Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

Stacey Balkun, Festival Assistant

Hadara Bar-Nadav is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, where she currently lives with her husband. Her first collection of poems, A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight, won the Margie Book Prize.  Bar-Nadav’s poetry pulls an audience in through familiar sounds and images, but holds their attention by subtly confounding expectations and offering new insights through inventive connections.

In an interview with Serena Agusto-Cox of 32 Poems, Bar-Nadav cites jazz music as her first teacher.  She approached the study of the shape of  language through the rhythms and sounds of jazz, and the composition of her poetry reflects this influence.  Bar-Nadav’s poetry reverberates with music; her images are often linked through sound.  However, to Bar-Nadav, poetry must extend beyond the musical sphere.  She entrusts poetry as a place “where the senses sing, cry, and take shape through language” (from Beloit Poetry Review).  Bar-Nadav invites the audience to enter into her poems, to experience her sense perceptions; her dreams and impulses, which move with a current as improvisational as jazz.

Each poem in A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight is carefully calculated in both language and form.  Bar-Nadav is exacting even in her use of line breaks and white space.  Certain poems in the collection use numbers and calculations as a central metaphor. “A Number of Things” and “Breaking the Equation” are only two examples.  Yet, there is nothing cold in the precision of Bar-Nadav’s poetry.  Instead, like both music and mathematics, her poetry carefully walks the line between precision and improvisation.  In an interview with Simone Muench of Sharkforum, Bar-Nadav reveals her belief in a correlation between poetry and arithmetic: “the rhythms and stresses and sounds—the desire for language to equal an idea.”

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.

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

The Favorite Poem Project launched by former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky reminded us that the audience for poetry was much larger than many would have us believe. We discovered that tens of thousands of Americans, from all walks of life, have favorite poems they’ve carried with them through their lives, often committed to memory.

It’s easy to lose track of how pervasive a presence poetry is because for much of the time the poems that matter to us are carried “by heart” within us, where they are rarely heard by others. When we do give poems a voice, the audience is often small and intimate: we say them to a beloved, to friends or family, or to a gathering at our local café or library.

Because of this, we may be led to the false impression that few people care about poetry. But poetry circles, reading groups, workshops and open mics are in nearly every city, suburb and small town. In the tiny rural village where I now live, the two coffee shops in town have each run their own poetry reading series. Such gatherings might be small, but they are everywhere.

And poetry has been shared in small gatherings for tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years. This is how it has been since before the development of written language, and how it will likely be for as long as human beings exist. The audience for poetry hasn’t diminished; it’s just that in the last century many of the other performance arts have reached the scale of spectacle.

Compared to a rock concert in Madison Square Garden, or the latest 3-D epic in an IMAX theater, a poetry reading can seem like a small event. But for much of human history theater and music were performed on a scale closer to that of a poetry reading. Before the invention of electronic amplification and Jumbotrons, their size was dependent upon the power of the human voice.

The poetry reading reminds us of that power, of the intimate experience of gathering together to listen closely to one another. There may never be a single poetry reading that packs Giants’ stadium as a Springsteen concert can, but there are easily as many people listening to poetry at the thousands of poetry readings happening on any given night.

So, to celebrate National Poetry Month, check your local paper and visit the nearest reading or open mic. There’s sure to be some listed. Or track down one of your favorite poems, perhaps one you haven’t revisited in years, and have your own poetry reading, even if the only audience is a beloved, or a friend, or yourself.

Be sure to return for upcoming Poetry Fridays and to visit our Poetry Festival website for news on the upcoming 2010 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival.

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?