Festival Poets consider how and when poetry might/might not be called upon to bear witness.

GOING PUBLIC WITH PRIVATE FEELINGS
How much of one’s personal life can be made available in a work of art? Form and structure—art itself—can make it possible to approach certain feelings and to survive going public with them. This session touches on the difficulty and the importance of articulating private feelings, of trying to say personal truth, as Festival Poets use their own and others’ poems to illustrate the issues.

I ONLY LAUGH WHEN IT HURTS: WIT AND HUMOR IN POETRY
The serious need not always be solemn. The work of many contemporary poets suggests that profound subjects can be approached through humor, and this is part of a centuries-long tradition. Join former U.S. Poets Laureate Billy Collins and Kay Ryan in a “conversation in poems,” their own and others’, as they read and discuss the place of wit and humor in poetry.

POETRY ACROSS BORDERS
More than language must be translated when poems, and poets, move across borders. Why does it matter, for the poetry community everywhere, for poets and poetries to keep traveling across borders? Festival Poets offer different perspectives on these topics, ranging from immigrating to another country to writing in a language other than their native tongue.

AMERICAN POETRIES
Adrienne Rich wrote there is no such thing as an “American Poetry.” Instead, there are American Poetries, so many divergent schools that no single style or aesthetic can be singled out as the definitively “American” one. Festival Poets consider what we might gain from this diversity and by listening more closely to each other?

THE RICHES OF DAILY LIFE
Much traditional and contemporary poetry in many parts of the world finds grounding in the actualities of the ordinary. In his Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke responds to the young poet’s concern that he has not lived a rich enough life to have any material for poems: “If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it. Blame yourself. Tell yourself you are not poet enough to call forth its riches.” This session explores how what we encounter in our daily lives can be a powerful source or springboard for poetry.

POETRY AND CLASS
This event explores the questions of class status—educational, socioeconomic, cultural—and how it influences poetry and poets. Is poetry an elite art for the members of a particular class? One of the folks arts? Must one lose one’s native voice to cross over and be accepted by the arbiters of taste? Festival Poets discuss how poetry continues to grapple with these concerns.

POETRY AND SPOKEN WORD
Recent decades have seen an explosion of interest in poetry slams, jams, readings and open mikes in urban, suburban and rural communities. The oral tradition is far older than any distinctions between poet and storyteller, shaman and actor. Festival Poets explore what contemporary poets and spoken-word artists might learn by approaching each other as compatriots in a much older tradition.

A CERTAIN KIND OF ATTENTION
William Stafford once wrote that a poem was anything said or written with “a certain kind of attention.” This quality of attention was required of both the poet and the reader, for both the writing and reading of poetry require a certain adjustment to our normal level of attentiveness. What happens if we turn this attentiveness to the world, to our surroundings and to poetry itself?

POETRY AND HISTORY
In which ways has poetry traditionally been used as a primary repository for memory? It has been said that history is written by the victors, poetry by the survivors. How do we negotiate the distance between the “official story” and the news we get from poems? How do we find in poetry ways to help ourselves confront fact, actual occurrence and ignored truth? How does poetry preserve and illuminate personal history, the history of a people, the history of a species, the history of life itself?

LEGACIES AND LEGENDS: A CONVERSATION WITH AMIRI BARAKA
Guest moderator Baraka Sele, Curator/Producer of NJPAC’s ongoing Alternate Routes series, interviews Amiri Baraka. This is a special installment of Legacies and Legends, a series of intimate conversations with artists, authors, scholars, entrepreneurs, film makers and others who have contributed to the cultural, educational, social, political and even spiritual contexts and landscapes impacting our communities, our country and our culture. Legacies and Legends will include conversations with Bill T. Jones and Phillip Glass in the months ahead.

POETRY AND MENTORS
Harold Bloom claimed that each rising generation of writers competes with and rejects its immediate predecessors in a fiercely competitive struggle for independence and dominance. Yet most poets are quick to acknowledge the importance of those teachers and mentors who nurtured and encouraged them and consider it their duty as members of the poetry community to support and teach the next generation. Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar were two such mentors to Matthew and Michael Dickman, and they have a particularly compelling story to tell. Join these four poets in a conversation about the importance of the mentor relationship in poetry.

