Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

Michelle Knapik, Environment Program Director

Yesterday’s dedication of the Scott & Hella McVay Poetry Trail at Greenway Meadow Park punctuated a glorious autumn day with the spoken words of poets and the soulful, reverberating music of Paul Winter.

Paul Winter

The magic of the day has been made timeless thanks to the Poetry Trail installation. The Trail, a collection of 30 poems dotting a gentle 1.5 mile trail, is a gift from the McVays that seems a perfect expression of their love for each other, their shared love of arts and culture, and their desire to inspire connections between people and the natural world.

Scott was the founding Executive Director of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, and his many contributions to the poetry world include the creation of the Dodge Poetry Festival. He is also known for the innovative environmental grantmaking he guided during his time at Dodge and throughout his career. Hella McVay, Founder of the Whole Earth Center and a trustee of the D&R Greenway Land Trust, has worked on a parallel track of building capacity in the arts world as well as in the environmental arena.

 Hella’s poetry flags, fluttering in the afternoon winds, framed the temporary outdoor stage at Greenway Meadow Park. Linda Mead, the Executive Director of D&R Greenway Land Trust, whose team was instrumental in the preservation of the park and the preservation of some 226 properties overall, presided over the ceremonies. Linda and Hella, however, are no strangers to the concept of art and nature. They have been champions of D&R Greenway’s efforts to bring the environmental and arts communities together, including the outstanding exhibits that D&R Greenway hosts at its headquarters in the Johnson Education Center.

The crowd listened intently as poets and educators read their own works and the works of poets passed. Jim Haba, the former Poetry Program Director at Dodge read Lucille Clifton’s Earth and his own Eating the Whole Apple. Penny Harter read Owl Dream. Gerald Stern read Your Animal. Mary Delia delivered Vacant Land. Wei-ling Wu, a gifted educator, read poems of Li Po and Chuang Tzu. Nupur Lahiri read and sang works by Rabindranath Tagore. Paul Muldoon offered Charles Baudelaire’s Albatross and his own Hedgehog. (Poets are pictured in the order listed above)

Richard Goldman, D&R Greenway’s board chair, noted that this day was one of the most powerful, moving and significant days at D&R Greenway. Yes, there was applause to acknowledge D&R Greenway’s success in preserving 14,500 plus acres valued at more than $320,000,000, but this day went way beyond land transactions. This was about matters of the heart and soul; it was about laying a hearthstone for stewardship; it was about people connecting to the land. As people fanned out over the trail at the end of the presentation, it was also clear that the psychic value of this day outsized any monetary figure.

I read and walked and communed with nature and people until sundown. I took stock in new ways. There were moments filled with wonder, beauty, quiet and calm.

I saw movement in the meadows, and heard the different sounds of the wind through leaves, branches, and grasses.

As Martin Farawell, Dodge’s current Poetry Program Director has said of poetry, it makes you notice life. I am grateful for the time I got to take notice and thankful for the gift that will make it possible for so many others to walk the Poetry Trail and do the same.

What have you noticed in nature? Which poems or poets inspire or capture your experiences?

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

The second poem Gerald Stern reads in this video clip from the 2008 Dodge Poetry Festival ends with the phrase, “the way my brain works.” Yet it is exactly how his brain works that pulls us into the poems and astonishes us with where he takes us.

He begins with the most mundane objects: coffee pots, wilted rhododendron, a rusted burst-out water pipe, a green cap. For Stern, nothing is insignificant; everything demands our attention and our praise because, as one of his book titles instructs us: Everything Is Burning. In the act of cherishing this transitory world, he stumbles over human ignorance, cruelty and greed, and rages against them. But it is the rage of one who refuses to abandon his faith in our capacity for joy. Stern may be our one true ecstatic poet, for he will praise what most of us abandon and neglect.

And he does this with great humor and irony. But Stern’s irony has little in common with that praised in much of the poetry of the last century. He does not use it to gain distance from his subject, or to allow the reader to feel superior to human emotion. His irony is like that in King Lear. It is awful and awe-full.

Lear does not see the truth until Cordelia is dying. We know it is too late to matter, to change anything, and yet, like Lear, we lean forward, hoping against hope she will breathe. In “Asphodel,” the speaker, after a lifetime that has spanned World War II, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, both Iraq invasions and the war in Afghanistan, refuses to believe it should take a lifetime “just to hate one of their dumb butcheries.” And yet, because it is the last line of the poem, we know it does, and it has. The aged veteran we meet in the poem, wearing his Korean War cap, which we would assume is a sign of pride and patriotism (Is it?) calls that war stupid and useless.

In “The Dancing,” the speaker and the reader share the historical knowledge that creates the terrible irony that the small family dancing so riotously in their small apartment in Pittsburgh in 1945 know nothing of the “dancing” of the families dying in gas chambers across the sea. In a few short lines Stern has painted that small family with such loving detail they come alive for us. They become every family we did not see because they were vanished in the Holocaust.

This Time: New and Selected Poems offers a generous selection from Gerald Stern’s first seven books of poems. Save the Last Dance is his most recent collection.

In case you wondered: Stern’s “Here’s Eddy” during his opening remarks is his noticing his old friend Edward Hirsch in the audience.

Be sure to return for upcoming Poetry Fridays, when we will feature many poets from past Dodge Poetry Festivals in the weeks ahead.

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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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