Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

Stacey Balkun, Festival Assistant

A graduate of Ohio State University’s MFA program for both poetry and creative non-fiction, Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of Miracle Fruit, At the Drive In Volcano, and a forthcoming collection from Tupelo Press.  A dynamic poet, Nezhukumatathil is active in both the worlds of teaching and touring—she has set out “to make sure that no student ever says ‘I never knew there were Asian-American poets’ again” (every other day).  Through poetry, she shares her life experiences in a way that is accessible to readers of all ages.  Nezhukumatathil feels that her teaching and writing influence each other: her best teaching days lead her to write, and her best writing days excite her to teach (How a Poem Happens).

Nature plays a huge role in Nezhukumatathil’s poetry.  Her poetry often examines life by linking “average” occurrences with scientific or biological information (see “Fugu Soup Blues” and “Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia”).  Much of Nezhukumatathil’s work is research-based, and every one of the many morsels about science or natural elements is true.  Nezhukumatathil feels she owes the reader accuracy within her poetry; although the poems are not truly autobiographical, the “trivia” bits are completely factual.  She often uses biology as a jumpstart when writing poems.  In an interview with Poetic Asides, she confides, “Mother Nature is the greatest poet of all. I just take my cues from her.”

Nezhukumatathil teaches creative writing and environmental literature at the State University of New York-Fredonia.  She encourages aspiring writers to “read often and a lot. Floss. Invest in a good pair of shoes and write letters more often. Listen to the paper take the ink when you sign your name” (Poetic Asides).  Read poems by Aimee Nezhukumatathil on 2^nd Avenue Poetry and Octopus Magazine.  Hear her poetry and Q&A’s on From the Fishhouse.

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.

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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Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

A member of the Muskoke/Creek Nation, Joy Harjo has said “Poetry, music and dance came into the world together. Will go out that way, together, too.” So it is no surprise that, during the Friday Afternoon Poetry Sampler at the 2008 Dodge Poetry Festival, she introduced her second poem by saying, “It’s a little poem. It’s a song. Same thing.” To get a feel for what she means, listen to her recite/chant/sing her poems “No” and “No Huli.”

In all cultures, song, dance, chant and poetry were once part of group activities, celebrations, ceremonies and rituals that involved the entire community. Although we don’t know exactly when they emerged, we know poetry and song existed long before written language and musical notation. Most anthropologists agree that recognizable human speech is at least 50,000 years old. Paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey has argued that the skulls of much older hominids offer evidence that a speech area of the brain may have developed hundreds of thousands, even a million years ago.

But song predates human beings. Choirs of crickets and frogs sang long before the first hominid appeared. Perhaps we, too, sang before we had speech. The cooing and babbling of babies almost always falls into rhythm, repetition, even melody long before they have spoken words.

The Native American Indian tradition of referring to animals as people may come from an understanding that we share many of our deepest impulses, including the impulse to sing, with our nonhuman relatives. Certainly Harjo’s suggestion that “we’re in a big old canoe together” comes out of a worldview that sees kinship before it sees difference.

But Harjo’s poems will not allow us to idealize this worldview. The poems dip down into dark, brutal images as quickly as they rise back up into song. Listen to her again. How can singing be a response to the violence the singer has witnessed?

“No Huli” can be found on Joy Harjo’s most recent CD, Winding Through the Milky Way. For a wide selection of poems spanning her publishing career, see How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems. Visit the 2008 Dodge Poetry Festival Poet Pages for a biography of Joy Harjo.

Be sure to return for upcoming Poetry Fridays, when we will feature many poets from past Dodge Poetry Festivals in the weeks ahead, including Edward Hirsch, Jane Hirshfield, Ted Kooser, Maxine Kumin, Naomi Shihab Nye and others.

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

In “Something Escapes the Bonfire,” a poem from his collection, The Republic of Poetry, Martín Espada recounts the story of Victor Jara, the Chilean songwriter and poet murdered by Augusto Pinochet’s military junta. Fellow prisoners have testified that after the guards had beaten Jara and broken his hands, they taunted him to sing and play guitar. Jara responded by singing a forbidden political anthem. This act of defiance gave heart and courage to the thousands then imprisoned in the Estadio Chilé.

