Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

Dodge Poetry Program Staff

Whether it’s the metaphorical wings of freedom and expression, or a bowl of Buffalo wings with blue cheese and celery, poets and poetry lovers love wings, too.  But if watching the Super Bowl is not your thing, we have some ideas about how to spend Sunday afternoon that might bring you more inspiration than the halftime show.

• Invite your friends over for a literary salon, or reading circle, or poetry party.  Call it whatever you want. You can serve all the typical Super Bowl fare, but spend your time reading newly discovered or favorite poems to each other.  For millennia, long before the invention of wide-screen televisions, or football for that matter, the only “instant replay” was to ask the bard to repeat a favorite poem or passage.  It’s easy to imagine one of our ancestors seated before a fire calling out, “Do that bit about Beowulf tearing off the monster’s arm again!”  Salons, where friends gathered to read to each other, predate the Elizabethan era.  Being read aloud to (or listening to bards, balladeers and storytellers before written language was invented), is a basic pleasure as old as human consciousness.  Yet for most of us, it is one largely abandoned after childhood.  Dedicate one afternoon to sharing and listening to poems, and you might discover you want this to be a regular part of your life.  And mid-winter is a great time to check in with friends to find out what they’ve been reading, and to get ideas about what to read next.

• Super Bowl Sunday is a great day to go to the theater or visit a museum.  Many cities and states have organizations that sell reduced and even half-price day-of tickets for local theaters.  New York has its famous TKTS booth, and New Jersey has its NJ Theater Alliance.  Because so many people are home watching the game or out at parties, there are usually plenty of good seats for sale at very reasonable prices in your local theaters and for concerts and dance performances.  For the same reason, museums and galleries will be quiet, allowing you to wander freely and take the time to linger where you will without having to worry about crowds or noise.  One way to find out what’s happening in New Jersey is to check out Discover Jersey Arts for a searchable listing of events.

• Sunday is supposed to be a mild day across the Northeast and much of the nation.  If being in nature is one of the ways you feed your inner life, take a walk in one of our National or State Parks, or in your own county park system.  Live near a sea coast, lake or river?  Don’t wait until summer vacation to visit them.  New Jersey’s beaches, for example, take on an entirely different feeling during the quiet winter months, and are the perfect place for a meditative, rejuvenating stroll.

• If you’re like the Dodge Poetry Staff, you probably have a constantly growing stack of books that you haven’t found time to get to.  Protect those books from an inevitable tumble by putting this Sunday aside for reading.  There is nothing like dedicating time to sit quietly and read with a cup of tea or, to continue the Super Bowl theme, a frosty mug of your favorite brew.  Can’t get away from the game in your home?  Bring a satchel of books to your local tea or coffee shop, or even the local diner.  They’ll likely be empty enough for you to find a quiet corner where the wait staff will be happy to leave you alone.  (And if they do, and you stay long, be sure to  tip generously.)

Whatever you decide to do, we hope you have a revitalizing day. We’d love to hear about it.

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For more information about the Dodge Poetry Festival and programs, visit www.dodgepoetry.org

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“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.”

–Oliver de la Paz

Since 1986, over 45,000 students and 10,000 teachers from as far away as Florida, Wisconsin, Maine and California have participated in High School Student Day, the largest poetry event for high school students in North America.

Pre-registered high school students and their pre-registered teachers are admitted at no charge to all High School Student Day events, described below:

·POETS ON POETRY: Festival Poets read and discuss some of the poems and poets that have mattered to them. Time is set aside for Q & A.

·CONVERSATIONS: Intimate groups of Festival Poets discuss the enduring themes evoked by poetry, including Going Public with Private Feelings, When Politics is Personal, and Saying the Unsayable.

·FESTIVAL POET READINGS feature a dynamic and diverse group of poets.

·POETS FOR TEACHERS (preferred seating for teachers): Festival Poets explore how to bring poetry to life inside and outside the classroom.

