Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

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.

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

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

Last week, we heard four-time National Poetry Slam Individual Champion Patricia Smith read her poem “34” from Blood Dazzler, her book-length meditation on Hurricane Katrina. To continue our exploration of poetry as an oral/aural art, listen to Sekou Sundiata read his poem “New American Theatre.”

Sundiata is such a gifted reader, that it is easy to miss how masterfully spoken English has been crafted into the elaborate rhythms of this poem. Many of us were taught in English classes how to scan stressed and unstressed syllables to hear the meters of traditional poetic forms. But meter is only one way to create rhythm in poetry.

A recurrent alteration in any of the acoustic qualities of human speech can be used to create rhythm. Meter, rhyme, repetition, and parallel syntax are all widely used for this purpose. Sundiata goes beyond these familiar devices. He weaves every aspect of speech into the varying rhythms of his poems: the shapes of sentences, phrases, words, and syllables, the pitches of vowels and the textures of consonants.

Listen to “New American Theatre” again. Sundiata’s use of sound is so masterful he appears to compose vowel melodies. In case you suspect this is the result of his skill as an orator, listen more closely. Say a few of his lines aloud yourself. You will quickly realize the shaping of sound is as deliberate and controlled as it is in any musical composition.

Although print versions of Sundiata’s poems are hard to find, even when encountered on the printed page the rhythms of his lines come alive in the reader’s ear. Sekou Sundiata can be heard reading with musical accompaniment on longstoryshort and The Blue Oneness of Dreams.

Return to Poetry Fridays in the weeks ahead, when we will feature video clips of readings by Taslima Nasreen, Brian Turner, Kevin Young, and others.

In a small departure from our YouTube Festival videos, today we’re pleased to feature Bridget Talone, our  Poetry Festival Assistant from September 2005 to August 2008. Bridget  worked for both the 2006 and the 2008 Festivals, and she is currently an Iowa Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers Workshop.

Ordeal and What Comes After/MFA Mid-Life Crisis

In an interview with the Paris Review, the poet John Berryman said: “I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it, Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he’s in business.”

While that point of view flirts with fetishizing suffering (Berryman goes on to say that he hopes to be “nearly crucified”), I believe Berryman’s quote speaks to the question that catches up to most writers at one time or another: Why write?

For writers who feel they have lived through what Berryman calls ‘an ordeal,’ that question is moot. Why write? Because they feel they have to. Anxiety over—or at least delayed.

Starting out, this was certainly true for me. I was a life-long reader (of just about anything) but only began to write poetry in high school, when my father was struggling with a cancer diagnosis and a host of other issues that accompanied it for him. I wrote in order to express my most painful and unsayable thoughts and feelings—to make some sense out of his, and my own, suffering. I wrote (in the words of artist & sculptor Louise Bourgeois) because my emotions were “inappropriate to my size.” I needed to engage with them outside of my body—on the page—where I had the chance to play with the forces that threatened to overwhelm me in real life. To make what was painful into something I could be proud of—something beautiful.

Now, two years after my father’s passing, and one year after starting graduate school, I find myself asking ‘why do I write now?’ And how? The distress that I experienced while my father was ill, and the grief I felt over his passing have become manageable parts of my life. They will always be with me, but they are no longer as urgent, as total, as they once were.

While I have made peace with this personally, my experience as a writer has been shaken by this change. I used to know what I was going to write about—it was almost as though I had no choice. Now I feel like I am being dishonest if I attempt to write the same poems I was writing even a year ago. Yet, I have rarely approached writing this way—as a choice and a practice.

Graduate school is, in a lot of ways, an interesting place to deal with this question. On one hand, there is a pressure to produce (at least) a poem a week and, ultimately, a manuscript (hopefully with some coherence). This could, if one was not careful, lead to a sort of spitting out of poems—sticking with a subject because it is large enough that one could conceivably write a book around it. Or, to look at things more positively, it could enforce the idea that writing, just like any task ones sets out to do well, takes practice and determination. It even encourages developing a routine. (I am a night writer/morning reviser. And lately, a morning writer.)

I like to think that, while an MFA program can be a place to hyper-focus on your own methods & shortcomings as a writer, it can also be a place to be refreshed. It is a place to learn about and write back to different methods and traditions. To meet writers who came to poetry for a variety of reasons and who continue to write for reasons you may never have guessed. It’s a place for conversations about art and, above all, it is a place where you have to/get to read like crazy.

For me, the recently terrifying question of Why Do I Write & How is best answered after reading—when the terror has dissipated and is replaced with pleasure. I write poetry because poetry moves me. It shocks and shakes me. It reminds me, in the best way, that I am alive and part of a world full of people. It reminds me of the urgency of that we all share, whether we are currently suffering through an ordeal or not.

For more of Bridget’s work, take a look at her poem “Expecting Honey“ at Tin House.

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

A hundred years have passed since the free-verse revolution. Yet the question still emerges of what makes a piece of writing that doesn’t rhyme a poem, and how does it differ from prose. It helps if you begin with a simple distinction: The basic building block of prose is the sentence; the basic building block of poetry is the line. Now listen to Jane Hirshfield read five short poems.

Yes, these five poems are written in recognizable sentences. But the movement and pacing of the language, which creates the rhythmic shape of each poem, is determined by the line. Hirshfield is so attentive to the shape of language that you can almost hear the poem progress, line by line, as she reads.

That we can’t see the printed lines to know where they break on the page offers an opportunity to experience more fully the difference between the line and the sentence. (more…)

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry
[email_link]

In the video below, filmed at the 2008 Festival, Edward Hirsch stands before a capacity crowd of more than 2,000. Hirsch is halfway through a day of poetry conversations with educators who have come from all over the country to participate in Teacher Day. His excitement is palpable as he reads two of his poems, “A Partial History of My Stupidity” and “The Widening Sky.”

It is not surprising that Hirsch is so obviously delighted at being part of the group gathered under the Concert Tent. He deeply values the sense of community we can experience through poems. For Hirsch, poetry is eternal and global: When a poem speaks to us, even one written hundreds of years ago, we join with everyone who has ever read or heard that poem.

His poems almost seem acts of gratitude for having been allowed into this community. With that gratitude comes a deep respect for the difficulty of writing a poem. Hirsch has said that once he knew he wanted to be a poet, he thought “reading everything” was part of the job description. He understood that in order to make your own poems, you have to know how other poets made theirs.

Yet he wears his erudition lightly. “A Partial History of My Stupidity” opens with gentle humor concerning an immediately recognizable predicament: making a wrong turn that gets him hopelessly stranded in traffic. The language seems direct enough, and yet, as the poem progresses, the speaker’s self-indictments grow increasingly troubling.

The revelations in this poem, and in the closing lines of “The Widening Sky,” take us in directions we are not quite prepared for. In this, they are like most self-discoveries. Listening to Hirsch, it is easy to imagine he wasn’t ready for these revelations either. But once they emerged, he had to share them. Because that’s what poems are: one human being speaking to other human beings. And what we say to each other should matter.

“A Partial History of My Stupidity” appears in Edward Hirsch’s most recent collection, Special Orders, and “The Widening Sky” appears in Lay Back the Darkness. Visit the 2008 Dodge Poetry Festival Poet Pages for a biography of Edward Hirsch.

Be sure to return for upcoming Poetry Fridays, when we will feature many poets from past Dodge Poetry Festivals in the weeks ahead, including Jane Hirshfield, Ted Kooser, Maxine Kumin, Naomi Shihab Nye, Sharon Olds and others.