Category Archives: Poetry 2010 Festival
The 2010 Festival Village
August 25, 2010Get 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 … Continue reading
Poetry Fridays: Festival Poet Sharon Olds
August 23, 2010Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry Through nine collections of poems, Sharon Olds has turned an unflinching eye toward the ecstasies and sorrows of living in the human body. Every stage of life is meticulously observed and explored: childhood, adolescence and … Continue reading
2010 Festival Poet: Aimee Nezhukumatathil
August 20, 2010Stacey 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 … Continue reading
2010 Festival Poet: Malena Mörling
August 15, 2010Malena Mörling grew up in southern Sweden and has translated extensively from Swedish into English including the work of Tomas Tranströmer – see “April and Silence.” This might explain why her works seeks to transport readers into a new consciousness. … Continue reading
2010 Festival Poet: Nancy Morejón
August 13, 2010Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry Research assistance: Stacey Balkun, Festival Assistant Born and raised in Havana, the daughter of a militant dock worker and trade union seamstress who supported her scholarly and artistic pursuits, Nancy Morejón is the most widely … Continue reading
2010 Festival Poet: Joseph Millar
August 6, 2010Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry Research assistance: Stacey Balkun, Festival Assistant Joseph Millar’s poem “Work Song” begins “Love picks its way through the gravel ruts/leading into the job site, past the truck tires/exploded nearby…” The apparent incongruity of love entering … Continue reading
2010 Festival Poet: Dunya Mikhail
July 30, 2010Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry Research assistance: Stacey Balkun, Festival Assistant Iraqi-born Dunya Mikhail was only fifteen-years-old when Saddam Hussein’s armies invaded western Iran in 1980. Just awakening to the possibilities of her own potential as a poet, she had … Continue reading
2010 Festival Poet: Dorianne Laux
July 23, 2010Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry Research assistance: Stacey Balkun, Festival Assistant In the poem “Last Words” from her collection Smoke, Dorianne Laux asks, “How many losses does it take to stop a heart,/to lay waste to the vocabularies of desire?” … Continue reading
2010 Festival Poet: Galway Kinnell
July 23, 2010Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry Like most of his contemporaries, Galway Kinnell started out writing in traditional forms. The shape of formal verse, with its counted beats and pre-determined quatrains, octaves and couplets, is carried over from the sung lyric, … Continue reading
2010 Festival Poet: Tyehimba Jess
July 16, 2010Khalil Murrell, Program Associate, Poetry Poetry may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you hear “Music History,” unless you’ve been reading Rita Dove’s Sonata Mulattica, or leadbelly by Tyehimba Jess. Through poems in the voice of … Continue reading
2010 Festival Poet: Bob Hicok
July 16, 2010Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry Research Assistance: Rebecca Gambale, Festival Assistant There’s a superstition in some cultures that if you praise anyone or anything too much, proclaim your love or express your happiness too much, they will be snatched away. … Continue reading
2010 Festival Poet: Kathleen Graber
July 9, 2010Rebecca Gambale, Festival Assistant You can’t read an article about poet Kathleen Graber without seeing her referred to as a “success story.” She says her interest in poetry was stirred “fairly late in [her] life, in comparison, say, to Keats” … Continue reading
Poetry Fridays: Festival Poet Penny Harter
July 9, 2010Stacey Balkun, Festival Assistant Measured and contemplative, Penny Harter’s poetry recognizes nature both in subject and in form. The imagery within her poems ranges from mourning doves on a windowsill to abandoned gas stations lining the highways of New Jersey. … Continue reading
2010 Festival Poet: Rachel Hadas
July 2, 2010Stacey Balkun, Festival Assistant On the faculty of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Rutgers University in Newark, Rachel Hadas has a long history of deep immersion in poetry from all eras. Hadas received her baccalaureate in classics from Radcliffe College … Continue reading
2010 Festival Poet: Santee Frazier
June 25, 2010Khalil Murrell, Program Associate, Poetry SANTEE FRAZIER has rendered a collection of stories, through verse, alive with darkness and survival and humor and ugliness and intimacy—all the things that make us human. His debut collection, Dark Thirty, is not a … Continue reading