Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

Part of what has been unique about the Dodge Poetry Festival since the first in 1986 is the feeling it engenders of being in a place made for poetry. We live in a culture and a time that makes space for countless other things. Sometimes it feels as if there are so many coming at us so quickly we can barely keep up with them. More and more it seems that what demands our attention is designed to distract us from our inner lives, the rich source of imagination, reflection, creativity and renewal.

But every other year thousands come together to make a place for poetry. They travel from all the mid-Atlantic and New England states, and from Florida and Texas, from Michigan and California, and from nearly every state between, and from Europe, the Middle-East and Asia, to create a village with poetry as a living art at its center.

A village is made up of its citizens. This year the poetry village that is the Dodge Poetry Festival is gathering in Newark’s Downtown Arts District. As always, there will be days full of an overabundance of opportunities to encounter some of our most celebrated poets in conversations, readings, craft talks and panel discussion in an array of intimate and inviting settings. On Thursday night, October 7th, we will join together in NJPAC’s beautiful Prudential Hall to celebrate the launching of the 13th Dodge Poetry Festival. Won’t you join us?

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

A number of years ago, Founding Director Jim Haba wrote of the Dodge Poetry Festival that it provided “a space in which poetry can assume its rightful place at the center of our imaginative and emotional lives.” For more than two decades, that space existed for a few days in the Festival’s “Poetry Village,” which seemed to magically appear and disappear during every even-numbered year.

Of course, the Festival did not appear by magic. It took vision, imagination, determination, persistence, and even downright stubbornness. It took dozens of people working, sometimes to the point of near delirium from exhaustion, to make it happen. Although no magic was involved, a miracle of sorts was: During decades when poetry was consistently the poorest funded of all the arts, the Dodge Foundation sponsored a Festival that grew to be widely recognized as the largest poetry event in North America.

But the rising cost of producing the Festival came up against the harsh realities of the recent stock market crash. Earlier this year, David Grant, Dodge’s President and CEO, had the painful task of announcing that the Foundation could no longer sustain a Festival of its previous scale at Waterloo Village.

And then something utterly unpredictable happened. (more…)