Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry
Research assistance: Stacey Balkun, Festival Assistant

Born and raised in Havana, the daughter of a militant dock worker and trade union seamstress who supported her scholarly and artistic pursuits, Nancy Morejón is the most widely translated Cuban woman poet of the latter half of the twentieth century.

Through more than twenty volumes of poetry, Morejón’s work remains deeply connected to place, in all the various connotations that word conjures. The city of Havana and the lush tropical zone of her native Cuba are brought vividly into the reader’s imagination with rich, sensual detail. But she is no mere regional poet. Place, for Morejón, is often defined by the people who inhabit it, and her poems are full of compassionate portraits of family members, friends, lovers, colleagues and strangers seen in passing.

This habit of witnessing has made Morejón an impassioned spokesperson for the people of her place, and so, history, politics and social issues are recurring themes in her work. Morejón sees the African-Cubans of her homeland and all people of African descent living in the Americas as part of the larger group of all African-Americans. In this sense, the place they share is made up of the North and South American continents, where African slaves were brought by Europeans for hundreds of years. She manages to give these many themes a personal immediacy in poems like “I Love My Master.”

Although Morejón’s awareness of her place in this larger group pervades her work, she is equally aware of the social ramifications of being a member of several distinct groups: Cubans, Cubans of African descent, and women. How could she not be? She was the first person of African-Cuban descent to receive a degree in faculty of arts at Havana University, and the first black woman poet in Cuba to be widely published and attain professional status as a writer, critic and translator.

And yet, only a poet acutely aware that she is an individual, one particular person living in one specific woman’s body, could have written a poem like “The Drumming.” In Morejón’s poetry, the lyrical is also political, and the historical is also personal because she clearly understands that what we as individuals consider our most private and intimate experiences—first love, profound loss, concern for our friends, family and country—are also the most universal.

A powerful reader, Nancy Morejón has appeared at festivals and universities across North America, including Split This Rock and the International Festival of Poetry of Resistance in Toronto, and has served as writer-in-residence at Wellesley College and the University of Missouri-Columbia. A generous selection from her body of work can be found in Looking Within/Mirar Adentro: Selected Poems/Poemas Escogidos, 1954-2000.

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Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry
Research assistance: Stacey Balkun, Festival Assistant

Joseph Millar’s poem “Work Song” begins “Love picks its way through the gravel ruts/leading into the job site, past the truck tires/exploded nearby…” The apparent incongruity of love entering such a place is not lost on Millar, yet the absolute clarity with which he states his case convinces us he knows what he’s talking about. This is the place for love, wherever “this” happens to be.

But Millar is no sentimentalist. The attention he gives to physical detail in the poem as he moves into the worksite makes it clear he is a dedicated realist. He never glosses over what he sees, nor romanticizes the working life. Nevertheless, his “Work Song” acknowledges the countless ways work itself, whatever work that is, binds us to one another, even if only for a few hours on the job. And behind the relationships forged by men and women engaged in challenging, even brutal work, are the countless relationships each one of them carries, the responsibilities to spouses and children that justify enduring the work itself.

In essence, all of Millar’s poems are work songs. There are the many that capture the physical and personal costs and rewards of hard labor. He sings of the very real pain endured by those who must use their bodies to earn a living, and the deep, mostly silent satisfaction at completing an arduous task, and the pride in having put in a good day’s work. Having spent decades doing blue-collar labor as everything from a commercial fisherman to a telephone installation foreman, he knows first-hand the life he describes.

But for Millar the nature of work is more expansive than that. There is the work of trying to be a good son, husband, brother or parent; the work of facing down your fears, admitting your mistakes and accepting your faults; the work of pulling up the courage from somewhere inside yourself to persevere in the face of failure and disappointment; the work of loving.

In Millar’s poems, there is the knowledge that love, too, is work. Like any work worth doing, it requires our attention, care and serious effort, and there is always a price paid for negligence. His poems are often about the difficulty of doing the actual work loving another requires. But they never waver from their conviction that this is work, and work of an essential nature if we’re going to be human beings.

“Work Song” is from Joseph Millar’s collection Overtime. His most recent collection is Fortune. To read two of his poems on-line, visit the Poetry Foundation website.