Knowing of his empathy for Jara might offer some insight while listening to Espada read one of his earlier poems, “Imagine the Angels of Bread.”

Like Jara’s song, Espada’s “Imagine the Angels of Bread” seems written, at least in part, to give encouragement to those who have suffered or are suffering from oppression. Remembering that the root meaning of the word encourage is to give courage, or to give heart, perhaps suggests one aspect of Espada’s sense of the poet’s task.

The poem also seems an act of defiance against the euphemisms so often used in political discourse. Espada counteracts the numbing effects of such vague language. In “Imagine the Angels of Bread,” vivid images give a physical and emotional immediacy to what might otherwise remain abstractions. Espada does not allow the listener or reader to plead ignorance. Perhaps he also believes poetry can put a human face on political issues.

But the title of the poem could be read as a declarative: Imagine what is possible now to bring about change in the future. The poem catalogs several acts of the imagination that brought about change in the past, and this suggests that Espada believes strongly that any political act must begin as an act of the imagination. From this perspective, an act of the imagination is a political act. Listening to the poem again, would you agree?

The text of “Imagine the Angels of Bread” can be found in his collection Imagine the Angels of Bread. Visit the 2008 Dodge Poetry Festival Poet Pages for a biography of Martín Espada.

Be sure to return for upcoming Poetry Fridays, when we will feature many poets from past Dodge Poetry Festivals in the weeks ahead, including Edward Hirsch, Jane Hirshfield, Ted Kooser, Maxine Kumin, Naomi Shihab Nye and others.

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

Robert Frost is reputed to have said, “Poetry is what is lost in translation.” Poet and translator Peter Cole told a group of students at a recent Dodge Poetry Festival: “Poetry is what is found in translation.” Is Cole disagreeing with Frost? To find out, listen to Cole read his translation of a Taha Muhammad Ali poem as well as one of his own poems: “Coexistence: A Lost and Almost Found Poem.”

Now go back and listen again-but also watch Cole’s hands. He appears to be conducting the poems. This physicalization may help us understand one aspect of what both Frost and Cole mean by “poetry.” Cole is, perhaps unconsciously, showing us that both his translation and his own poem have a rhythmic shape. Indeed, he writes the shape of every line of both poems on the air.

Poets often speak of “listening for” the right word, phrase or line as if these were fragments of a piece of music whose complete sonic shape is only vaguely sensed at first, and that only emerges through careful attention. This is true regardless of whether the poets write in predetermined verse forms or in free-verse.

So Cole is not necessarily disagreeing with Frost. Perhaps part of what he means is that, as a translator, he must listen for the shape of the poem in its original language and then listen for the shape that poem wants to take in English. Through that process, he finds the poetry in both. That is wonderfully illustrated by listening to “Revenge,” read first in the original Arabic by Taha Muhammad Ali, and then in English by Peter Cole.

Peter Cole is one of our foremost translators of ancient and contemporary poetry of the Levant. He is deeply learned in this tradition, and this scholarship infuses his own poetry. It is clear that only someone widely read, curious about many subjects, informed about the news of his own time and possessing a deep knowledge of poetic traditions and forms could have written “Coexistence: A Lost and Almost Found Poem.” Yet, in his introduction, Cole stresses the chance nature of the poem, how its elements seemed to simply fall together. This reveals yet another truth about the nature of composition: It requires long, deep and careful preparation to take full advantage of the inspirations “chance” sometimes drops into our laps.

“Coexistence: A Lost and Almost Found Poem” can be found in Things on which I’ve Stumbled. Peter Cole’s translation of “Revenge” appears in So What: New and Selected Poems. Visit the 2008 Dodge Poetry Festival Poet Pages for a biography of Peter Cole.

Be sure to return for upcoming Poetry Fridays, when we will feature many poets from past Dodge Poetry Festivals in the weeks ahead, including Martín Espada, Joy Harjo, Jane Hirshfield, Charles Simic, C. D. Wright and others.