TELL ALL THE TRUTH BUT TELL IT SLANT
In one poem, Emily Dickinson advises “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.” What is the purpose of approaching truth obliquely? Can we ever know how much of an apparently autobiographical poem is literally true? How can we trust the testimony of its author, regardless of what they assert about the authentic or fictional nature of a piece? Why should such questions matter to readers or poets?

POETRY AND FORM
How do our ideas about poetry and form influence our sense of what a poem is or what is possible in poetry? Can predetermined ideas about free verse be as restrictive as those regarding traditional form? Do our ideas about form shift while reading a given poem or change from one poem to the next? What do we gain by challenging instead of defending our ideas about form?

POETRY AS PRAYER, POETRY AS CURSE
Samuel Beckett wrote, “All poetry is prayer.” Much poetry does seem to aspire to the higher states of consciousness we often associate with incantation and ritual, and often the line between poems and prayers of praise vanishes. There is an equally ancient tradition of using verse to curse our enemies, and almost as many poems excoriate as praise. Why does some remnant of this ancient belief in the power of rhythmic language survive in contemporary poems that praise or curse? Why do we turn to poetry for these extreme functions?

SILENCE IS BECOME SPEECH: THE EMERGENCE OF WOMEN’S VOICES
“Silence is become speech,” Muriel Rukeyser wrote in “The Speed of Darkness,” one of her groundbreaking poems. Compare the number of women poets in a turn-of-the-19th-century anthology with that of a collection published today and the emergence of women’s voices in the century is dramatic. What has this shift meant to poetry in general? How has it affected what we, as readers, expect or accept from poetry? How has it changed the poems that men write? That women write? What does it mean for women to have a sense of community within the poetry community?

POETRY LIKE BREAD
Like the anthology of the same name, this conversation gets its title from these lines from Roque Dalton’s poem “Like You” (Como Tú): “I believe the world is beautiful/and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.” But how is poetry for everyone? What happens to the idea of poems as sophisticated objets d’art if we begin to think of them as something as common as loaves of bread? Festival Poets explore how poetry, like bread, can offer us life and sustenance.

WHERE POETRY MATTERS
“Does poetry matter?” would not be asked by anyone who has ever attended, performed in, produced or organized any of the open mikes, poetry jams or slams that have sprung up in community centers, church basements, libraries, bookstores and coffee shops in our urban centers. At these events it is immediately, powerfully obvious how crucial this avenue for self-expression and self-discovery is for many of our urban youth. Four young poets straight out of Newark’s own poetry renaissance will discuss the important place of poetry assumed in their lives, and why it continues to matter to them and to the young people of Newark and our many urban centers.

FROM HOMER TO HIP-HOP
Homer’s Iliad is filled with horrific scenes of hand-to-hand combat described in gory detail. The women in his Odyssey are often destructive, bewitching, jealous and vengeful. The charges sometimes made against rap and hip-hop—that they are violent and misogynistic—could be leveled against these two masterpieces of Western Literature and against nearly every ancient epic. Is it the distance of centuries that makes their violence tolerable? William Carlos Williams wrote, “it is hard to get the news from poems.” Could it be that some of us don’t want to hear the news in rap and hip-hop? What might connect the oral tradition’s long history of telling the news of its time and the emergence of rap and hip-hop in our times?

POETRY AND WORK
It is almost always assumed that a poet must perform some other work to earn a living and sustain a life in this art. The late Stanley Kunitz, a lifelong gardener, advised younger poets to find some work that took them completely out of their heads, work that required physical engagement with the world. Many poets have created some of their most powerful poems from work experiences, and from speaking for the silent and unheard who do some of our dirtiest and most thankless jobs. What does it mean that we even draw a distinction between “work” and the poet’s work?

PUTTING A PUBLIC FACE ON POETRY: THE U.S. POETS LAUREATE
Since 1937, the Library of Congress has appointed a “Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry” (also titled “Consultant in Poetry,” prior to 1986) to a one-year or longer term. The Laureate’s task: to raise the national consciousness to a greater appreciation of the reading and writing of poetry. Former Poets Laureate Billy Collins (2001-2003), Rita Dove (1993-95), Kay Ryan (2008-2009) and Mark Strand (1990-91) discuss their own experiences and initiatives while in this post, as well as what it means to be the public face of what many consider an art best created and read in private.

