Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

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 heritage.

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…)