Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry
Research Assistance: Rebecca Gambale, Festival Assistant

Kay Ryan’s poetry has a quality of wit John Donne and other writers of the English Renaissance would have appreciated. Her poems are witty in our modern sense of showing a quick mind and pointed sense of humor, but they are far more than merely clever. Wit, in Donne’s time, was a prized gift for a poet to possess. It suggested the ability to both stretch logic and compress language to their limits. Big ideas were hidden inside tiny containers. In this sense of wit, part of the poet’s skill is like that of the master of the shell-game: we are always surprised by the outcome and delighted by the practitioner’s skill, even if we get stung by what’s uncovered.

We don’t have to go back four centuries to find this kind of wit. It is a thread that joins Ryan to Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and many other poets who, with the simple turn of a phrase, can twist an apparently innocuous observation into a startling, even discomfiting musing. What all these poets have in common is that, under the nimble surface of their poems is a barely contained surging pressure. Sometimes it’s emotion or the need to get something said that cannot be articulated or even approached without the help of the poem’s form to provide support and structure. Just as often that pressure is created by the force of conflict, by opposing ideas or observations that cannot be reconciled with mere reason, and the poem exists in that place of tension between them.

It is fitting that we must look to a tradition that stretches across centuries to discuss Kay Ryan’s poems, rather than rely on the vocabulary of the conventions of contemporary poetry. Ryan worked for 30 years teaching remedial English in a small community college in Marin County, California. Far removed from any literary center or the world of creative writing programs, she forged an individual style based on the poets from over the centuries who spoke to her temperament. The result is a unique voice that is at once unmistakable as distinctly hers and simultaneously immediately recognizable as coming from a long tradition.

A generous sampling of Kay Ryan’s poetry cane be found in her most recent collection, The Best of It: New and Selected Poems. Visit the Academy of American Poet’s Kay Ryan Page for a biography and audio recordings of her reading a selection of her poems.

Please use the “Share your thoughts with us” box below to share other resources you may have found for this poet. In this way, we can build together a mini-wiki-encyclopedia on the 2010 Festival Poets.

Return in the weeks ahead as we continue to profile the 2010 Festival Poets.

Khalil Murrell, Program Associate, Poetry

Poetry may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you hear “Music History,” unless you’ve been reading Rita Dove’s Sonata Mulattica, or leadbelly by Tyehimba Jess. Through poems in the voice of Leadbelly and characters in his life (listen to freedom and see martha promise receives leadbelly, 1935) and through letters, quotes, dialogue, song lyrics, and prose pieces (see harris county chain gang and home again), Jess brings the fascinating life of American folk and blues musician, Huddie William Ledbetter (Leadbelly),  into verse. Perhaps for him, history is not only a matter of fact, but one of perspective and imagination.

When asked in an interview what drew him to the “King of the 12-String Guitar,” Jess said the history was fascinating: “[Leadbelly’s] personal themes matched certain major themes in African American history: his relationship to The Prison Industrial Complex, The Great Migration, anthropology… The fact that he was grounded in myth, and on the edges of American folklore was also appealing to me.”

But these somewhat academic interests do not say enough about Tyehimba Jess. A two-time member of the Green Mill Slam teams in Chicago, the hometown of slam poetry, he attributes much of his performance and writing techniques to what he learned from slam poets, like Patricia Smith. An avid fan of blues, the Detroit native’s performance style has also been greatly influenced by blues and jazz. (see Jess read below). Still, he acknowledges The Last Poets, Black Arts Movement poets, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, and later on Cornelius Eady and Yusef Komunyakaa as literary influences.

Hearing Jess’ most recent work on Thomas “Blind Tom” Wiggins, an autistic savant and musical prodigy on piano, suggests his interest in the intersection between (musical) history and poetry show no signs of wavering. A Cave Canem fellow, Tyehimba Jess earned degrees from the University of Chicago and NYU, and is also the author of African American Pride: Celebrating Our Achievements, Contributions, and Enduring Legacy (non-fiction). He currently teaches at CUNY College of Staten Island. To hear more poems and an interview, visit Fishouse.

Please use the “Share your thoughts with us” box below to share other resources you may have found for this poet. In this way, we can build together a mini-wiki-encyclopedia on the 2010 Festival Poets.

