Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

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.

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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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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

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

Andrew Motion was the son of a brewer, and grew up in an environment that he describes as “very unbookish indeed.” Yet he went on to become a critically acclaimed literary biographer, established the Poetry Archive project and website in the United Kingdom, and was England’s Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009.

His background is often reflected in the imagery and diction of his poems. The setting is often domestic or rural, and the tone of the poems decidedly understated. We feel both comfortable and welcomed. Within the first few lines of “A-1 Mechanics” we feel that this poet is a guide we can trust, taking us to a place immediately recognizable.

The vivid images Motion creates with such lucid language bid us enter deeper into his poems. We go willingly because we feel we know the place and the speaker. Once we enter fully into an Andrew Motion poem, we discover, again and again, that beneath the inviting surface more troubling emotions and memories lie submerged.

Motion’s many poetry collections include: Selected Poems 1976-1997, Public Property, and most recently, The Cinder Path. His Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life, which won the Whitbread Biography Award; and his life of John Keats, Keats, are considered essential reading for students of these two poets.

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

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

Kurtis Lamkin is a contemporary American embodiment of the ancient West African griot tradition, which blurs the boundaries between poet, singer and storyteller.

The griot, bard or troubadour has been a fixture in all cultures since before the advent of written language. It is believed that such bards passed down the legends of the Trojan War and Beowulf for generations before they were set down in the versions now familiar to us, and that Homer himself likely half-chanted half-sung large sections of the Illiad and Odyssey and accompanied himself on the lyre.

When he performs, Kurtis Lamkin often accompanies himself on the kora, a twenty-one-stringed West African harp-lute. He not only composes on and plays the kora, but he makes them by hand. This sense of the intimate bond between performer and instrument is also part of the griot tradition.

In recent decades, there has been much debate in academic circles in the United States regarding the place of politics in poetry. But in the griot/bardic tradition, there is no debate. The poet is seen as someone directly involved in the life of the community, and commentary on events that impact the community is not only accepted, but expected.

We assume our troubadours will sing us love songs, and Lamkin gives us one, but they have also been seen as the chief chroniclers of their times. In Elizabethan England, the news stories of the day were passed on through popular ballads. Like Lamkin, the griots and bards of the past always performed this function with humor and satire.

Lamkin has released a number of CDs of his work, including: My Juju (1995), El Shabazz (1998), and Queen of Carolina (2001).

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