·STORYTELLING, poetry’s closest relative, is performed throughout the day.

·OPEN READING: Time and space is set aside for young writers to read their work to their peers.

·Pre-registered schools have the option of remaining for THE EVENING MAIN STAGE PROGRAM of readings and music at no charge.

High school teachers can CONTACT US at studentday@grdodge.org with questions, but more information will be available as the Festival approaches.

To read the rest of Oliver’s blog on his experience at the 2010 Festival, click here.

“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 treated the talk as if I were talking to my younger self.”

–Oliver de la Paz

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The best way to get up to the minute announcements as the Festival approaches is to join our mailing list. If you are a teacher, make sure to join the Teacher Mailing List to receive updates related to the 2012 High School Student Day.

For more information about the Dodge Poetry Festival and programs, visit www.dodgepoetry.org

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Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

In his 1991 essay, “Slow Down for Poetry,” former U.S. Poet Laureate Mark Strand wrote that poetry invites us to step out of the pace of our everyday lives and slow down.  It requires we change the speed at which we usually absorb information.  We can’t skim over a poem the way we do newspaper or website pages.  With poetry, we pause to meditate over a line, phrase or image, rereading passages, stanzas, whole poems many times.  We don’t so much slow down for poetry as allow poetry to slow us down.

Speaking to students at the 2006 Dodge Festival, current U.S. Poet Laureate Philip Levine said that everyone needs to find their poetry.  Poetry, for him, was the one thing that engaged all the many aspects of himself, that made him feel most fulfilled, most true to his truest self.  He said that everyone needs to find something like this in their lives.  For some people, like Levine, it’s poetry, but it could be any art, or work, or hobby.

We’ve all had the experience of being so deeply absorbed in something—creative work, meditation, conversation—that we lose all sense of time.  We look at the clock and are shocked by how much later it is than we’d thought, or, we complete a challenging task and discover with focused attention it took a fraction of the time anticipated.

Perhaps we don’t need to slow down for poetry so much as to allow ourselves to make the time to forget time.  There is no better way to do this than to make time for our poetry, whatever that is: gardening, wood working, playing or listening to music, dancing, yoga, reading or writing.  It is particularly important to do this when we are certain we have no time.  During periods of my life when adding anything extra to my schedule seemed impossible if not downright insane, I would set the alarm a little earlier to create time for silent reading in the early morning.  I’m certain that’s how I got through those stressful times.

And let us not make “resolutions” to do this, as if to do what brings us joy requires resolve.  Instead, let’s make gifts, little gifts to ourselves of an evening here or there, or even fifteen minutes in the morning, to do something we find fulfilling.  You might discover it is poetry.  But whatever it is, allowing ourselves time for it is not a selfish act.  Doing what brings us fulfillment makes us less impatient, less frustrated, calmer and more centered.  It makes us easier to be around, which makes us better friends, partners, citizens, parents and co-workers.  Of course, we already know this.  Perhaps the first gift is to allow ourselves to act on what we know about ourselves.

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For more information about the Dodge Poetry Festival and programs, visit www.dodgepoetry.org
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On the first day of the new year, promise shines, but on the second day, it begins to dim. Returning to teaching, although it’s a new semester with new courses, isn’t accompanied by the start-up glow of the fall term. For me, and maybe for some of you, the Eastern Standard Time of a Mid-Atlantic winter not only means early dark and late light, but a downward slide into ordinary time, the standardized minute-tick of day-to-day life, and the sense that something within has shrunken down to its hard, tart core. In his poem, “The times are nightfall,” British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins says it all:

“The times are nightfall, look, their light grows less;
The times are winter, watch, a world undone:”

And then he proposes a counter to the nightfall: “Or what is else? There is your world within.”

