Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

We had an amazing time at the 2010 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, and for those who were able to come, we hope you did too. Who could forget performances by US Poets Laureate Kay Ryan, Rita Dove, Billy Collins and Mark Strand? Or Galway Kinnell reading his translation of Rilke’s Duino Elegies? Who didn’t love the depth of talent and diversity among all of our Festival Poets, and the youthful enthusiasm of 5,000 high school students on Friday? We were thrilled to see people tweeting from the Festival and sharing it with the larger Twitter community. And if you weren’t able to make the Festival, we hope you were able to enjoy the live stream on Thursday and Sunday through our partnership with NJN. We will make the recordings of those events available very soon.

We want to give special thanks to Mayor Booker and the City of Newark and to the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, who brought this Festival to its first ever urban location, to a city we love and support through our work at the Dodge Foundation.

Thanks also to our presenting sponsors: the Prudential Foundation, Berkeley College, Fidelity Investments, PSE&G, Bank of America, Chase Bank, New Jersey Monthly, NJ Transit, the Robert Treat Hotel, the Sagner Family Foundation, the Victoria Foundation, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, and the Poetry Foundation, as well as to all of our Friends of the Festival.

This Festival couldn’t have happened without the hard work and support of hundreds of people – the fantastic team of NJPAC volunteers and the helpful NJPAC ushers, the City of Newark’s police department, and our Green Team volunteers who helped sort through all of the Festival trash to divert waste from landfills and make this our greenest Festival yet. It was so terrific to see those compost bins fill up! There are too many people to thank by name here, but you should know that we know who you all are, and we are thankful for your contributions to the Festival.

Billy Collins and Sharon Olds, “Conversation on the Life of the Poet” at the First Baptist Peddie Church

Dodge’s commitment to poetry is year-round. Even while we are planning for each Festival, we are also offering our Poetry-in-the-Schools program, which includes the 6-week Clearing the Spring, Tending the Fountain sessions for New Jersey teachers, mini festivals, and poet visits to schools. You can keep up-to-date with Dodge’s Poetry Program a number of ways throughout the year: subscribe to our YouTube channel to see past Festival performances and be the first to see videos of performances from the 2010 Festival, which will be coming soon. Look also to our Facebook fan page for a Festival round-up and the latest updates, and follow us on Twitter for all the latest links to videos, programs, photos and current Poetry Program news.

While it’s still fresh in your mind, we want your feedback: Which poets were your favorites? What did you like best about the Festival? Did you find the Poetry Village in Newark easy to navigate? What about the Festival needs improvement? Leave us a comment here and/or send us an email to poetryprogram@grdodge.org. Also, if you wrote a blog post about the Festival, we would love to read it. Please share your links via Facebook, Twitter, email or as a comment on the blog.

Also, it’s never too early to start planning for the 2012 Festival, and your partnership is vital to making it happen. Please consider becoming a Friend of the Festival.

From the entire staff of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, we thank you for a successful and memorable 2010 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival.

Images courtesy of New Jersey Symphony Orchestra and Cohn Dutcher Associates

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

Starting next week and continuing into October, we’ll be using the Poetry Fridays blog to introduce the poets participating in the 2010 Dodge Poetry Festival.  Each post will feature brief profiles of one or more poets, with links to poems, videos, interviews, podcast, bios and anything else of interest we might find in our research.

More importantly, we invite you to join in the process of building these profiles by using the Comments section of each blog to link us to items of interest you might discover about these poets.  Teachers, especially those bringing students to the Festival, can make such contributions part of a research assignment.  In this way, together we can build our own mini-wiki-encyclopedia on the 2010 Festival Poets.

The late Stanley Kunitz once commented on the Festival’s great democratic spirit.  He was referring, in part, to its long tradition of having an amazingly broad, deep and diverse line-up.  The 2010 Festival continues that tradition.  So far, the poets who have agreed to participate include:

Be sure to follow us in the weeks ahead as new names are added to this list, and to meet the 2010 Festival Poets.

You can always view video clips of readings from past Dodge Poetry Festivals on our YouTube channel.

Khalil Murrell, Program Associate, Poetry

Disregarding short bouts with writer’s block, I approach the daunting question posed by the blank page with greater ease and more tools—more colors in my poetic palate—than ever before. Much of this growth as a poet has resulted from attending an MFA program. The writer who entered grad school two years ago is completely different than the one who will turn in a final thesis to graduate in May.

