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2010 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival
It is just about time for the biennial Dodge Poetry Festival to roll around. The festival will be held October 7-10 in the grand city of Newark, NJ. Okay, not grand. Unfortunately, the GRD foundation was not able to hold the festival at Historic Waterloo Village in Stanhope, New Jersey; a truely grand location. Don't let Newark put you off. The festival will be held in the heart of the city’s vibrant arts district, with its mix of Beaux Arts, Gothic, Art Deco and contemporary architecture. The main area will festival will take place at The New Jersey Performing Arts Center.
This is the largest poetry event in North America and for anyone who loves poetry a must attend; at least once. I hope all the devoted followers of "The Top 500" are listening, I urge you to consider attending. I will be there 3 of the 4 days this year. Lucky me, I have a hotel room across the street from the main building of the festival. This year I'll have a laptop with me and will report directly to you from the field!
Between now and October I will try to post something about each festival poet.
_________________ " How we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used." - Wendell Berry, What Are People For?
“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.” -Thich Nhat Hahn
The following user would like to thank Saffron for this post: DWill
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Re: 2010 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival
Wow, I didn't know you were so geared up. I like the idea of Newark. Poetry can get too segregated to the bucolic and the wine-and-cheesey. Your trip is something special. We await your words from the front.
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Re: 2010 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival
DWill wrote:
Wow, I didn't know you were so geared up. I like the idea of Newark. Poetry can get too segregated to the bucolic and the wine-and-cheesey. Your trip is something special. We await your words from the front.
You should consider going. Especially since the grit of Newark doesn't put you off. In fact, you've been such a stalwart soldier of poetry with your tireless posting of The Top 500 I think the class ought to pitch in for your ticket and send you!
_________________ " How we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used." - Wendell Berry, What Are People For?
“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.” -Thich Nhat Hahn
The 13th biennial Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival is the largest and most famous poetry event in North America. Organizers expect it to attract more than 20,000 people Oct. 7 – 10, plus 4,500 high-school students from 250 schools across the country. . .
Other featured poets include Pulitzer Prize-winner and McArthur “Genius” Fellowship recipient Galway Kinnell (the 83-year-old will read in its entirety his definitive translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, which event spokesperson Ilene Antelman compared to “Sir Laurence Olivier reading the Shakespeare soliloquies in his later years”). . .
_________________ " How we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used." - Wendell Berry, What Are People For?
“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.” -Thich Nhat Hahn
Joined: Apr 2008 Posts: 2637 Images: 5 Location: Round Hill, VA
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Re: 2010 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival
I am here! The internet connection is weak and wavering; a warning that my posts might be rudely interupted and not as well spell check as usual. Newark, NJ is proving to be an odd location for this festival. I heard lots of talk about staying off the streets at night and the events are taking place all around the block (a church and the historical society amoung the locations). The streets all around the site of the festival are closed off with police baricades, so there is a street fair atmosphere.
For now I will leave you with Billy Collins' closing remarks from his session Poets on Poetry --
"TV is telling us that everything is fine; any chanel any show. Contempory Fiction is telling us that nothing is fine. Poetry tells us life is beautiful and then we die."
_________________ " How we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used." - Wendell Berry, What Are People For?
“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.” -Thich Nhat Hahn
The following user would like to thank Saffron for this post: DWill
Joined: Apr 2008 Posts: 2637 Images: 5 Location: Round Hill, VA
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Re: 2010 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival
I heard Matthew Dickman read and talk about this poem today. The last stanza of this poem, especially two lines, of this poem are perfect.