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Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry
Research assistance: Stacey Balkun, Festival Assistant

Iraqi-born Dunya Mikhail was only fifteen-years-old when Saddam Hussein’s armies invaded western Iran in 1980. Just awakening to the possibilities of her own potential as a poet, she had little time to indulge in writing on the themes we might expect to preoccupy someone so young. The Iran-Iraq war would drag on for eight years, and be followed two years later by the first Gulf War with the United States. Because war was the norm in her homeland throughout her teens and early twenties, she emerged as a poet of witness almost out of necessity.

Mikhail has no delusions that writing about war will heal her or her country. Shedding light on a wound doesn’t necessarily heal it. But she believes that poetry can provide a way to see and tell the truth, to force us to look at what we might otherwise turn away from. This can be a dangerous practice in a country whose leader expects its poets and artists to praise every act of their government. Under Hussein, even neutrality was not an option. It suggested a refusal to endorse his regime and was considered an act of defiance.

In 1995, after the publication of Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea, her fourth collection containing anti-war poems, Mikhail faced increasing harassment. A friend warned her that she needed to leave the country as soon as possible. When two newspaper editors were publicly humiliated and executed, she took that as the final warning it was time for her to flee.

She credits poetry with saving her life.  She was working for the Baghdad Observer at the time, and her passport listed her as a journalist. This presented a problem: For a journalist to leave Iraq, an official leave of absence was required, which could take months. A friend knew someone in the passport office who changed her profession to “poet.” Because poets didn’t need an official leave, this allowed her to make her escape quickly.

After nine months in Jordan, she emigrated to the United States, where she has lived in exile ever since. What she discovered, once she returned to writing, was an unexpected change in her work. No longer worried about the Iraqi censors, her poems, like “The War Works Hard,” became more direct. It was a strange shift, coming from a country where a poet’s words were under careful government scrutiny, to one where it seemed possible to write poetry about anything.

And poetry, she says, allows her to feel at home in her new country. No matter where she is, once she starts writing, poetry makes her feel at home. Living in the United States, she continues to bear witness. Mikhail points out that the first known poet in history was an Iraqi woman, named Enheduanna, who had an official title, “Keeper of the Flame.” That, she believes, is the poet’s role, to be the keeper of the flame.

Author of four poetry collections in Arabic, Dunya Mikhail’s collections available in English are The War Works Hard, and Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea.

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Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry
Research assistance: Stacey Balkun, Festival Assistant

In the poem “Last Words” from her collection Smoke, Dorianne Laux asks, “How many losses does it take to stop a heart,/to lay waste to the vocabularies of desire?” Later, in the same collection, in “Stairway to Heaven,” which describes an adolescent listening raptly to the title song on the car radio during a long drive, she writes:

I’m beholden to any boy brave enough
to be stunned, to sit still and hushed
while the grievous tones wash through him
like dusk.

Laux’s poems thrive in the complex landscape between these two extremes: One, the constant questioning why some lives are worn to death by terrible suffering; the other, the persistence to keep on crafting tiny acts of gratitude for the human capacity for beauty.

Essentially, her poems are prayers to the present; tiny rituals to keep us engaged with the earth, our own lives and other living beings. They make no distinction between the sacred and profane. The act of honoring the specific physical details of living a life on earth is the act of recognizing the mundane is sacred. And so, Laux’s poems are richly sensual. Their sensuality extends far beyond the physical pleasures shared by lovers, which they often celebrate.  In her poems, the scratchy voices of trees in wind, the carved face on a decomposing pumpkin buckling into itself, a cold can of soda held between a driver’s knees all, through our senses, re-attach us to the world.

Laux knows it is a world where some people are crushed: by brutality, poverty, hopelessness, disease. She’s well aware that some people are capable of horrific cruelty, and that others suffer through that cruelty in nightmarish childhoods. She was one such child, with some terrible stories to tell, and tells them with the same unflinching attention she brings to all her work.

But Laux is also an unflinching witness to acts of kindness and the possibility of redemption. Her poems are alive with people who have suffered cruelty and yet have hearts of compassion, and others guilty of brutal acts who are still capable of great tenderness. In the face of these paradoxes, she does not distance herself with irony or offer facile answers. Instead, she returns relentlessly to questions regarding our humanity, and our lack of it. In the process, she helps herself, and us, to find some.

