Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

Get acquainted with the conveniently walkable Downtown Newark Arts District through our newly added Festival Village page. Here you can see the layout of the charming and historically rich area which will be transformed into a Poetry Village for the duration of the Festival.

The  Festival will be taking place within the boundaries of the original village of “New Ark,” founded by a group of Puritan settlers led by Robert Treat in 1666. Looking out from NJPAC, you can see the greenery of Military Park, where the town’s Revolutionary militia would assemble. Predating the Revolutionary War is Trinity & St. Philip’s Cathedral, which  sits in one corner of Military Park and served as a field hospital for both British and Colonial armies during wartime.

In addition to the rich history of the area, the Downtown Newark Arts District is home to a rich  cultural heritage that continues today.  Just across the street from Trinity and St. Philip’s, Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Arts, features the work of local artists with a broad range of voices and perspectives.  And just two blocks from Aljira, there’s the Newark Museum, housing exhibits of both new and ancient works , including the largest collection of Tibetan Buddhist art in the Western heritage.

For those  who’ve attended past Festivals, you’ll be glad to know  the 2010 Festival  footprint is actually smaller, from end to end, than Waterloo Village.  You can see the scope of the footprint on our map, here. All the venues are within easy walking distance of each other, and only a 10 minute walk from Newark’s two major train stations.  But you don’t even have to take the walk to the train station if you don’t want to: the Newark Light Rail has a stop directly in front of NJPAC.

So keep it green and hop on public transportation and explore the venues which make up the 2010 Dodge Poetry Festival situated in the Newark Downtown Arts District.

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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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Join the Friends of the Festival (use the blue Donate button on our homepage)

Stacey Balkun, Festival Assistant

A graduate of Ohio State University’s MFA program for both poetry and creative non-fiction, Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of Miracle Fruit, At the Drive In Volcano, and a forthcoming collection from Tupelo Press.  A dynamic poet, Nezhukumatathil is active in both the worlds of teaching and touring—she has set out “to make sure that no student ever says ‘I never knew there were Asian-American poets’ again” (every other day).  Through poetry, she shares her life experiences in a way that is accessible to readers of all ages.  Nezhukumatathil feels that her teaching and writing influence each other: her best teaching days lead her to write, and her best writing days excite her to teach (How a Poem Happens).

Nature plays a huge role in Nezhukumatathil’s poetry.  Her poetry often examines life by linking “average” occurrences with scientific or biological information (see “Fugu Soup Blues” and “Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia”).  Much of Nezhukumatathil’s work is research-based, and every one of the many morsels about science or natural elements is true.  Nezhukumatathil feels she owes the reader accuracy within her poetry; although the poems are not truly autobiographical, the “trivia” bits are completely factual.  She often uses biology as a jumpstart when writing poems.  In an interview with Poetic Asides, she confides, “Mother Nature is the greatest poet of all. I just take my cues from her.”

Nezhukumatathil teaches creative writing and environmental literature at the State University of New York-Fredonia.  She encourages aspiring writers to “read often and a lot. Floss. Invest in a good pair of shoes and write letters more often. Listen to the paper take the ink when you sign your name” (Poetic Asides).  Read poems by Aimee Nezhukumatathil on 2^nd Avenue Poetry and Octopus Magazine.  Hear her poetry and Q&A’s on From the Fishhouse.

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.

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

There’s a superstition in some cultures that if you praise anyone or anything too much, proclaim your love or express your happiness too much, they will be snatched away. What at first appears as cynicism in some of Bob Hicok’s poems might be remnants of a similar wariness. Examined more closely, even a poem with as brutally funny a title as “Hope is a thing with feathers that smacks into a window” threatens to break out into a hymn of praise. But the impulse is checked, as if some learned reluctance held the speaker back from being too much of an ecstatic.

Yet, in poem after poem, Hicok turns an almost devotional attention to the things of this world. No image or detail is too small or strange to escape his eye and imagination. His poems teem with images that lead us, on the momentum of his own curious mind, from observation to idea to emotion to (sometimes) revelation. The tension in his verbal music is sustained by his constant questioning of those very same observations, ideas, emotions and revelations. His is a restless intelligence, uncomfortable with platitudes or facile resolutions. He roots out sentimentality not because he is against emotion, but because he is propelled forward by a deeper desire to connect, to understand, to feel and perhaps, as he writes in one poem, find “one last chance/to adore beyond reason.”

Hicok’s poems can be very funny, but even at their most ironic they do not provide distance from their subjects. His is not a humor of escapism, but of acceptance. It is a humor found more often in factory lunchrooms than university faculty meetings. No wonder. Hicok’s path to his current position as a professor at Virginia Tech. was unorthodox. He worked as a waiter, dishwasher and factory worker and held a variety of other jobs before founding and running his own auto die design shop for twenty years. He forged his own style by writing steadily while completely isolated from MFA programs, and reading voraciously wherever his interests led him, influenced by novelists as much as by any poet.

The result is an unmistakable voice, one tempered by personal experience of the struggles of our working poor, the innate optimism of the self-made man, and the perseverance of an artist who found his own path despite the considerable odds against him.

“Hope is a thing with feathers that smacks into a window” appears in Bob Hicok’s newest collection, Words for Empty and Words for Full. Visit the Poetry Foundation’s Bob Hicok page for a generous sampling of his work.

