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.

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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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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.

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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
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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).

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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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In her novels, essays, and poems, Linda Hogan often explores the deep connections between how the damage we do to the environment damages us, and how the natural world we wound instructs us on how to heal both it and ourselves.

A descendant of the Chickasaw Nation, she is deeply learned in the traditions of her ancestors. She is equally knowledgeable of the complex social and political history that has shaped the crises of our times. In poems like “The History of Red,” and in novels like Mean Spirit and Power, Hogan explores the interconnections between these two world-views.

What she finds in her search cannot be confused with the diluted renderings of Native American spirituality promulgated in some new-age tomes. Hogan sees a natural world (which includes human creatures) that presents a far greater challenge to our understanding. In her poems, the soldier crawling toward life in a ditch filled with blood is given as close attention as the newborn passing through the birth canal.

Hogan understands that ceremonies are not to be taken lightly, and that the making and sharing of a poem is a kind of ceremony. In these acts, she does not invite us to be victims. On the contrary, she reminds us of what her study of both nature and history has taught her: We must climb or crawl through the fire “in order to live so nothing will be left for death in the end.”

“The History of Red” and “Other, Sister, Twin” can both be found in Linda Hogan’s The Book of Medicines.

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

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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

Part of what has been unique about the Dodge Poetry Festival since the first in 1986 is the feeling it engenders of being in a place made for poetry. We live in a culture and a time that makes space for countless other things. Sometimes it feels as if there are so many coming at us so quickly we can barely keep up with them. More and more it seems that what demands our attention is designed to distract us from our inner lives, the rich source of imagination, reflection, creativity and renewal.

But every other year thousands come together to make a place for poetry. They travel from all the mid-Atlantic and New England states, and from Florida and Texas, from Michigan and California, and from nearly every state between, and from Europe, the Middle-East and Asia, to create a village with poetry as a living art at its center.

A village is made up of its citizens. This year the poetry village that is the Dodge Poetry Festival is gathering in Newark’s Downtown Arts District. As always, there will be days full of an overabundance of opportunities to encounter some of our most celebrated poets in conversations, readings, craft talks and panel discussion in an array of intimate and inviting settings. On Thursday night, October 7th, we will join together in NJPAC’s beautiful Prudential Hall to celebrate the launching of the 13th Dodge Poetry Festival. Won’t you join us?

In “Romantic Moment,” which he read at the 2006 Dodge Poetry Festival, Tony Hoagland manages to turn both love poetry and nature poetry on their heads.

For centuries, poets have asserted that poetry forces us to stop and look more closely at the world around us. Like the thousands of nature poems that have come before it, Hoagland’s poem pays meticulous attention to detail. The more specific his descriptions become, the greater the absurdity of the images evoked, and the louder the audience laughs. Although he never states it directly, the poem forces us to wonder at the absurdity of the elaborate protocols that dominate human courtship.

And yet, there is gentleness in his treatment of the couple, who finally decide to simply get some ice cream at this stage of their particular mating ritual. There is always heart at the heart of Hoagland’s humor. Although the poems can often be biting—there were several points during his readings at the Festival when the audience shared a collective gasp—Hoagland turns his wit most often against himself.

Poets have also asserted that poems force us to look inward, at ourselves. Hoagland is a relentless observer of human behavior and motivation, constantly digging into the deeper layers beneath what consciousness typically allows us to acknowledge about ourselves. His is not an escapist’s or a cynic’s humor. It is rooted in tenderness toward our human foibles and faith in our potential. He invites us to laugh, and we do because sometimes when we hurt, laughter offers greater relief than crying.

The text of “Romantic Moment ” can be found in the chapbook Hard Rain. Tony Hoagland’s most recent full-length collection was What Narcissism Means to Me, and Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty will be out soon.

Be sure to return for upcoming Poetry Fridays, when we will feature many poets from past Dodge Poetry Festivals in the weeks ahead, including Linda Hogan, Taslima Nasreen and others.

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Linda Gregg’s observation of the two horses in “The Weight,” one of two poems she read at the 2006 Dodge Poetry Festival, is reverent, and the poem’s tone is almost prayerful. It is as if, for Gregg, attention to the sensual is spiritual. Her reading leaves no doubt that the horses love each other, and that Gregg loves them.

Yet Gregg avoids the word and the connotations it carries. In his equally reverent “A Blessing,” James Wright states directly of the two horses in his poem: “they love each other.” But Gregg knows she cannot name what is passing between the horses, or what passes between any intimate sentient beings. She is willing to remain in a state of wonder. Gregg is one of our rare contemporary poets who will write about wonder without irony. This is not to suggest she lacks a sense of humor, about herself or our human foibles.

In her introduction to “Alone with the Goddess,” Gregg tells the audience that she admires the families in Java that include rituals from three or more faiths in their burial ceremonies. Despite its title, the speaker in this poem is clearly not alone. Her offering ritual to the goddess is interrupted by the judgmental comment of a present observer, and young men on horseback are racing up and down the beach. Gregg’s description of the horses in this poem is also admiring and attentive, even as she notices that they wear blinders, and the young men that ride them do not look either left or right.

We don’t know why the speaker needs to protect the man she loves with a ritual from another culture, or why she is so quick to refute that her offering has been rejected. It could be that she, like the young men on horseback, is just “pretending to be brave.” Or perhaps, like the Javanese, she knows we need to seek out as many avenues as we can into life’s mysteries.