Though I’m not convinced the MFA is necessary or pragmatic for all writers, particularly full-time residency programs, it does become a milestone event if you choose this route. Getting a Master’s in Fine Arts is a viable option for many who wish to hone their poetic skills and cultivate community with like-minded people. And since “Mom, I want to be a poet” may not get you a standing ovation at the next family dinner, it may also help to appease family members who had hoped you’d be a lawyer. In fact, completing your MFA is like finishing med school or an MBA (except with less money-making potential, but similar debt).

Of course milestones such as these always beg the big question: what’s next? In particular, what will you do with your thesis after the MFA? And perhaps a more subconscious question, how will this relatively “professional” activity enrich and complicate the mere artistic desire to create (poems)? Naturally, capitalism offers an easy answer to these questions: morph it into manuscript, shop it around and publish! publish! publish!

But in many ways life as a writer becomes more complicated once you drop the pen and certainly as you mature as an artist. Sometimes I miss a simpler time when I first came across Sharon Olds and Lucille Clifton and understood the power of memory and personal/family histories. Or, years later, when the world began to open up for me as I read Leaving Saturn by Philly native, Major Jackson, and saw myself (and my neighborhood) literally and figuratively – young, black, working-class, and male – in a piece of literature for the first time. (See Mr. Pate’s Barbershop and Euphoria). And believe it or not, I even miss the time when I foolishly wrote bad love poems (but good to me at the time) before the word “workshop” ever invaded my vocabulary.

Since then, including my intense work on my thesis—which will become the bulk of the infamous first book—refreshing encounters with art are, at times, pushed to the side by the business of poetry. Questions such as, “(Where) are you submitting?” or “How close are you to publishing your book?” too often become the nature of poets’ conversations. For me these are important questions but not the most urgent ones.

Even in the healthiest, most non-threatening MFA environments—and I have had the pleasure of attending this kind—there seems to be widespread emphasis on publishing, whether it is an unspoken and unquestioned assumption or clearly stated in formal and informal conversations with classmates or professors.

Most if not all of my writing buddies have responded positively to the opportunity to publish. They seem pretty ambitious about their work, though some more than others. They are very disciplined about getting their work out there. In fact, one friend created an Excel document to track her submissions. Another keeps some type of document on his iPhone. And they always seem to have three or four poems forthcoming or pending. This all makes sense for them, especially since we’ve given so much time, effort and money in attending a top graduate writing program.

But some of them seemed shocked when I said I wouldn’t be interested in publishing any poems for some time, even poems I feel are ready. I’m content right now with just trying to write good work, with sending poems (of mine or others) in the mail, as gifts, to friends who may or may not know anything about poetry. I’m satisfied with making sure I leave my program with an authentic—rather than workshop—voice, with trying to create something beautiful out of bewilderment or sadness. I realize this may sound overly romantic if not inauthentic, like the guy who says, “I’m working hard at the gym to get ripped with muscles, but I don’t care if anyone ever notices.” Of course I want to publish at some point. Of course I want to squash the voices of doubt in my head, with a success in writing that could validate my decision to take this path. But a little romanticism has done very little to hurt the masses. And I’d like to hang on to mine a little bit longer.

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

If the word “ode” summons up strains of Beethoven or lines from the English Romantics, listen to Sharon Olds’ “Ode to a Composting Toilet” and “Ode to a Tampon” for a brief introduction to how radically poets have re-visioned the form in the last century.

Pablo Neruda’s Odas Elementales popularized the idea that an ode could be addressed to anything: socks, artichokes, salt, a typewriter. Many contemporary poets, including Erica Jong, Robert Pinsky and Kevin Young to name a few, have followed Neruda’s example and written odes to such mundane subjects as television, shoes and catfish.

Through nine collections of poems, Sharon Olds has turned an unflinching eye toward the ecstasies and sorrows of living in the human body. While many of us allow fear and shame to limit what we are willing to discover or reveal, Olds refuses to be so limited. It is as if for her fear and shame were absolutely reliable signals that we are being warned away from approaching something we must explore. The deeper the fear or shame, the more tenaciously she will insist on exploring further.

So it is no surprise that Olds should be inspired by Neruda to write odes on such elemental subjects. Her odes, like all her poems, are unrelentingly inquisitive and tender. Olds has never allowed the fierceness of her looking to dull her compassion. What may surprise some of her readers is her great sense of humor and obvious delight in sharing it.

Sharon Olds’ most recent collection is One Secret Thing. For a generous selection of poems from her earlier books, see Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, 1980-2002 . Visit the 2008 Dodge Poetry Festival Poet Pages for a biography of Sharon Olds.

Be sure to return for upcoming Poetry Fridays, when we will feature many poets from past Dodge Poetry Festivals in the weeks ahead, including Linda Pastan, C. D. Wright and others.