THE POET AS CITIZEN
Poetry is sometimes said to revolve around private perception and emotion. At the same time it has been a powerful glue for many communities, a force that linked individuals into a family of feeling and belief. Festival Poets consider the role of the artist as a member of a community—be it the world, a nation, state, race or species. What are the artist’s responsibilities to any or all of these communities? How are these related to the integrity of the artist? What is the relation of art in general and poetry in particular to contemporary communities?

SAYING THE UNSAYABLE
Poets often take on topics that might never be broached at the dinner table, as well as reveal secrets kept by individuals, families, communities or nations. Witnesses’ testimonies to the horrors of war, daring political protests, sexual trauma and all forms of abuse have found their way into poems. How does the unsayable get said? Why do we need to say it? Festival Poets explore these ideas, along with the preparation needed to make art out of what might, in many contexts, be considered “taboo” material.

If you haven’t purchased your Festival tickets yet, keep in mind that all events this year are taking place in performance venues that, unlike open-sided tents, have fixed seating capacities. If you want to guarantee a seat for the evening events, you should purchase your tickets in advance.

Return in the days ahead for updates on the 2010 Poetry Festival.

Pictured above, left to right: Franz Wright, Edward Hirsch, Joy Harjo and Simon Armitage in a conversation: Going Public with Private Feelings at the 2008 Festival.  Photograph by T. Charles Erickson.

Poetry readings have always been at the heart of the Dodge Poetry Festival. This year, the Festival officially opens with a Thursday Evening Poetry Sampler on October 7, which offers the opportunity to hear nearly half of the poets who will be appearing over the next three days.

The Main-Stage Readings, which bring the Festival community together under one roof at the close of each day, have been one of the most popular events at every Dodge Poetry Festival. This year they are taking place in the New Jersey Performing Arts Center’s beautiful and acoustically splendid Prudential Hall.

If you can’t make the Main-Stage readings, don’t worry. There will be Festival Poet Readings during the day at venues throughout the Festival Village. Visit our Poet Spotlight to see exactly when all the Festival Poets are reading.

In addition to the readings that make up the core of the Festival program, there are a number of special readings. We wrote in last week’s blog about Galway Kinnell’s reading of Rilke’s Duino Elegies in their entirety on Saturday morning, October 9. Some other special events are listed below:

POETRY AND MUSIC: AN EXPLORATION
In this combination reading, discussion and musical performance on Saturday, poet and music scholar Amiri Baraka will be joined by word-music ensemble Blue Ark to explore the many interconnections between poetry and music—connections that vibrantly link spoken word, jazz, the blues and the ancient griot tradition.

GIVING VOICE TO A LIFE IN POETRY
Join Galway Kinnell on Sunday, October 10, in this informal reading/conversation and discover some of the poets who have influenced one of our most influential poets. Kinnell will read and discuss poems that first drew him to poetry, as well as works by teachers and mentors who shaped his sense of what poetry might be and by friends and peers from a lifetime dedicated to this art.

GIVING VOICE TO NICOLÁS GUILLÉN, FREDERICO GARCÍA LORCA AND PABLO NERUDA
On Sunday afternoon, Poets Martín Espada and Nancy Morejón are joined by Latin jazz musicians Bobby Sanabria and Quarteto Aché in this bilingual celebration of just a few of the many Spanish-speaking poets from the last century who have had an international influence on contemporary poetry.

GIVING VOICE TO LUCILLE CLIFTON
In this special tribute from the Main-Stage at NJPAC’s Prudential Hall, friends and fellow poets will read from the works of Lucille Clifton on Sunday afternoon. The author of twelve collections of poems, Clifton appeared at eleven Dodge Poetry Festivals and became, for many, the embodiment of the spirit of the Festival itself.

If you haven’t purchased your Festival tickets yet, keep in mind that all events this year are taking place in performance venues that, unlike open-sided tents, have fixed seating capacities. If you want to guarantee a seat for the evening events, you should purchase your tickets in advance.

Visit our website to see the complete Festival Schedule and read Descriptions of Festival Events.  Return in the days ahead for updates on the 2010 Poetry Festival.

Pictured above: Sharon Olds at the 2008 Festival.  Photograph by T. Charles Erickson.

Rainer Maria Rilke’s masterpiece, the Duino Elegies, opens with “Who, if I screamed out, would hear among the hierarchies/of angels?” This haunting and disturbing question begins one of the most influential poetic sequences from the first half of the twentieth century. At times soaring through spiritual heights, at others quietly observant of the earthiest facts, the ten Duino Elegies draw the reader or the listener into an intimate encounter with one of the most curious, questioning and original minds to ever write poetry.