Love
We fall in love at weddings and auctions, over glasses of wine in Italian restaurants where plastic grapes hang on the lattice, our bodies throb in the checkout line, the bus stop, at basketball games and we can’t keep our hands off each other until we can— so we turn to rubber masks and handcuffs, falling in love again. We go to movies and sit in the air conditioned dark with strangers who are in love with heroes like Peter Parker who loves a girl he can’t have because he loves saving the world in red and blue tights more than he would love to have her ankles wrapped around his waist or his tongue between her legs. While we watch films in which famous people play famous people who experience pain, the boy who sold us popcorn loves the girl who sold us our tickets and stares at the runs in her stockings every night, even though she is in love with the skinny kid who sold her cigarettes at the 7-11, and if the world had any compassion it would let the two of them pass a Marlboro Light back and forth until their fingers eventually touched, their mouths sucking and blowing. If the world knew how the light bulb loved the socket then we would all be better off. We could all dive head first into the sticky parts. We could make sweat a religion and praise the holiness of smelliness.
I am going to stop here, on this dark night, on this country road, where country songs come from, and kiss her, this woman, below the trees which are below the stars, which are below desire. There is a music to it, I hear it. Johnny Rotten, Biggie Smalls, Johan Sebastian Bach, I don’t care what they say— I loved you the way my mouth loves teeth, the way a boy I know would risk it all for a purple dinosaur, who, truth be known, loved him.
In the Midwest, fields of corn are in love with a scarecrow, his potato-sack head and straw body, hanging out among the dog-eared stalks like a farm-Christ full of love.
Turning on the radio I hear how AM loves FM the way my mother loved Elvis whose hips all young girls loved, sitting around the television in a poodle skirt and bobby socks. He LOVED ME TENDER so much that I was born after a long night of Black-Russians and Canasta while “Jailhouse Rock” rocked.
Stamps love envelopes, the licking proves it— just look at my dog who obviously loves himself with an intensity no human being could sustain, though you can’t say we don’t try.
In High school I once cruised a MacDonald’s drive-thru butt-naked on a dare from a beautiful Sophomore, only to be swallowed up by a grief born from super-size or no super-size.
Years later I met a woman named Heavy Metal Goddess at a party where she brought her husband, leading him through the dance floor by a leash, while in Texas cockroaches love with such abandon that they wear their skeletons on the outside.
Once a baby lizard loved me so completely, he moved into my apartment and died of hunger.
No one loves war, but I know a man who loves tanks so much he wishes he had one to pick up the groceries, drive his wife to work, drop his daughter off at school with her Little Mermaid lunch box, a note hidden inside next to the apple, folded with a love that can be translated into any language: I HOPE YOU DO NOT SUFFER.
Matthew Dickman
_________________ " How we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used." - Wendell Berry, What Are People For?
“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.” -Thich Nhat Hahn
The following user would like to thank Saffron for this post: froglipz
The 13th biennial Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival is the largest and most famous poetry event in North America. Organizers expect it to attract more than 20,000 people Oct. 7 – 10, plus 4,500 high-school students from 250 schools across the country. . .
Other featured poets include Pulitzer Prize-winner and McArthur “Genius” Fellowship recipient Galway Kinnell (the 83-year-old will read in its entirety his definitive translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, which event spokesperson Ilene Antelman compared to “Sir Laurence Olivier reading the Shakespeare soliloquies in his later years”). . .
Good for you, pioneer of poetry! Go see Galway Kinnell and tell me what you think. He visited CSU in about 1973 and I saw him read. I really go for his poem "Flower Herding Pictures on Mt. Monadnock."
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Re: 2010 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival
Saffron wrote:
I am here! The internet connection is weak and wavering; a warning that my posts might be rudely interupted and not as well spell check as usual. Newark, NJ is proving to be an odd location for this festival. I heard lots of talk about staying off the streets at night and the events are taking place all around the block (a church and the historical society amoung the locations). The streets all around the site of the festival are closed off with police baricades, so there is a street fair atmosphere.
For now I will leave you with Billy Collins' closing remarks from his session Poets on Poetry --
"TV is telling us that everything is fine; any chanel any show. Contempory Fiction is telling us that nothing is fine. Poetry tells us life is beautiful and then we die."
The setting sounds intriguing, edgy, (if a trifle scary!). It will be really interesting to hear how this festival flies by the end.