The text of “Alone with the Goddess” can be found in Things and Flesh. “The Weight” is from Linda Gregg’s most recent collection, All of It Singing.

Be sure to return for upcoming Poetry Fridays, when we will feature many poets from past Dodge Poetry Festivals in the weeks ahead, including Linda Hogan, Tony Hoagland, Taslima Nasreen and others.

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Jorie Graham has too deep a respect for the art of poetry to take anything for granted, whether it concerns her own perceptions, human consciousness or any notion of what a poem is. With each new collection, she questions the assumptions behind everything she has previously written.

Those assumptions include not only the nature of the line, of the image, of syntax, form and structure, but extend to voice, perspective, and the very self that embodies any given perspective. She is constantly challenging her own expectations, and ours.

Although her poems are sometimes described as difficult, the real difficulty may be in confronting our own expectations. This experience is not limited to poetry.

For example, if we expect a drawing or painting to present us with a realistic or even idealized view of things as they appear in the world, we may be disturbed by Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase,” with its cascade of body parts fractured into hard-edged metallic shapes. Odds are that for most of us drawing a realistic nude is a great challenge, and we admire those who have mastered a skill that is beyond us. But drawing realistically might not be so engaging to the artist who does not find it a challenge.

All of us come to poems with expectations, and it is perfectly natural, in art as in life, to favor what brings us comfort. We also know that nearly every important experience in our lives, whether or not it included our engagement with a work of art, pushed us beyond the boundaries of our comfort zones. Graham pushes relentlessly against those boundaries. To follow her, we must be willing to enter the active, questioning and questing mind alive in her poems.

“Studies in Secrecy” can be found in The Errancy. Jorie Graham’s most recent collection of poems is Sea Change. She also published Overlord in 2005 and Never in 2003.

Be sure to return for upcoming Poetry Fridays, when we will feature many poets from past Dodge Poetry Festivals in the weeks ahead, including Linda Hogan, Tony Hoagland, Taslima Nasreen and others.

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The youngest poet to appear at the Dodge Poetry Festival, Ekiwah Adler Beléndez was nineteen years old when he read “Topography,” “Haiku” and “Coyote’s Trace” during the Friday Afternoon Poetry Sampler in 2006.

The son of a North American father and a Mexican mother, Ekiwah is from Amatlán de Quetzalcoalt, a small town surrounded by mountains an hour south of Mexico City. Born ten weeks prematurely and weighing barely two pounds, he was diagnosed shortly thereafter with cerebral palsy and paralytic scoliosis.

Of the physical challenges he has faced, Ekiwah has said, “Having cerebral palsy is both a curse and a blessing because it has allowed me to be directly in contact with my creativity. I’m sure I was born a poet, and not being able to walk made me find different ways of entertaining myself; this made it easy for me to tune into my inner world, where I discovered words and poetry.”

He discovered words and poetry at a very early age, composing poem fragments aloud by the time he was three years old. He studied and composed poetry throughout his childhood and his first poetry collection, Soy (I Am), was released when he was twelve. His other poetry collections include: Palabras Inagotables, (Never-ending Words); Weaver, his first book in English; and The Coyote’s Trace. Fluent in English and Spanish, Ekiwah has given readings in schools and colleges across Mexico and the United States.

Be sure to return for upcoming Poetry Fridays, when we will feature many poets from past Dodge Poetry Festivals in the weeks ahead, including Jorie Graham, Tony Hoagland, Taslima Nasreen and others.

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While stationed in Iraq in 2004, Brian Turner wrote the title poem to his debut book of poems, Here, Bullet, folded it up, sealed it in a Ziploc bag, and put it in his left breast pocket, where he kept it for the remainder of his year as an infantry team leader with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. “Caravan” and Eulogy” are two of the poems from that collection.

Since its publication, Here, Bullet has been promoted by Veterans for Peace and like organizations, and has been adopted for courses at the US Air Force and Naval Academies, the US Military Academy at West Point and the Virginia Military Institute. We might not expect Turner’s poems to speak to members of peace organizations and military academies, but the poems in Here, Bullet are part of a long tradition dating back to the ancient epics.

It has been said that history is written by the victors, but the true story is written by our poets. Whatever we know about the brutality of war in Ancient Greece we’ve learned from reading Homer’s Illiad. Walt Whitman’s “The Wound Dresser” and “Reconciliation” are only two of his many poems that put a human face on our own Civil War.

Turner’s attempt to right the wrong of the erasure of Private First Class Bruce Miller’s name from the official record reminds us of the human cost of the wars of our own time. It is a sad fact of history that our poets need to keep reminding us.

The Winter Solstice, Chanukah, Christmas and Kwanzaa celebrations all emerged as festivals of light and hope held during the darkest time of the year. In this dark time when we find ourselves embroiled in two of the longest wars in our history, let’s take a few moments to remember Private Bruce Miller and the many young men and women stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and make a New Year’s resolution to give our poets fewer reasons to write war poems.

Poetry Fridays will be on holiday hiatus until the New Year.

Be sure to return for upcoming Poetry Fridays, when we will feature many poets from past Dodge Poetry Festivals in the weeks ahead, including Jorie Graham, Tony Hoagland, Taslima Nasreen and others.

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