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.

Rebecca Gambale, Festival Assistant

You can’t read an article about poet Kathleen Graber without seeing her referred to as a “success story.” She says her interest in poetry was stirred “fairly late in [her] life, in comparison, say, to Keats” – when, as a high school English teacher, she took her class to the High School Student Day at the Poetry Festival. Graber says in an interview with the Cape May County Herald, “While I cannot claim that any of them were so inspired as to change their lives, I was.”

Graber grew up in Wildwood, NJ, where her parents owned, at separate times, a mini-golf course and an arcade—the latter being a place of employment for a good portion of her young life. This unconventional upbringing made Graber feel hesitant toward what she perceived to be the academia of poetry. In the above mentioned interview, Graber explores the two disparate worlds and the value of experiencing both: “I thought all ‘real poets’ must be so much more sophisticated, so much better educated, and so worldly. Yet if you set out to sever yourself from your past, you risk cutting yourself off from yourself in a way that now feels very dangerous to me.”

Writing her first poem at the age of 35 during a writing workshop at the “Winter Poetry and Prose Getaway” in Cape May, it is possible that Graber had saved up the right words and experiences until she was ready to produce her work. Care and thoughtful use of language is crucial to Kathleen Graber’s poems. Perhaps those years leading up to her discovery of poetry allowed her to form the generous, long-lined and rich poems which she produces today. You can see the examples of this in Graber’s pieces which have been featured in the New Yorker: The Magic Kingdom and  The Drunkenness of Noah.

From this launching point, Graber started enrolling in workshops close to her Wildwood home. She began to study at Richard Stockton College with Stephen Dunn and Peter Murphy, two award-winning poets who helped Graber to grow as an artist. She went on to graduate from New York University’s creative writing program in 2002 and began shopping her manuscript for her book, Correspondence, the following year. Shortly thereafter, in 2005, Correspondence was chosen by poet Bob Hicok to receive the 2005 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, and Graber won an Artist Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council of the Arts and a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award. You can read a poem from Correspondence here.

In 2007, Graber was awarded the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, followed by the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship which allows a poet to travel and write “in whatever place the recipient deems best suited to advance the art of poetry as practiced by (the poet).” This travel time was spent working on her newest publication, The Eternal City.

Despite being referred to as a “success story” and even a “rockstar” by Peter Murphy, Graber remains humble and balanced. Her first goal is producing work which is of great quality. In an interview with poet Kate Greenstreet, Graber said “There are a lot of superb poems out in the world to read already. If we want to add to that, we should be as thoughtful about that as we can…I think we should try to put out there only the very best we have, even if that means publishing less frequently.”

She admits that she is not a role-model for the solicitation and promotion of one’s work, but she remarks simply and earnestly that “the people who have managed to find [my book] and read it seem to like it. Whenever I give a reading, people seem to buy the book. That’s been extremely encouraging.”

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

Follow the Dodge Poetry Festival on Twitter
Become a fan of the Dodge Poetry Festival on Facebook
Join the Friends of the Festival (use the blue Donate button on our homepage)

Stacey Balkun, Festival Assistant

Humans are drawn repeatedly to the narrative; our lives are a sequence of journeys from one place or time to another.  Situating these passages within the context of geography or time can reveal themes and motifs that persist throughout the days, months, or years and often resurface as stories or poems. Oliver de la Paz is a curator of these memories and experiences, cultivating personal myths as well as spiritual elements to create poetry out of the autobiographical.

In an interview with Box Car Poetry Review, de la Paz describes himself as “very deliberate when it comes to discovering [the] patterns in [his] writing”.  Author of three collections of poetry, de la Paz’s work often revisits themes, slowly evolving through experiments with form.  Images surrounding the motion of flight are prevalent: wings, birds, even airplanes resurface often, as the speaker often desires spiritual ascension.

De la Paz recognizes the influence of life history on in his poetry.  During a reading at Bowdoin College he tells a memory of a voyage taken to Lourdes, France as a child to collect holy water in tiny vessels; the inspiration for his poem “Four Madonnas”.  De la Paz suggests the spiritual element within the imager of his poems.  He approaches the creation of a poem with a focus on craft before symbolism, as evident in his How a Poem Happens interview.  His poem “Holiness” holds the shape of a sonnet because de la Paz felt the sonnet form was “an ideal container for questioning belief”.  The question of holiness re-emerges throughout the poet’s three collections.

De la Paz reveals his flexibility as a writer by adapting this motif to a variety of poetic forms: aubades, sonnets, couplets, and apostrophes, among others.  He weaves form, image, and theme together gracefully, working in and around form to tie myths and reality together in a subtle manner.  His style of reading reflects this elegance; de la Paz’s voice presents each line of poetry with composure and deliberation, allowing the listener to digest each image and recognize its relation to the poem as a whole.  Hear de la Paz read on the poet’s website.

De la Paz co-chairs the advisory board of Kundiman, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of Asian American Poetry. He is the author of three collections of poetry, Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby, and the forthcoming Requiem for the Orchard, winner of the Akron Prize for poetry chosen by Martín Espada.

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.

* * *

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
Join the Friends of the Festival (use the blue Donate button on our homepage)