New translations of Rilke’s work into English have appeared with increasing frequency over the last eighty years. Festival Poet Galway Kinnell is one of many poets of his generation whose sense of what a poem or poetic sequence could do was deeply affected by his reading of the Duino Elegies. His The Book of Nightmares, also a sequence of ten poems, is, at least in part, a response to Rilke’s earlier collection.

Like Rilke, Kinnell is capable of an interior soaring, a delving into the self that goes deeper than notions of self and other. Also like Rilke, he is willing to project himself out into the physical world, into animals, plants, even minerals, and sense our kinship with the nonhuman. For Kinnell, these explorations are not leading in opposite directions: Attention to the things of the earth is attention to the sacred, and we are sacred because we are part of the earth.

Wallace Stevens, commenting on the ancient epics, once wrote that the great poems of heaven and hell had been written, but what was missing was the great poem of the earth. It could be argued that both Rilke and Kinnell have tried to write it. It is no wonder that Kinnell would be drawn to translating Rilke, or that his translation of the The Essential Rilke (with Hannah Liebmann) has been widely praised for its capacity to capture both the earthiness of Rilke’s language and the power of his spiritual yearning.

So we are very excited that on Saturday, October 9, at the Dodge Poetry Festival, Galway Kinnell will read his translation of Rilke’s Duino Elegies in its entirety. It will mark the first time he has read the entire sequence in performance, and offers the rare opportunity to hear one of the great poetic sequences read by one of our most influential poets.

This is only one of many special events at this year’s Festival. Take a few minutes to look over our Festival Program and read the Descriptions of Festival Events to learn more about the variety of Conversations and Festival Poet Readings we have planned for you.

If you haven’t purchased your Festival tickets yet, keep in mind that all events this year are taking place in performance venues that, unlike open-sided tents, have fixed seating capacities. If you want to guarantee a seat for the evening events, you should purchase your tickets in advance.

Return in the weeks ahead for updates on the 2010 Poetry Festival.

Anyone who saw Benjamin Bagby’s riveting recitation of Beowulf at the 2004 Festival, which merged dramatic performance, singing, incantation and storytelling, had a glimpse into what a performance by an ancient bard might have been like. It is believed that Homer accompanied his readings of the Illiad and Odyssey with a lyre or a drum, and that he half-chanted half-sung the lines to the rhythm of the accompanying beat. (This would make him one of our first rappers.)

The oral tradition existed for thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years before we drew distinctions between actor, poet, singer and storyteller. Music and storytelling have always been an integral part of the Dodge Poetry Festival, in part to honor the ancient common source of poetry, story and song. The 2010 Festival continues this practice with an exciting line-up of storytellers and musicians.

Nashville-based spoken-word artist Minton Sparks fuses music, poetry and storytelling to transport her audiences into the lives of the southern country folk whose stories she tells with great compassion and humor. Described as “the ghost child of Flannery O’Connor and Hank Williams,” Sparks will perform several times at varied locations during the Festival. She is a true original, and unlike any storyteller we’ve had at the Festival.

Word-Music ensemble Blue Ark will be performing with Amiri-Baraka in NJPAC’s Victoria Theater on Saturday morning in “Poetry and Music: an Exploration.” This performance/discussion/improvisation will explore the connections between jazz, the blues and poetry, bridging the gap between the ancient griots and contemporary hip-hop artists.

Latin Jazz great Bobby Sanabria will be performing with his Quarteto Aché on Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday night, Bobby and the quartet will accompany Martín Espada during his reading. On Sunday afternoon, they will take part in a special celebration of some of the most influential twentieth century Spanish language poets, including Lorca and Neruda, in a bi-lingual reading featuring Martín Espada and Nancy Morejón.

And of course, Ecuadorian musicians Yarina, beloved by Festival audiences after many years, will once again be strolling the Festival grounds and welcoming us all into the 2010 Poetry Festival Village.

If you haven’t purchased your Festival tickets yet, keep in mind that all events this year are taking place in performance venues that, unlike open-sided tents, have fixed seating capacities. If you want to guarantee a seat for the evening events, you should purchase your tickets in advance.

Return in the weeks ahead for updates on the 2010 Poetry Festival.