Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

Stacey Balkun, Festival Assistant

Hadara Bar-Nadav is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, where she currently lives with her husband. Her first collection of poems, A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight, won the Margie Book Prize.  Bar-Nadav’s poetry pulls an audience in through familiar sounds and images, but holds their attention by subtly confounding expectations and offering new insights through inventive connections.

In an interview with Serena Agusto-Cox of 32 Poems, Bar-Nadav cites jazz music as her first teacher.  She approached the study of the shape of  language through the rhythms and sounds of jazz, and the composition of her poetry reflects this influence.  Bar-Nadav’s poetry reverberates with music; her images are often linked through sound.  However, to Bar-Nadav, poetry must extend beyond the musical sphere.  She entrusts poetry as a place “where the senses sing, cry, and take shape through language” (from Beloit Poetry Review).  Bar-Nadav invites the audience to enter into her poems, to experience her sense perceptions; her dreams and impulses, which move with a current as improvisational as jazz.

Each poem in A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight is carefully calculated in both language and form.  Bar-Nadav is exacting even in her use of line breaks and white space.  Certain poems in the collection use numbers and calculations as a central metaphor. “A Number of Things” and “Breaking the Equation” are only two examples.  Yet, there is nothing cold in the precision of Bar-Nadav’s poetry.  Instead, like both music and mathematics, her poetry carefully walks the line between precision and improvisation.  In an interview with Simone Muench of Sharkforum, Bar-Nadav reveals her belief in a correlation between poetry and arithmetic: “the rhythms and stresses and sounds—the desire for language to equal an idea.”

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.

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

Starting next week and continuing into October, we’ll be using the Poetry Fridays blog to introduce the poets participating in the 2010 Dodge Poetry Festival.  Each post will feature brief profiles of one or more poets, with links to poems, videos, interviews, podcast, bios and anything else of interest we might find in our research.

More importantly, we invite you to join in the process of building these profiles by using the Comments section of each blog to link us to items of interest you might discover about these poets.  Teachers, especially those bringing students to the Festival, can make such contributions part of a research assignment.  In this way, together we can build our own mini-wiki-encyclopedia on the 2010 Festival Poets.

The late Stanley Kunitz once commented on the Festival’s great democratic spirit.  He was referring, in part, to its long tradition of having an amazingly broad, deep and diverse line-up.  The 2010 Festival continues that tradition.  So far, the poets who have agreed to participate include:

Be sure to follow us in the weeks ahead as new names are added to this list, and to meet the 2010 Festival Poets.

You can always view video clips of readings from past Dodge Poetry Festivals on our YouTube channel.