Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

Martin, Michele & Rebecca

This week’s blog announces our ambitious Friends of the Festival fundraising campaign.  You may wonder why the Dodge Poetry Program—part of the Dodge Foundation, a major arts funder in New Jersey—needs to fundraise.  We hope you’ll take a few moments to read this blog in order to understand how fundraising is essential to sustaining the Dodge Poetry Program.

Remember when you first “Came alive in the presence of poetry”

“Students come alive in the presence of live poetry… I find them taking notes, writing down the advice (on writing and life) that the poets share, then turning around and sharing that wisdom in their classes. It provides them with a bit of confidence and validation for their own work.  The Festival is life changing—once they experience Dodge, they are forever changed for the better!”
Nicole Marionni, Highland Park High School. 2010 Festival

Since 1986, the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Program has been one of the leaders of a national poetry renaissance that is changing the way poetry is encountered, experienced and perceived.

• An international audience of 150,000 has attended the 13 biennial Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festivals.
• Over 45,000 students and 18,000 teachers have attended the Festival at no charge.
• More than 600 poets have read at the Festival or at a New Jersey High School as part of our Poetry in the Schools Program.
• Thousands of teachers have discussed poetry during our Clearing the Spring, Tending the Fountain sessions.
• Nearly 75,000 high school students encountered living poets at one of our events.

Preserve the Past

In addition to the ongoing work of producing the Festival and the Poets in the Schools Program, we have begun planning the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Archive project.   Consisting of over 2,500 hours of audio and video recordings, the Archive is one of the most extraordinary records of contemporary poetry and poets in the world.  Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners, U. S. Poets Laureate, and poets of international stature are captured in readings, interviews, and once-in-a-lifetime conversations.  Our long-term goal is to create a Dodge Poetry Archive website to create an experience of poetry that is shaped by curiosity, pleasure and personal interest, furthering our mission to nurture the connection between poetry lovers and poetry.

Sustain the Future

Developing the Archive, while continuing the Festival and our work in the schools, is more than the Poetry Program budget can sustain.  Begun as an initiative of the Dodge Foundation in 1986, the Poetry Program is only one of hundreds of initiatives and grantees in the arts, education and the environment funded by the Foundation.  The current economic landscape is challenging–both for the Foundation and for the non-profit sector which it steadily supports.

At this critical time, we ask you to consider what the Dodge Poetry Program has meant to you, and how you envision it being a part of your future.  We ask you to support the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Program as a Friend of the Festival. Friends of the Festival contributions are tax deductible and help us continue this extraordinary work. Click here to see all the ways your support makes a difference.

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Did you know that the Dodge Poetry Program has a YouTube channel? Take a look – view video clips from past biennial Festivals! You can also join the conversation on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter @dodgepoetryfest. See you there!

You don’t have to wait until the next Dodge Festival to hear great poetry in Newark. This weekend, NJPAC’s Alternate Routes Hip Hop Festival is hosting more than twenty Hip Hop artists in a variety of disciplines, including break-dancing, DJing, poetry, spoken word and film.  The festival, which is bi-annual, began in 2001 and is celebrating its 10^th anniversary.  Events run through Saturday, April 9 in the Art Center’s Chase Room.  Go to www.njpachiphop.org to get tickets.

The festival kicked off last night with a Word Jam.  Middle and high school students from Burnet Street School, Louise A. Spencer School and Newark Innovation Academy performed poems they wrote in NJPAC’s In-School Residencies, coordinated by the NJPAC Arts Education staff.  Tamesha Hawkins, a professional poet and performer who studied in NJPAC’s Arts Training program and Shamsuddin  “Sham” Abdul-Hamid, a 2010 NJPAC Women’s Association/Star-Ledger Scholarship recipient emceed the night. Over 60 students attended and 30 student performers shared their poems with the enthusiastic crowd.

Alternate Routes Hip Hop Festival founder and producer, Baraka Sele, believes students, educators, youth and elders will learn that Hip Hop is not always misogynistic, materialistic or violent.  “While Hip Hop artists are still rappin’ and beat-boxin’ and b-boyin’, they are also curating art exhibitions, making films and producing theater, as well as becoming authors, cultural critics, institution builders, politicians and social entrepreneurs.  We want to showcase all the ways they contribute positively to society.”

Tonight, Newark-born spoken word artist, Taalam Acey, will host a night of spoken word artists from across the country.  Acey’s work has been featured on BET, in Essence magazine, at the Sundance Film Festival, and the 2010 Dodge Poetry Festival.  Several of the artists who will perform have participated in HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and have appeared or worked with such artists as Amiri Baraka, Dead Prez, Lauryn Hill, Mos Def, and Sonia Sanchez.

Go to the NJPAC Hip Hop website for a full schedule of events and to save your spot at the festival.

A Life Together/Poets for Teachers
Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar
Thursday, October 7, 3:00-5:00 p.m.
New Jersey Performing Arts Center

A Life Together/Poets for Teachers is being offered free of charge exclusively to New Jersey teachers who will also be attending the October 7 Poetry Sampler that evening.

Join poets Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar for an intimate reading and conversation with two poets and teachers who have made a life together while making a life in poetry

Earn 5 Professional Development Hours

Attend A Life Together/Poets for Teachers and the Poetry Sampler, and fill out a simple survey, and earn 5 Professional Development Hours.

Call the NJPAC Box Office at 1-888-466-5722, and mention the “Teach Poetry” promotion. You will be offered the option of purchasing either a Thursday night ticket or a Four-Day Pass at the discounted teacher rate. Using the “Teach Poetry” promotion when ordering tickets will automatically generate a ticket for you for A Life Together/Poets for Teachers.

If you have already purchased a Thursday evening ticket or Four-Day Pass, simply call the box office and tell them you want to add the “Teach Poetry” event. The ticketing staff will be able to call up your sales record and generate a ticket for the afternoon event.

You must have a valid New Jersey teacher’s ID to participate.

DORIANNE LAUX’s fourth book of poems, Facts about the Moon, is the recipient of the Oregon Book Award and was short-listed for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Earlier collections include Awake; What We Carry, finalist for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award; and Smoke, as well as two small press editions, Superman: The Chapbook and Dark Charms. Her fifth collection of poetry, The Book of Men, will be published by W.W. Norton in 2011. Laux is the recipient of two Best American Poetry Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Widely anthologized, her work has appeared in The Body Electric: America’s Best Poetry from The American Poetry Review, The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and The Best of the Net Anthology. Laux has been teaching poetry in private and public venues since 1990 and currently teaches poetry in the M.F.A. program at North Carolina State University.

JOSEPH MILLAR‘s first collection, Overtime (2001), was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and his second, Fortune, was published in 2007. A native of Pennsylvania, Millar attended Johns Hopkins University and spent 25 years in the San Francisco Bay area working at a variety of jobs, from telephone repairman to commercial fisherman. It would be two decades before he returned to poetry. His work has won him a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2008 Pushcart Prize and has appeared in magazines such as DoubleTake, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, American Poetry Review and Ploughshares. In 1997, he gave up his job as a telephone-installation foreman to try his hand at teaching. A new chapbook, Bestiary, is now available from Red Dragonfly Press, and a third collection, Blue Rust, will be published by Carnegie-Mellon University Press in fall 2011. Millar is on the core faculty at Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA Program and lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with his wife, the poet Dorianne Laux.

Read on to see how teachers can
Earn up to 20 Professional Development Hours
at the Dodge Poetry Festival

(more…)

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 hemisphere.

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
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

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.