Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

The second poem Gerald Stern reads in this video clip from the 2008 Dodge Poetry Festival ends with the phrase, “the way my brain works.” Yet it is exactly how his brain works that pulls us into the poems and astonishes us with where he takes us.

He begins with the most mundane objects: coffee pots, wilted rhododendron, a rusted burst-out water pipe, a green cap. For Stern, nothing is insignificant; everything demands our attention and our praise because, as one of his book titles instructs us: Everything Is Burning. In the act of cherishing this transitory world, he stumbles over human ignorance, cruelty and greed, and rages against them. But it is the rage of one who refuses to abandon his faith in our capacity for joy. Stern may be our one true ecstatic poet, for he will praise what most of us abandon and neglect.

And he does this with great humor and irony. But Stern’s irony has little in common with that praised in much of the poetry of the last century. He does not use it to gain distance from his subject, or to allow the reader to feel superior to human emotion. His irony is like that in King Lear. It is awful and awe-full.

Lear does not see the truth until Cordelia is dying. We know it is too late to matter, to change anything, and yet, like Lear, we lean forward, hoping against hope she will breathe. In “Asphodel,” the speaker, after a lifetime that has spanned World War II, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, both Iraq invasions and the war in Afghanistan, refuses to believe it should take a lifetime “just to hate one of their dumb butcheries.” And yet, because it is the last line of the poem, we know it does, and it has. The aged veteran we meet in the poem, wearing his Korean War cap, which we would assume is a sign of pride and patriotism (Is it?) calls that war stupid and useless.

In “The Dancing,” the speaker and the reader share the historical knowledge that creates the terrible irony that the small family dancing so riotously in their small apartment in Pittsburgh in 1945 know nothing of the “dancing” of the families dying in gas chambers across the sea. In a few short lines Stern has painted that small family with such loving detail they come alive for us. They become every family we did not see because they were vanished in the Holocaust.

This Time: New and Selected Poems offers a generous selection from Gerald Stern’s first seven books of poems. Save the Last Dance is his most recent collection.

In case you wondered: Stern’s “Here’s Eddy” during his opening remarks is his noticing his old friend Edward Hirsch in the audience.

Be sure to return for upcoming Poetry Fridays, when we will feature many poets from past Dodge Poetry Festivals in the weeks ahead.

* * *

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

Follow the Dodge Poetry Festival on Twitter
Become a fan of the Dodge Poetry Festival on Facebook

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

For poet, novelist, essayist and newspaper columnist Taslima Nasreen, the nature of the relationship between poetry and politics is not an academic question but, quite literally, a matter of life and death. Her outspoken poems and essays supporting women’s rights and freedom of expression have led repeatedly to fatwas calling for her execution. As a result, she has spent long periods of her life under house arrest, in hiding or living in exile from her native Bangladesh.

Considering her history, reading “You Go Girl” and “A Letter to My Mother” in public is, for Nasreen, the act of taking her life in her hands. This has been the case for nearly two decades, when religious fundamentalists first broke into the newspaper offices where she worked, sued her editors and publishers and threatened her life. She has since been publicly assaulted a number of times and, as recently as March of 2010, one of her newspaper columns sparked riots that left two dead.

Despite the risks, Nasreen has continued to write and speak out, publishing nearly thirty books that have been translated into twenty languages. In the process, she has become internationally recognized as an advocate for women’s rights. It may be that international attention to her plight spared her life on more than one occasion.

English translations of her work include the poetry collections All About Women, Love Poems of Taslima Nasreen, 100 Poems of Taslima Nasreen, and The Game in Reverse and the prose works Homecoming, Phera and Shame (Lajja).

Be sure to return for upcoming Poetry Fridays, when we will feature many poets from past Dodge Poetry Festivals in the weeks ahead.

* * *

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

Follow the Dodge Poetry Festival on Twitter
Become a fan of the Dodge Poetry Festival on Facebook

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

Andrew Motion was the son of a brewer, and grew up in an environment that he describes as “very unbookish indeed.” Yet he went on to become a critically acclaimed literary biographer, established the Poetry Archive project and website in the United Kingdom, and was England’s Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009.

