Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

You don’t have to wait until the next Dodge Festival to hear great poetry in Newark. This weekend, NJPAC’s Alternate Routes Hip Hop Festival is hosting more than twenty Hip Hop artists in a variety of disciplines, including break-dancing, DJing, poetry, spoken word and film.  The festival, which is bi-annual, began in 2001 and is celebrating its 10^th anniversary.  Events run through Saturday, April 9 in the Art Center’s Chase Room.  Go to www.njpachiphop.org to get tickets.

The festival kicked off last night with a Word Jam.  Middle and high school students from Burnet Street School, Louise A. Spencer School and Newark Innovation Academy performed poems they wrote in NJPAC’s In-School Residencies, coordinated by the NJPAC Arts Education staff.  Tamesha Hawkins, a professional poet and performer who studied in NJPAC’s Arts Training program and Shamsuddin  “Sham” Abdul-Hamid, a 2010 NJPAC Women’s Association/Star-Ledger Scholarship recipient emceed the night. Over 60 students attended and 30 student performers shared their poems with the enthusiastic crowd.

Alternate Routes Hip Hop Festival founder and producer, Baraka Sele, believes students, educators, youth and elders will learn that Hip Hop is not always misogynistic, materialistic or violent.  “While Hip Hop artists are still rappin’ and beat-boxin’ and b-boyin’, they are also curating art exhibitions, making films and producing theater, as well as becoming authors, cultural critics, institution builders, politicians and social entrepreneurs.  We want to showcase all the ways they contribute positively to society.”

Tonight, Newark-born spoken word artist, Taalam Acey, will host a night of spoken word artists from across the country.  Acey’s work has been featured on BET, in Essence magazine, at the Sundance Film Festival, and the 2010 Dodge Poetry Festival.  Several of the artists who will perform have participated in HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and have appeared or worked with such artists as Amiri Baraka, Dead Prez, Lauryn Hill, Mos Def, and Sonia Sanchez.

Go to the NJPAC Hip Hop website for a full schedule of events and to save your spot at the festival.

The 2010 Poetry Festival is within walking distance of Newark’s Ironbound district, famous for its many Spanish and Portuguese restaurants, cafes and bakeries. Through the generous cooperation of the Greater Newark Convention and Visitors Bureau, we have arranged for a Festival Trolley to take Festival attendees into the Ironbound.

Take a look at the Festival Trolley map, which shows the many stops on the trolley route along popular Ferry Street in the Ironbound, and lists the eateries closest to each stop. The Ironbound is only a short trolley ride from the center of the Festival footprint, and stops right in front of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center.

The Trolley will also cover both Penn Station and the Broad Street Station for those taking mass transit, augmenting Newark’s Light Rail schedule. The Light Rail also stops at NJPAC.

For those who prefer to walk, the Greater Newark Convention and Visitors Bureau’s Hospitality Guide lists many restaurants in the Downtown Arts District, all within a few blocks of the Festival footprint.

NJPAC’s Theater Square Grill, Theater Square Bistro and Calcada restaurants will also be open during the Festival, as will a festive outdoor food court that will spill across the street into Military Park.

Take some time to visit the Around the Town pages on our website, and plan ahead to take advantage of the many opportunities to make your dining experiences as festive as 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.

Return in the days ahead for the latest news on the 2010 Poetry Festival.

Get acquainted with the conveniently walkable Downtown Newark Arts District through our newly added Festival Village page. Here you can see the layout of the charming and historically rich area which will be transformed into a Poetry Village for the duration of the Festival.

The  Festival will be taking place within the boundaries of the original village of “New Ark,” founded by a group of Puritan settlers led by Robert Treat in 1666. Looking out from NJPAC, you can see the greenery of Military Park, where the town’s Revolutionary militia would assemble. Predating the Revolutionary War is Trinity & St. Philip’s Cathedral, which  sits in one corner of Military Park and served as a field hospital for both British and Colonial armies during wartime.

In addition to the rich history of the area, the Downtown Newark Arts District is home to a rich  cultural heritage that continues today.  Just across the street from Trinity and St. Philip’s, Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Arts, features the work of local artists with a broad range of voices and perspectives.  And just two blocks from Aljira, there’s the Newark Museum, housing exhibits of both new and ancient works , including the largest collection of Tibetan Buddhist art in the Western hemisphere.

For those  who’ve attended past Festivals, you’ll be glad to know  the 2010 Festival  footprint is actually smaller, from end to end, than Waterloo Village.  You can see the scope of the footprint on our map, here. All the venues are within easy walking distance of each other, and only a 10 minute walk from Newark’s two major train stations.  But you don’t even have to take the walk to the train station if you don’t want to: the Newark Light Rail has a stop directly in front of NJPAC.

So keep it green and hop on public transportation and explore the venues which make up the 2010 Dodge Poetry Festival situated in the Newark Downtown Arts District.

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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

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…)