Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

“The best audience for a poetry reading that I have ever experienced is the audience during the Dodge Poetry Festival’s High School Student Day. Busloads and busloads of students from surrounding towns, counties, and states came to Newark to listen to poets read and talk about poetry.”

–Oliver de la Paz

Since 1986, over 45,000 students and 10,000 teachers from as far away as Florida, Wisconsin, Maine and California have participated in High School Student Day, the largest poetry event for high school students in North America.

Pre-registered high school students and their pre-registered teachers are admitted at no charge to all High School Student Day events, described below:

·POETS ON POETRY: Festival Poets read and discuss some of the poems and poets that have mattered to them. Time is set aside for Q & A.

·CONVERSATIONS: Intimate groups of Festival Poets discuss the enduring themes evoked by poetry, including Going Public with Private Feelings, When Politics is Personal, and Saying the Unsayable.

·FESTIVAL POET READINGS feature a dynamic and diverse group of poets.

·POETS FOR TEACHERS (preferred seating for teachers): Festival Poets explore how to bring poetry to life inside and outside the classroom.

·STORYTELLING, poetry’s closest relative, is performed throughout the day.

·OPEN READING: Time and space is set aside for young writers to read their work to their peers.

·Pre-registered schools have the option of remaining for THE EVENING MAIN STAGE PROGRAM of readings and music at no charge.

High school teachers can CONTACT US at studentday@grdodge.org with questions, but more information will be available as the Festival approaches.

To read the rest of Oliver’s blog on his experience at the 2010 Festival, click here.

“I held a Poets on Poetry discussion with a group of fun-loving high school students at Peddie Baptist Church. I read a few poems, but mostly I talked about what it was like to be a writer and what it was like to do what I do. I treated the talk as if I were talking to my younger self.”

–Oliver de la Paz

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The best way to get up to the minute announcements as the Festival approaches is to join our mailing list. If you are a teacher, make sure to join the Teacher Mailing List to receive updates related to the 2012 High School Student Day.

For more information about the Dodge Poetry Festival and programs, visit www.dodgepoetry.org

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Stacey Balkun, Festival Assistant

Humans are drawn repeatedly to the narrative; our lives are a sequence of journeys from one place or time to another.  Situating these passages within the context of geography or time can reveal themes and motifs that persist throughout the days, months, or years and often resurface as stories or poems. Oliver de la Paz is a curator of these memories and experiences, cultivating personal myths as well as spiritual elements to create poetry out of the autobiographical.

In an interview with Box Car Poetry Review, de la Paz describes himself as “very deliberate when it comes to discovering [the] patterns in [his] writing”.  Author of three collections of poetry, de la Paz’s work often revisits themes, slowly evolving through experiments with form.  Images surrounding the motion of flight are prevalent: wings, birds, even airplanes resurface often, as the speaker often desires spiritual ascension.

De la Paz recognizes the influence of life history on in his poetry.  During a reading at Bowdoin College he tells a memory of a voyage taken to Lourdes, France as a child to collect holy water in tiny vessels; the inspiration for his poem “Four Madonnas”.  De la Paz suggests the spiritual element within the imager of his poems.  He approaches the creation of a poem with a focus on craft before symbolism, as evident in his How a Poem Happens interview.  His poem “Holiness” holds the shape of a sonnet because de la Paz felt the sonnet form was “an ideal container for questioning belief”.  The question of holiness re-emerges throughout the poet’s three collections.

De la Paz reveals his flexibility as a writer by adapting this motif to a variety of poetic forms: aubades, sonnets, couplets, and apostrophes, among others.  He weaves form, image, and theme together gracefully, working in and around form to tie myths and reality together in a subtle manner.  His style of reading reflects this elegance; de la Paz’s voice presents each line of poetry with composure and deliberation, allowing the listener to digest each image and recognize its relation to the poem as a whole.  Hear de la Paz read on the poet’s website.

De la Paz co-chairs the advisory board of Kundiman, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of Asian American Poetry. He is the author of three collections of poetry, Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby, and the forthcoming Requiem for the Orchard, winner of the Akron Prize for poetry chosen by Martín Espada.

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.

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The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark is October 7 – 10
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