Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

Come for the Poetry, Discover a Great City

The Board of Trustees and the staff of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation are pleased to announce that the Dodge Poetry Festival, the largest poetry event in North America, will be returning to Newark in the autumn of 2012. The fourteenth biennial Festival’s lineup of performances and discussions will again transform New Jersey’s largest and most vibrant city into a “poetry village” for four days.

We are grateful to the partners who have made this possible: the New Jersey Performing Arts Center and the City of Newark. Just as vital to this decision was the cooperation and support of the many cultural and arts organizations that have done so much to revitalize Newark’s Downtown Arts District, including Aljira: A Center for Contemporary Art, Brick City Development Corporation, Greater Newark Area Conventions and Visitors Bureau, Newark Arts Council, New Jersey Historical Society, Newark Museum and many others.

Not only has the move to Newark allowed us to continue the Festival itself, it has also given us the opportunity to contribute toward and support the efforts of these Arts District organizations. Anyone in attendance during the 2010 Festival’s opening night Poetry Sampler saw a vivid example of poetry’s potential impact on the city. When the audience members were asked how many were visiting Newark for the first time, 80 percent of attendees raised their hands. The thousands who came to Newark in 2010 for the poetry also discovered the city’s thriving galleries, museums, cultural and historical institutions, architectural wonders and many fine restaurants. We expect an even greater turnout in 2012.

The response to our new location in 2010 was overwhelming. Many attendees shared their enthusiastically positive “reviews” with our staff on-site; others later wrote to tell us how amazed they were by the beauty of the performance spaces and by how easy it was to travel to and navigate the Festival site. As former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins asked from the main stage: “Why would you have the Festival anywhere else?”

The Festival venues will once again be contained within a walkable footprint centered around the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, and will include NJPAC’s 2,800-seat Prudential Hall, which The New Yorker listed with Carnegie Hall and Boston Symphony Hall as one of the three best orchestral spaces in the Northeast, and its 514-seat Victoria Theater, which The New York Times called “a gem.” More-intimate events will be held nearby in the architectural wonder that is First Peddie Baptist Church; the historic Trinity and Saint Philip’s Cathedral, where both Colonial and British armies established field hospitals during the Revolutionary War; Newark Museum, home to the largest collection of Tibetan Buddhist art in the Western Hemisphere; and such cultural treasures as Aljira: A Center for Contemporary Art and the New Jersey Historical Society.

If you are one of the thousands of 2010 festival-goers who found kinship and inspiration in Dodge’s latest poetry village, please tell your friends, family and colleagues about the upcoming Festival in Newark. They, too, should have a chance to hear a diverse array of some of our most celebrated poets, and to play a part in the renaissance of one of America’s most historic cities.

Michele Russo & Rebecca Gambale
We recently spent an afternoon cleaning and reorganizing a storage closet here at the office.  As we shifted around boxes of files, we had a moment to look through our collection of Festival posters, starting with the first Festival in 1986.

We occasionally get requests to buy posters from previous Festivals.  We’re working on counting our inventory, and seeing what our capacity is for selling them. If you’re interested, send us an email at festival@grdodge.org and we’ll get back to you if we can sell them.

In the meantime, we hope you enjoy!  Which one is your favorite?  Why?

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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!

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

Each spring, the Dodge Poetry Program offers poetry immersion groups for New Jersey Teachers. We don’t call them seminars or workshops because they are neither. The sessions are based on certain assumptions about the nature of creativity, its central place in our humanity, and the belief that poetry is one of the most powerful means to reconnect with and reinvigorate our creative consciousness. Those assumptions we have articulated as the Four Core Principles that underlie all our work in the schools, with teachers and in designing the Festival. The First Core Principle, discussed below, is deeply rooted in Dodge’s commitment to creativity and sustainability. We will discuss the other core principles in the weeks ahead.

1) Imagination and creativity are essential to our humanity: Without them, what we understand as human consciousness could not exist. Poetry can stimulate awareness of and trust in our imaginative essence.