So in early January, I turn my attention to cultivating my inner life with a brief yet leisurely retreat at the Jersey shore where the order of the day is read, write, eat and walk on the beach. The focus is to keep poetry alive within me for another year, the same goal that prompts my participation in the Dodge Poetry Program’s Clearing the Spring, Tending the Fountain sessions each year, sessions that are mini-retreats in their clarity and simplicity.

Why poetry? Because it’s slow. It’s unpredictable. It’s non-linear. There’s no right answer, but there’s clarity. The poem never asks more than I can give because reading a poem is a collaboration between the poem and the reader. I can return to the same poem every day and find something new in it, and in me because I’m seeing by the light of the poem. Or maybe the poem strikes a spark in that flinty winter core, and I’m the one who lights the poem in a new way. Either way, it feels symbiotic and surprising, as a good friendship does.

During Spring & Fountain, reading poetry isn’t forced: I’m not retooling a syllabus, searching out information for a report or required to learn anything. There’s no purpose except the doing of it, no rubric or anticipated outcome, no quantifiable result. When I share a poem, I don’t have to read to the end of poem, or even to the end of a line. As I listen to a poem being read, my attention can flit like the piping plovers I pass on the January beach at sunset, lifting and wheeling off, a delicious form of seasonal ADD that loosens the internal strictures developed from decades of studying, teaching and writing.

Why is this loosening necessary? Like stretching before exercise, flexibility. As a teacher and writer, language is the tool through which I practice my art and craft; if my use of it becomes rigid, my life-work is in trouble. I could endanger the art that keeps me awake in the world because, for me, poetry is the purest source of discovery and refreshment. And so this symbiotic relationship with poetry is not unlike that of humans with the endangered piping plover. When I create a protected space for poetry during Spring & Fountain, I develop practices that protect my own survival as an enlightened being.

Now I’m back in the classroom knowing winter’s long dark will continue for weeks. One solace is this year’s Spring & Fountain session where I’ll be with a group of educators, each of us making discoveries as we read and listen to poems. Like a walk on the beach, our collaboration with poems may be unpredictable and invigorating; there’s no telling when we’ll change direction, where we’ll wade in or wade out, or what the poems will toss up that we’ll want to look at more closely. Our Spring & Fountain mini-retreat will strike and fan a spark. When we leave, its protected space will remain a world within, a sanctuary that keeps giving light.

BIO

J. C. Todd currently teaches creative writing at Bryn Mawr College and in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Rosemont College after many years of teaching secondary English and leading Artist-in-the-Schools workshops.  Widely published in journals such as The Paris Review, The American Poetry Review, and The Virginia Quarterly Review, her most recent collection of poems, What Space This Body, is published by Wind Publications. She’s had a happy affiliation with the Dodge Poetry Program for more than 20 years.

Photo courtesy of Lauren Rutten Photography

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For more information about the Dodge Poetry Festival and programs, visit www.dodgepoetry.org
Be our friend on Facebook,  and follow us on Twitter @DodgePoetryFest

Michele Russo, Poetry Coordinator

As we move forward in planning the 2012 Festival in Newark, we thought we’d give you a sneak peek into some of the beautiful places our readings and discussions will take place.  The sites that host Festival events are far from ordinary.  The cultural, historic or artistic significance of each venue make an important contribution to the atmosphere of the Festival.



The incredible woodwork and architecture of First Baptist Peddie Memorial Church, dating back to 1890, are enough to take your breath away.

The Newark Museum’s sculpture garden is a plush and inspiring stop along the way into the Museum.

Trinity & St. Philip’s Cathedral, with a history dating back to 1729, is warm and welcoming.

The exhibitions at Aljira represent both emerging artists and more established artists, and bridge racial, cultural and ethnic divides.

The exhibitions at the NJ Historical Society help us interpret and understand our past.

We are still working on confirming additional locations for the 2012 Festival.  We’ll keep you posted as we do.

Poetry Fridays will be on holiday break until 2012.  The staff of the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Program wishes you a lovely holiday season filled with poems.