Return in the weeks ahead as we continue to profile the 2010 Festival Poets.

Khalil Murrell, Program Associate, Poetry

In the great, big ol’ picnic of Matthew Dickman’s poems, everything is eligible for singing: a glowing, off-the-vine “Roma,” the chicken hung in the window in “The Mysterious Human Heart,” and even the skinny girl wearing a Talk Nerdy to Me t-shirt in “V.” His poems enter and re-enter the strange and heart-wrenching places of American life (see “Lents District” and “Trouble”) without leaving us in sentimentality or despair. He takes us to places as democratic and basic as Walmart without simplifying the complex world into “Love” and roses.

Dickman’s debut collection, All American Poem, offers rich tensions between humor and heartbreak—even the joyride through sorrow—that fill our everyday lives. In fact, like Jeffrey McDaniel and Tony Hoagland, Dickman often employs jest and witticism on his way to poignancy. Watch him read “Slow Dance” below.

We’ve all heard more people write poetry than those who read it. True or not, this sentiment may result from the belief that poetry—arguably the most democratic of all the arts—feels removed at times from its capacity to engage the masses. But with a Whitmanian catalog style that spills down the page, Dickman seems to have found a way to write inclusive and accessible, yet densely complex poems that help bridge the gap between high art and the mainstream. “I want to write poems I want to read, in a way,” the Portland native said in an interview. Matthew and his brother, Michael Dickman, may be the closest thing the poetry world has ever come to having a phenom, including being profiled in the New Yorker and having a small role as a pre-cog in Minority Report with Tom Cruise. But the hearty muscularity and generosity of his work suggest both Dickman and his poems will be around for a long time to come.

Please use the “Share your thoughts with us” box below to share other resources you may have found for this poet. In this way, we can build together a mini-wiki-encyclopedia on the 2010 Festival Poets.

Return in the weeks ahead as we continue to profile the 2010 Festival Poets.

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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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Welcome back to our January Earthwatch Mondays series.

Dodge has been working with the Earthwatch Institute to offer Educator Fellowships to New Jersey’s K-12 public school teachers “so they can return to the classroom and community to advance an ethic of environmental stewardship and empower the students’ voices.”

You can see the first installment of the Teacher Chronicles here.  For the next three Mondays you will read teacher fellow responses to a series of questions regarding expeditions that have helped them build science skills, increase scientific literacy, and improve environmental stewardship through hands-on, inquiry based learning.

This week, meet Matt Farber, who participated on “Costa Rican Coffee – From Community to Cup” from August 9-16 2009 with Earthwatch Scientist Sebastián Castro Tanzi. Matt is a sixth and seventh grade social studies teacher at Valleyview Middle School in Denville, NJ.

Q. What did you learn in the field and how did you bring your experience back to the classroom?

The Earthwatch expedition I took, “Costa Rica Coffee – From Community to Cup,” was a natural extension of what I try to bring to my students. I am a social studies teacher at Valleyview Middle School, in Denville, New Jersey. This expedition was an excellent opportunity for me to show my social studies students how we can maintain a sustainable future. My ultimate goal was for my students to see themselves as global citizens.

In the field, we randomly picked coffee plants and counted productive and non-productive branches and berries. We also took soil samples. The coffee farms were sometimes very steep. We learned the benefits of having shade-grown coffee plants. Banana trees often provide the shade. The idea is that shade trees prevent erosion & return nutrients to the soil. This is a sustainable way to farm without using harmful herbicides and/or pesticides.

Q. What did your students think of the lesson?

The first topic we cover in seventh grade social studies is the Jamestown Colony. Jamestown succeeded due to its successful cultivation of tobacco as an exported cash crop. It was easy to point out the parallels that exist between the world of 1607 and today. My students got a lot out of the lesson. Three of my classes created a collaborative slideshow on VoiceThread.com:

2nd period slideshow

5th period slideshow

7th period slideshow

I created a bulletin board detailing my experience, as well as the town newspaper’s coverage of my adventure. I often refer to the pictures I posted when I teach about global citizenship.

This experience left a lasting impression on many of my students. From bananas to coffee to chocolate, I receive regular reports when my students spot the Fair Trade logo in stores. One of my students pointed out that his family gave out Fair Trade candy for Halloween. As a holiday gift, that student gave me a container of Fair Trade certified cocoa.

