Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

Poetry readings have always been at the heart of the Dodge Poetry Festival. This year, the Festival officially opens with a Thursday Evening Poetry Sampler on October 7, which offers the opportunity to hear nearly half of the poets who will be appearing over the next three days.

The Main-Stage Readings, which bring the Festival community together under one roof at the close of each day, have been one of the most popular events at every Dodge Poetry Festival. This year they are taking place in the New Jersey Performing Arts Center’s beautiful and acoustically splendid Prudential Hall.

If you can’t make the Main-Stage readings, don’t worry. There will be Festival Poet Readings during the day at venues throughout the Festival Village. Visit our Poet Spotlight to see exactly when all the Festival Poets are reading.

In addition to the readings that make up the core of the Festival program, there are a number of special readings. We wrote in last week’s blog about Galway Kinnell’s reading of Rilke’s Duino Elegies in their entirety on Saturday morning, October 9. Some other special events are listed below:

POETRY AND MUSIC: AN EXPLORATION
In this combination reading, discussion and musical performance on Saturday, poet and music scholar Amiri Baraka will be joined by word-music ensemble Blue Ark to explore the many interconnections between poetry and music—connections that vibrantly link spoken word, jazz, the blues and the ancient griot tradition.

GIVING VOICE TO A LIFE IN POETRY
Join Galway Kinnell on Sunday, October 10, in this informal reading/conversation and discover some of the poets who have influenced one of our most influential poets. Kinnell will read and discuss poems that first drew him to poetry, as well as works by teachers and mentors who shaped his sense of what poetry might be and by friends and peers from a lifetime dedicated to this art.

GIVING VOICE TO NICOLÁS GUILLÉN, FREDERICO GARCÍA LORCA AND PABLO NERUDA
On Sunday afternoon, Poets Martín Espada and Nancy Morejón are joined by Latin jazz musicians Bobby Sanabria and Quarteto Aché in this bilingual celebration of just a few of the many Spanish-speaking poets from the last century who have had an international influence on contemporary poetry.

GIVING VOICE TO LUCILLE CLIFTON
In this special tribute from the Main-Stage at NJPAC’s Prudential Hall, friends and fellow poets will read from the works of Lucille Clifton on Sunday afternoon. The author of twelve collections of poems, Clifton appeared at eleven Dodge Poetry Festivals and became, for many, the embodiment of the spirit of the Festival itself.

If you haven’t purchased your Festival tickets yet, keep in mind that all events this year are taking place in performance venues that, unlike open-sided tents, have fixed seating capacities. If you want to guarantee a seat for the evening events, you should purchase your tickets in advance.

Visit our website to see the complete Festival Schedule and read Descriptions of Festival Events.  Return in the days ahead for updates on the 2010 Poetry Festival.

Pictured above: Sharon Olds at the 2008 Festival.  Photograph by T. Charles Erickson.

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.

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

In “Something Escapes the Bonfire,” a poem from his collection, The Republic of Poetry, Martín Espada recounts the story of Victor Jara, the Chilean songwriter and poet murdered by Augusto Pinochet’s military junta. Fellow prisoners have testified that after the guards had beaten Jara and broken his hands, they taunted him to sing and play guitar. Jara responded by singing a forbidden political anthem. This act of defiance gave heart and courage to the thousands then imprisoned in the Estadio Chilé.

Knowing of his empathy for Jara might offer some insight while listening to Espada read one of his earlier poems, “Imagine the Angels of Bread.”

Like Jara’s song, Espada’s “Imagine the Angels of Bread” seems written, at least in part, to give encouragement to those who have suffered or are suffering from oppression. Remembering that the root meaning of the word encourage is to give courage, or to give heart, perhaps suggests one aspect of Espada’s sense of the poet’s task.

The poem also seems an act of defiance against the euphemisms so often used in political discourse. Espada counteracts the numbing effects of such vague language. In “Imagine the Angels of Bread,” vivid images give a physical and emotional immediacy to what might otherwise remain abstractions. Espada does not allow the listener or reader to plead ignorance. Perhaps he also believes poetry can put a human face on political issues.

But the title of the poem could be read as a declarative: Imagine what is possible now to bring about change in the future. The poem catalogs several acts of the imagination that brought about change in the past, and this suggests that Espada believes strongly that any political act must begin as an act of the imagination. From this perspective, an act of the imagination is a political act. Listening to the poem again, would you agree?

The text of “Imagine the Angels of Bread” can be found in his collection Imagine the Angels of Bread. Visit the 2008 Dodge Poetry Festival Poet Pages for a biography of Martín Espada.

Be sure to return for upcoming Poetry Fridays, when we will feature many poets from past Dodge Poetry Festivals in the weeks ahead, including Edward Hirsch, Jane Hirshfield, Ted Kooser, Maxine Kumin, Naomi Shihab Nye and others.