Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

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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Khalil Murrell, Program Associate, Poetry

In light of America’s evolving narrative on race, how do today’s writers of color, specifically those of the so-called Hip-Hop Generation, add to one of the nation’s most difficult conversations? How do they embrace a legacy, but also speak authentically about race and ethnicity today without regurgitating the voices of, say, Amiri Baraka, Jayne Cortez, Nikki Giovanni, and Langston Hughes?

Certainly all of these questions cannot be answered here, if at all or through any medium in one sitting. Still, many writers of color including Thomas Sayers Ellis, Suheir Hammad, Kevin Young, and Willie Perdomo have been deeply entrenched in this on-going conversation through their work. These are just some of countless contemporary writers who have added fresh perspectives to race dialogue in poetry.

Newark native Kyle Dargan also adds to this rich conversation, through verse, in his first collection, The Listening. Dargan carries with him an immense reverence for tradition as well as his cultural and artistic heritage —black poets who have come before him—especially evident in poems such as “Search for Robert Hayden,” and “This Knight” written to Etheridge Knight. You can see why heritage is important to Dargan as you watch him interview his grandmother, Ruth Dargan — the first black police detective on the Newark police force – about their generational differences in how they view Newark and the President. (He also wrote an article about it here). His work most often tries to make sense of history and the post-Civil Rights world by bridging gaps between two generations. He seems to find ways to pay homage and yet move forward…to accept and renounce observations in the world.  (Listen here to “Karaoke” and “Quagmire”).

But it’s limiting to see Dargan exclusively through this lense. To read his work is to be present with a writer whose senses are acutely aware of the people and spaces around him. Even his profile picture above seems reminiscent of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On? album cover. Dargan is, in fact, watching and listening to everything in the present world: the Ali-Frazier fight (Listen to “1975”); his grandparents’ stories; Gnarls Barkley’s St. Elsewhere album; squirrels in East Orange (Read “Redefinition”); his stepfather shaving (Listen to “On Men”); the priests at St. Benedict’s Prep in Newark; and even his friend, Dwayne, getting knocked out at the basketball court in Montclair.

A self-described child of hip-hop, Dargan is also as clever with the word as he is reverential. Read “Of the Sun,” where the first word of each left-aligned line reads downward: “a dark body with yellow skin.” His subjects and references are often musical – Rock N Roll by Mos Def, the Jacksons, a letter from Muddy Waters to Michael Harper. Dargan says Bouquet of Hungers, his second book, was arranged like some of his favorite albums – De La Soul is Dead, Mama’s Gun, Songs in the Key of Life, Electric Circus, etc. – because “they expanded the boundaries and weakened the perceived limitations of their genres.” His work, both hip and academic, attempts the same. Dargan is not just a poet who simply observes the world, he is actively engaged in it.

A recipient of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, Kyle Dargan is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Logorrhea Dementia, and editor of POST NO ILLS magazine. He is the former managing editor of Callaloo and currently a professor at American University in Washington, D.C. where he also lives.

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)

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

Anne Waldman is deeply committed to an approach to performing that treats poems and songs as “word-scapes” or “sound-scapes” created with breath, voice and body. The German language has a word for this: sprechstimme, which translates into “spoke-sung.”

A lifetime celebrant and proponent of poetry as an oral art, Waldman was blurring the lines between reciting, chanting, singing and dramatizing poetry decades before terms like “performance poetry” “slam poetry” or “spoken word art” were in use. She digs down to language’s atavistic roots—coo and cry, whine and howl, whimper and growl—to get at the language below language: the rhythmic sounds hominids may have used before they developed anything we would recognize as speech, and which connects us to our non-human relatives.

And yet, Waldman’s work is also highly spiritual. A student of Buddhism since the early 1960’s, she was co-founder with Allen Ginsberg and others of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, the first writing program in the United States rooted in Buddhist principles.

As the poems she reads in this clip from the 2006 Dodge Festival attest, Waldman is also passionate about the political and social issues of her time. An active peace advocate throughout her career, Waldman has also been outspoken as a protester, organizer and artist on nuclear arms, women’s rights and the environment. For Waldman, her art, activism and spirituality are all part of the ongoing struggle to remain deeply engaged with and committed to the world.

Anne Waldman is the author of over forty books, most recently, Manatee/Humanity. In the Room of Never Grieve: New and Selected Poems 1985-2003 includes selections from her earlier work.

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.

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

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.

* * *

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