His background is often reflected in the imagery and diction of his poems. The setting is often domestic or rural, and the tone of the poems decidedly understated. We feel both comfortable and welcomed. Within the first few lines of “A-1 Mechanics” we feel that this poet is a guide we can trust, taking us to a place immediately recognizable.

The vivid images Motion creates with such lucid language bid us enter deeper into his poems. We go willingly because we feel we know the place and the speaker. Once we enter fully into an Andrew Motion poem, we discover, again and again, that beneath the inviting surface more troubling emotions and memories lie submerged.

Motion’s many poetry collections include: Selected Poems 1976-1997, Public Property, and most recently, The Cinder Path. His Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life, which won the Whitbread Biography Award; and his life of John Keats, Keats, are considered essential reading for students of these two poets.

Be sure to return for upcoming Poetry Fridays, when we will feature many poets from past Dodge Poetry Festivals in the weeks ahead.

* * *

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

Follow the Dodge Poetry Festival on Twitter
Become a fan of the Dodge Poetry Festival on Facebook

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

Kurtis Lamkin is a contemporary American embodiment of the ancient West African griot tradition, which blurs the boundaries between poet, singer and storyteller.

The griot, bard or troubadour has been a fixture in all cultures since before the advent of written language. It is believed that such bards passed down the legends of the Trojan War and Beowulf for generations before they were set down in the versions now familiar to us, and that Homer himself likely half-chanted half-sung large sections of the Illiad and Odyssey and accompanied himself on the lyre.

When he performs, Kurtis Lamkin often accompanies himself on the kora, a twenty-one-stringed West African harp-lute. He not only composes on and plays the kora, but he makes them by hand. This sense of the intimate bond between performer and instrument is also part of the griot tradition.

In recent decades, there has been much debate in academic circles in the United States regarding the place of politics in poetry. But in the griot/bardic tradition, there is no debate. The poet is seen as someone directly involved in the life of the community, and commentary on events that impact the community is not only accepted, but expected.

We assume our troubadours will sing us love songs, and Lamkin gives us one, but they have also been seen as the chief chroniclers of their times. In Elizabethan England, the news stories of the day were passed on through popular ballads. Like Lamkin, the griots and bards of the past always performed this function with humor and satire.

Lamkin has released a number of CDs of his work, including: My Juju (1995), El Shabazz (1998), and Queen of Carolina (2001).

Be sure to return for upcoming Poetry Fridays, when we will feature many poets from past Dodge Poetry Festivals in the weeks ahead.

* * *

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

Follow the Dodge Poetry Festival on Twitter
Become a fan of the Dodge Poetry Festival on Facebook

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

When Lucille Clifton set out to be a poet she had no models to follow; the figures in the canon did not look or speak like her, did not have her stories to tell.  She realized if she was going to have a life as a poet, she would have to make it herself.  And she did.

To hear Lucille Clifton read was to know immediately you were in the presence of an authentic voice.  She once said, “I don’t write to be admired.  I write to be understood.”  And, we might add, she wrote to understand.  She questioned and explored every aspect of her own life and experience, and turned an unrelenting gaze onto the times and the nation she lived in.

Under the force of her determination to communicate whatever she saw, she compressed and pared down language to a fierce clarity.  And she did not turn away from anything her vision revealed, regardless of the sorrow, regret or fury it might bring her.  Instead, she invited us to “celebrate with me/ what i have shaped into/ a kind of life.”

For anyone lucky enough to have witnessed them, her readings at the Dodge Poetry Festival remain indelible reminders of what poetry can aspire to and inspire in us.  Everyone at the Dodge Foundation is deeply saddened by her passing.  At the end of her poem, “sorrows,” she asks, “but who can distinguish/one human voice/amid such choruses of desire?”  We can answer her easily.  We can, Lucille.  We will know your voice anywhere and everywhere we hear or read it.

A generous sampling of Lucille Clifton’s poetry can be found in Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000.  More recent collections include Mercy (2004) and Voices (2008).

* * *

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

Follow the Dodge Poetry Festival on Twitter
Become a fan of the Dodge Poetry Festival on Facebook