Dorianne Laux’s most recent collection is Facts About the Moon. For a detailed bio and audio recordings of Laux reading two poems, visit the Academy of American Poets’ Dorianne Laux Page.

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Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

Like most of his contemporaries, Galway Kinnell started out writing in traditional forms. The shape of formal verse, with its counted beats and pre-determined quatrains, octaves and couplets, is carried over from the sung lyric, where counted time and the shape of the melody determine the length of each line and stanza. But stanzaic structure was not the only feature borrowed from music. In much of the lyric poetry written in these forms there is also an attempt to imitate the mellifluousness of music itself. John Keats and William Butler Yeats are only two of the masters of this tradition whose influence is evident in Kinnell’s earliest poems.

Yet, in a publishing career that has spanned more than five decades, he has emerged as one of the most distinctive and influential poets of his generation, which includes Allen Ginsberg, W. S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton and James Wright. There is no mistaking Kinnell’s voice in these lines from “Little Sleep’s Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight”:

Kiss
the mouth
which tells you, here,
here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones.

The still undanced cadence of vanishing.

How did such a transformation occur? Speaking with high school students at the first Dodge Festival in 1986, Kinnell said he reached a point in his life where he felt that counting syllables and searching for rhymes didn’t seem like the best way for a grown man to spend his time. Criticizing one of his early poems, “First Song,” he complained the rhyme scheme he’d created had forced him to end a line by describing frogs as singing of “their joy,” when it would have been better, he now felt, to have gone down to the frog pond and listened more closely to the frogs themselves.

When Kinnell, Ginsberg and their contemporaries began writing free-verse, they were influenced by incantation and the rhythms of Hebraic verse as they had come down through William Blake, Christopher Smart and Walt Whitman. But even then, Kinnell’s use of the long line was unique. Whitmanesque rhythms were counter-balanced by a cherishing of the pause, a respect for the power of silences learned from Emily Dickinson and William Carlos Williams, and rooted in Kinnell’s own insistent self-questioning. Since Flower Herding on Mount Manadnock (1964) and Body Rags (1968), his work has sustained a constant tension between the impulse to break out into ecstatic song and the knowledge of how easily a voice can be silenced.

During these years, through his translations of Yves Bonnefoy, Yvan Goll and Francois Villon, he learned to explore the potential of harsher and more jarring sounds and images. By the time Kinnell wrote The Book of Nightmares, Rainer Maria Rilke’s soaring and searching rhetoric had left a clear stamp on his work. But even with these many influences, a distinct voice was always present. For Kinnell, these often long-dead poets were beloved teachers and mentors, who nurtured his constant testing of himself and of the possibilities and limitations of the spoken word.

In all of his collections, but particularly in those of recent decades, there is a sense of a relentless striving toward a poetry that is not based on emulating music, chant, Hebraic verse or any other constructed model, but on the physicality of words themselves. For Kinnell, every word has its own weight, texture, taste and mouth feel, which, as he writes in “Blackberry Eating,” “I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well.” His poems have come closer and closer to a keen appreciation for the value of words for their own unique existence as corporeal things, a savoring of the pure languageness of language.

This is no mere aesthetic exercise, but part of a deeper attentiveness to the sounds of an actual life lived on this earth. On Sunday afternoon of that first Festival, an infant in the concert tent started wailing during Kinnell’s reading. As its young parents rose to leave, Galway stopped in mid-poem to call out “Oh, please don’t take that baby away! A baby’s cry is a tuning fork.” He is still listening. Still writing poems that stun us into silence for their authentic ring.

“Little Sleep’s Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight” appears in The Book of Nightmares and A New Selected Poems, which also includes “Blackberry Eating.” Galway Kinnell’s most recent collections include Strong is Your Hold and Imperfect Thirst.   A rare video of Kinnell reading “The Bear” from memory at Thomas Jefferson College in 1973 is available on YouTube.

Kinnell will read his translation of Rainer Marie Rilke’s Duino Elegies in its entirety on Saturday morning at the 2010 Dodge Poetry Festival.

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