This imaginative essence (the source of metaphor and poetry) may be what defines us as human. While there are many qualities and features we share with the rest of the animal kingdom, humankind appears to be alone in its capacity to make metaphor. Our other neighbors on the planet can be said to sing, dance, act and some, like bowerbirds, even participate in the visual arts, but we alone appear to engage in myth-making and poetry.

Creativity/imagination/poetry (whatever name it is given) is what makes it possible for us to perceive a self. What we call human consciousness may have emerged the instant we could imagine a self existing as an entity distinct from the world we live in. Many spiritual traditions argue that this self is an illusion, that we cannot exist separate from the world. If they are correct, then the self, or the ego, to use Freud’s term, is a work of creative fiction. It may be that imagining a self was the act of the imagination that took us out of animal consciousness and separated us from oneness with nature (a state we now long for as a long-lost Eden).

Human consciousness is an imaginative consciousness. We are constantly imagining and re-imagining our place in the world. The voice of thought that runs relentlessly in our mind is creating the story of our life during every second of consciousness. (Radically revising it while we sleep.)

What, if not the capacity to make metaphor, allows us to make comparisons and connections between self and other, experience and ideal, or desire and reason? Without the capacity to imagine such comparisons and connections, we cannot make any essential quality-of-life decision. Mere reason is not enough. Modern neurobiology has discovered that when the emotional and logical centers of the brain are disconnected, by illness or accident, the capacity to make decisions is lost. MRIs have revealed what artists, seers, philosophers and poets have been saying for millennia: our reason can only function if connected to our emotions.

On the simplest level, people who rely completely on logic to methodically plan out a life ― reasoning that if they go from A to B to C they will then reach their goal ― may find themselves completely unable to function if, for example, a catastrophic illness interrupts their plans. If they have not cultivated their imaginative core, they may lack the ability to creatively imagine themselves in this new way of being in the world.

Standardized testing is in direct opposition to any point of view that treats creativity as central to human consciousness. Standardized testing is based on the assumption that all important knowledge can be objectively measured. Being in the world teaches us again and again that the opposite is true: the most important things we need to know cannot possibly be objectively measured.

For example, how do we know:

• What we are willing to die for?
• Unwilling to die for?
• What work will give our life meaning?
• That we have met our life partner?
• That we should/shouldn’t sign that Do Not Resuscitate order?

School work, that of both teachers and students, leaves less and less time for creative engagement with the questions that cannot be answered on a standardized test. To allow our creative inner life to die is to risk allowing our essential humanity to die. At the Dodge Poetry Program we believe this work, of allowing poems and words to wash through us, is as essential to our inner lives as clean water is to our bodies. We need both to survive as fully functional human beings. (more…)

Stacey Balkun, Festival Assistant

Measured and contemplative, Penny Harter’s poetry recognizes nature both in subject and in form.  The imagery within her poems ranges from mourning doves on a windowsill to abandoned gas stations lining the highways of New Jersey.   Harter’s poem “Driving Through the New Jersey Dusk” is a haibun—a form combining prose with haiku.  Harter uses an arrangement of prose and haiku to describe not only the scenery alongside a highway but also the psychology of driving, the voyage through one’s memories while traveling across the landscape.

In an interview on Blogging Along Tobacco Road, Harter says that the act of writing poetry “is, first and foremost, an act of seeing, followed by connecting,” as suggested by her calm and observant poetry.  The speaker in Harter’s poems often offers an image and then connects it to a universal truth, such as in “The Night Sky” from Harter’s book Lizard Light.

Harter has received several fellowships in poetry from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, as well as a fellowship for teaching from the Dodge Foundation.  In addition to these fellowships, she has received the Mary Carolyn Davies Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America and the William O. Douglas Nature Writing Award, among others. Her work has appeared in many magazines, including Contemporary American Voices and Umbrella.

Poems from Harter’s forthcoming book, Recycling Starlight, can be found in the Summer 2009 issue of Umbrella. To read her award-winning haiku, “Evening Rain,” please visit The Heron’s Nest.

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.

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.

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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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