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Re: 2010 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival
I took DWill's directive to go see Galway Kinnell. What a delight. He began his reading with this:
Oatmeal
I eat oatmeal for breakfast. I make it on the hot plate and put skimmed milk on it. I eat it alone. I am aware it is not good to eat oatmeal alone. Its consistency is such that is better for your mental health if somebody eats it with you. That is why I often think up an imaginary companion to have breakfast with. Possibly it is even worse to eat oatmeal with an imaginary companion. Nevertheless, yesterday morning, I ate my oatmeal porridge, as he called it with John Keats. Keats said I was absolutely right to invite him: due to its glutinous texture, gluey lumpishness, hint of slime, and unsual willingness to disintigrate, oatmeal should not be eaten alone. He said that in his opinion, however, it is perfectly OK to eat it with an imaginary companion, and that he himself had enjoyed memorable porridges with Edmund Spenser and John Milton. Even if eating oatmeal with an imaginary companion is not as wholesome as Keats claims, still, you can learn something from it. Yesterday morning, for instance, Keats told me about writing the "Ode to a Nightingale." He had a heck of a time finishing it those were his words "Oi 'ad a 'eck of a toime," he said, more or less, speaking through his porridge. He wrote it quickly, on scraps of paper, which he then stuck in his pocket, but when he got home he couldn't figure out the order of the stanzas, and he and a friend spread the papers on a table, and they made some sense of them, but he isn't sure to this day if they got it right. An entire stanza may have slipped into the lining of his jacket through a hole in his pocket. He still wonders about the occasional sense of drift between stanzas, and the way here and there a line will go into the configuration of a Moslem at prayer, then raise itself up and peer about, and then lay \ itself down slightly off the mark, causing the poem to move forward with a reckless, shining wobble. He said someone told him that later in life Wordsworth heard about the scraps of paper on the table, and tried shuffling some stanzas of his own, but only made matters worse. I would not have known any of this but for my reluctance to eat oatmeal alone. When breakfast was over, John recited "To Autumn." He recited it slowly, with much feeling, and he articulated the words lovingly, and his odd accent sounded sweet. He didn't offer the story of writing "To Autumn," I doubt if there is much of one. But he did say the sight of a just-harvested oat field go thim started on it, and two of the lines, "For Summer has o'er-brimmed their clammy cells" and "Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours," came to him while eating oatmeal alone. I can see him drawing a spoon through the stuff, gazing into the glimmering furrows, muttering. Maybe there is no sublime; only the shining of the amnion's tatters. For supper tonight I am going to have a baked potato left over from lunch. I am aware that a leftover baked potato is damp, slippery, and simultaneaously gummy and crumbly, and therefore I'm going to invite Patrick Kavanagh to join me.
_________________ " How we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used." - Wendell Berry, What Are People For?
“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.” -Thich Nhat Hahn
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Re: 2010 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival
I can see why Dwill recommended him, that gets some dings out of me too. I went and looked at the Mt Monadnock one, since that was a constant view (and yearly field trip) from my childhood.
How was it overall? Is this the kind of thing where you actually get to meet some of the poets?
_________________ ~froglipz~
"I'm not insane, my mother had me tested"
Si vis pacem, para bellum: If you wish for peace, prepare for war.
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Re: 2010 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival
froglipz wrote:
I can see why Dwill recommended him, that gets some dings out of me too. I went and looked at the Mt Monadnock one, since that was a constant view (and yearly field trip) from my childhood.
How was it overall? Is this the kind of thing where you actually get to meet some of the poets?
Yes, you can meet the poets. There are readings, poets talking about their work and the process of writing a poem, and a huge tent book store filled with books of poetry. Imagine a room full of people clapping and cheering at the end of poetry reading. It's kinda a heaven for poetry lovers.
_________________ " How we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used." - Wendell Berry, What Are People For?
“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.” -Thich Nhat Hahn
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