BOB HICOK
http://blog.grdodge.org/2010/07/16/2010 ... Program%29


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. What at first appears as cynicism in some of Bob Hicok’s poems might be remnants of a similar wariness. Examined more closely, even a poem with as brutally funny a title as “Hope is a thing with feathers that smacks into a window” threatens to break out into a hymn of praise. But the impulse is checked, as if some learned reluctance held the speaker back from being too much of an ecstatic.

That was great! Thanks for sharing!

WhimsicalWonder wrote:That was great! Thanks for sharing!

This poet will be at the Dodge Poetry Fest in NJ this fall. I already have my hotel room and ticket!

I have let this go unattended for too long, but am back on the job now. I will get something posted about each of the 2010 Festival Poets over the next several weeks. I have been checking the links I've post for each poet. They do not seem to be working. I am in the process of going back in to correct or delete them.

TAALAM ACEY
Born in Newark, Taalam Acey has recorded more than a dozen CDs and has authored four books including Excellent Exposure and Troubled Soul Refinery. He has performed and spoken at schools and venues throughout the world including the Essence Music Festival and his work has been featured in several films. Taalam currently resides in Baltimore, Maryland.

MARJORIE BARNES
An associate professor in the English Department at Union County College, Marjorie Barnes teaches writing and critical thinking. She received her B.A. in Literature from Richard Stockton College and an M.A. in Linguistics from Temple University. Marjorie’s career as a performance poet spans the past twenty-four years: in the late 1980’s as a poet on tour with Afro-One Dance, Drama and Drum Theatre and now as a Dodge Poet-in-the-Schools in New Jersey. In 2001, Marjorie received a grant from the New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC) to conduct a series of hip hop/poetry workshops for performance poets in Newark; the same year, she was instrumental in planning and organizing NJPAC’s first hip hop festival where she was a guest curator and host of the festival’s poetry series, Sacred Circle Poetry Café, from 2002 to 2006. A recipient of artist grants from the Puffin Foundation and the Newark Arts Council, Marjorie released her first poetry cd entitled, My Blues Ain’t Over Yet. Marjorie lives and writes in Newark.

http://blog.grdodge.org/2010/05/14/poet ... ie-barnes/

LAURA BOSS
Founder and editor of Lips, Laura Boss has received many poetry awards including a first place in Poetry Society of America’s Gordon Barber Poetry Contest and three fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. In 1998, her manuscript was a finalist for in PSA’s Alice Faye Di Castagnola Award. Her six books of poetry include Reports from the Front and Arms: New and Selected Poems. She was the sole representative of the USA at the XXVI International Poetry Readings in Europe and has read at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Wales. She has been a Dodge Poet-in-the-Schools for many years. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times. Her newest book, Flashlight, is forthcoming this October.

Lips
http://home.earthlink.net/~poetry_magaz ... 0Boss.html

PERFECT CIRCLES
by Laura Boss

The best teacher I ever had
told me I was the best student he’d ever had

The best lover I ever had
told me I was the best lover he’d ever had

The man I loved most
didn’t love me most when I loved him
needed me when I didn’t need him

I used to use a compass in school
could never make perfect circles



---- from On the Edge of the Hudson

( Cross-Cultural Communications,1986)

THE ASTRONOMER
for Michael Benedikt
by Laura Boss

At 13, you traveled from one junior high to another reading your paper on astronomy
that caused your teachers to want other students in the City to hear your paper they considered so brilliant from someone your age, or any age—
You tell me this after lovemaking years later, tell me that giving that “lecture” gave
you even more pleasure than reading your poems at the Library of Congress

Tonight, five months after your death that I am still recovering from
(and obviously you never will),
I look at the night sky and wonder, my love, if your inquisitive spirit
is soaring through the planets like the mind astronaut you always were

Thanks, Saffron. Interesting and appreciated.

There are also storytellers and music at the poetry festival.
http://blog.grdodge.org/2010/09/17/poet ... Program%29

Here is a clip from the web link:

Poetry Fridays: Poetry, Storytelling and Music

Anyone who saw Benjamin Bagby’s riveting recitation of Beowulf at the 2004 Festival, which merged dramatic performance, singing, incantation and storytelling, had a glimpse into what a performance by an ancient bard might have been like. It is believed that Homer accompanied his readings of the Illiad and Odyssey with a lyre or a drum, and that he half-chanted half-sung the lines to the rhythm of the accompanying beat. (This would make him one of our first rappers.)

The oral tradition existed for thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years before we drew distinctions between actor, poet, singer and storyteller. Music and storytelling have always been an integral part of the Dodge Poetry Festival, in part to honor the ancient common source of poetry, story and song. The 2010 Festival continues this practice with an exciting line-up of storytellers and musicians.

CHERYL CLARKE
Poet and essayist Cheryl Clarke is the author of four books of poetry: Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black Women (1982), Living as a Lesbian (1986), Humid Pitch (1989) and Experimental Love (1993). She is also the author of After Mecca: Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement (2005), a critical study, and The Days of Good Looks: Prose and Poetry 1980–2005 (2006). Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including The Black Scholar, The Kenyon Review, Belles Lettres, The World in Us: An Anthology of Lesbian and Gay Poetry, and Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader (1992). She hopes to publish Baltimore Aureole: Poems Selected and New in 2011. She is currently acting as a Dean of Students at Rutgers University New Brunswick Campus, where she is also a member of the graduate faculty of the Women’s and Gender Studies Department.

to work to the end of day
to talk to the end of talk
to run to the end of dark
to have at the end of it all: sex

the wish for forever
for more often
for more.

the promises
the absurdity
the histrionics
the loss of pride
the bargaining
the sadness after.

in wakefulness wanting
in wakefulness waiting.

(from "living as a lesbian at 35" in Living As A Lesbian)