Q. How did you benefit both personally and professionally from your Earthwatch experience?

This experience helped me to become even more of a conscious consumer. I understand better that we have the power to “vote” simply by making better decisions when I shop. By paying a little bit more for Fair Trade certified products, we receive better quality products and help local communities. Witnessing the success of the Tarrazu region of Costa Rica was all the proof I needed to see the “win-win scenario” that can exist!

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For a really thorough and interesting look at his fellowship, you can visit Matt’s Earthwatch blog here.

For his terrific classroom blog, click here.

Dodge is in conversations with Earthwatch to explore how the fellowships might become more closely aligned with other programs that emphasize sustainable community practices, including the Cloud Institute’s NJ Learns program, the Monarch Teacher Network and Sustainable Jersey. We welcome your thoughts about the teacher expeditions and potential connections to related efforts in New Jersey.

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Earthwatch is the nation’s leading environmental volunteer organization supporting sustainable development worldwide, recruiting volunteers from stakeholder groups (notably teachers, students, journalists, community and government leaders and multi-national corporations) to participate in innovative research programs benefiting environmental issues and capacity building. Earthwatch’s mission is to engage people in scientific field research and education to promote the understanding and action necessary for a sustainable world.

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David Grant, President and CEO

I have been reading Michael Sandel’s book Justice, which stems from his popular course of the same name at Harvard.  In between chapters over the weekend, I have been reading proposals from nonprofit organizations seeking funding from Dodge in the new year.

In both cases, the predominant question on my mind has been Sandel’s subtitle: What’s The Right Thing To Do?

The book, by the way, would be a great holiday present for anyone you know who appreciates having his or her assumptions challenged.  Just when you think you know what “the right thing to do” is, Sandel asks you to look at it another way.

He begins with some fascinating questions of judgment and, inevitably, politics, using real life situations.  Should there be laws against price gouging in the wake of natural disasters?  Should Purple Hearts be awarded for psychological injuries?  Should the CEO’s and top executives of banks bailed out with taxpayer money get bonuses?

And he uses hypothetical situations.  If you were the engineer on a runaway train, with five people working on the track in front of you, and you could turn onto a side track where one person was working, would you?  Most people say yes.  If you were watching the runaway train from a bridge and could push one person onto the tracks to save the five people working further down them, would you?  Most people say no.  In each case, there is a choice: either one person will die or five people will die. Yet we make different judgments.  It is not just about numbers and outcomes.

Sandel’s theme is that there are three main ways to think about justice: maximizing welfare, respecting freedom, and promoting virtue.

I began to cast the proposals to Dodge in these terms and realize our social investments of limited resources require us to reflect on these matters.  How shall we compare a local arts group with a local soup kitchen, for example? Do we support the educational organization that brings freedom of choice and opportunity to a small number of underserved students in a dramatic, transformational way?  Or do we back efforts to incrementally improve an educational system that affects thousands of students?

Sandel unpacks that last idea: the utilitarian idea of “the greatest good for the greatest number” – both its strengths and its weaknesses. That chapter helps me understand why at some gatherings of foundations, there are strong pleas for the whole field to drop everything except a focus on mitigating climate change.

At Dodge, we use the themes Creativity and Sustainability as if they were virtues.  But I imagine Sandel countering: “Do you value the creativity it takes to create a new weapon?  Is everything worth sustaining?”

Clearly not.  I appreciate how Sandel frames the process of responsible moral judgment as “a dialectic between our judgments about particular situations and the principals we affirm on reflection.”  It reminds me again of the importance of “Quadrant II” time in organizations – that precious time we set aside and protect for important matters that are not urgent.  It is our time to reflect on lessons learned from action and guiding principles for future decisions.

It is both disconcerting and liberating to understand anew through reading Justice that the right thing to do is not always clear to a single individual, let alone a group, no matter how much thoughtful attention you pay to a given situation or choice.  But as he writes, “Thinking about justice seems inescapably to engage us in thinking about the best way to live,” and for us at Dodge, that takes us to the heart of our mission of fostering a more livable world.

We will never, in Sandel’s words, “resolve (our) disagreements once and for all.”  But these discussions “can give shape to the arguments we have, and bring moral clarity to the alternatives we confront.”

Another cycle of grantmaking is underway.