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2012 Dodge Poetry Festival

A platform to express and share your enthusiasm and passion for poetry. What are your treasured poems and poets? Don't hesitate to showcase the poems you've penned yourself!
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Saffron

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Re: 2012 Dodge Poetry Festival

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giselle wrote: I looked up the Dodge Festival and I was thinking about New Jersey and the Arts ... wondering if it can't help living in the shadow of New York, maybe like a kid sister? I've never visited NJ but I have been to New York several times and find it a rather overwhelming, intense place but a lot of fun.
The festival is great fun. If I go this year it will make 3 times for me. Funny, your comment about NJ. I grew up in the middle section of NJ and was just saying to someone today that I never realized there was a whole state of NY until I was a teen. NYC is over whelming. I've got a trip plan to NYC to visit a friend at the end of July.
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giselle

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Re: 2012 Dodge Poetry Festival

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Saffron: Sorry, certainly didn't mean to dis your home town, I only meant that nearby all the fame and prominence of NYC particularly in the arts I guess its hard for outsiders like me to see the 'scene' in other places, but really its often the lesser known scenes that are most interesting! All I know about NJ I have learned from Stephanie Plum books! It looks like the Dodge festival is well established and popular. I was reading about a few of the poets, certainly an accomplished group. New York state is big and has a lot to offer - I used to go skiing upstate NY at one time.
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Re: 2012 Dodge Poetry Festival

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giselle wrote:Saffron: Sorry, certainly didn't mean to dis your home town, I only meant that nearby all the fame and prominence of NYC particularly in the arts I guess its hard for outsiders like me to see the 'scene' in other places, but really its often the lesser known scenes that are most interesting! All I know about NJ I have learned from Stephanie Plum books! It looks like the Dodge festival is well established and popular. I was reading about a few of the poets, certainly an accomplished group. New York state is big and has a lot to offer - I used to go skiing upstate NY at one time.
Not dissed at all, in fact, I was, in a way, agreeing with your statement. As a kid I didn't quite realize NY was a state - NYC looms so large that it over shadows everything around it and in my kid head it was all there was to New York.
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Here is the poet I most look forward to hearing read - Thomas Lux. I do so enjoy his poetry and this next one I think was written for me!

A Little Tooth
by Thomas Lux

Your baby grows a tooth, then two,
and four, and five, then she wants some meat
directly from the bone. It's all

over: she'll learn some words, she'll fall
in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet
talker on his way to jail. And you,

your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue
nothing. You did, you loved, your feet
are sore. It's dusk. Your daughter's tall.

And another -

You and Your Ilk

I have thought much upon
who might be my ilk,
and that I am ilk myself if I have ilk.
Is one of my ilk, or me, the barber
who cuts the hair of the blind?
And the man crushed by cruelties
for which we can't imagine sorrow,
who would be his ilk?
And whose ilk was it
standing around, hands in pockets, May 1933,
when 2,242 tons of books were burned?
Not mine. So: what makes my ilkness my
ilkness? No answers, none forthcoming.
To be one of the ilks, that's all
I hoped for; to say hello to the mailman,
nod to my neighbors, to watch
my children climb the stairs of a big yellow bus
which takes them to a place
where they learn to read
and write and eat their lunches
from puzzle trays—all around them, amid
the clatter and din,
amid bananas, bread, and milk.
all around them: them and their ilk.
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Image
Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan, in 1956 and raised in Virginia. He received his B.A. from the College of William and Mary in 1978, his M.A. from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee in 1980, and his M.F.A. from Columbia University in 1982.


Poppies

Waking from comalike sleep, I saw the poppies,
with their limp necks and unregimented beauty.
Pause, I thought, say something true: It was night,
I wanted to kiss your lips, which remained supple,
but all the water in them had been replaced
with embalming compound. So I was angry.
I loved the poppies, with their wide-open faces,
how they carried themselves, beckoning to me
instead of pushing away. The way in and the way out
are the same, essentially: emotions disrupting thought,
proximity to God, the pain of separation.
I loved the poppies, with their effortless existence,
like grief and fate, but tempered and formalized.
Your hair was black and curly; I combed it.

Beach Walk

I found a baby shark on the beach.
Seagulls had eaten his eyes. His throat was bleeding.
Lying on shell and sand, he looked smaller than he was.
The ocean had scraped his insides clean.
When I poked his stomach, darkness rose up in him,
like black water. Later, I saw a boy,
aroused and elated, beckoning from a dune.
Like me, he was alone. Something tumbled between us—
not quite emotion. I could see the pink
interior flesh of his eyes. "I got lost. Where am I?"
he asked, like a debt owed to death.
I was pressing my face to its spear-hafts.
We fall, we fell, we are falling. Nothing mitigates it.
The dark embryo bares its teeth and we move on.
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Re: 2012 Dodge Poetry Festival

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Saffron wrote: Something that is very enticing and therefore distracting. Don't you think? I have finally come to the conclusion men (straight men) cannot help their fascination with breasts; it's just a biological fact.
Yep, and don't forget--men are very, very stupid.
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oblivion wrote:I enjoyed this one as well but was taken aback a bit by the use of epizeuxis in such a modern poem (bring on the Greeks!!). I think this might call for buying a book of his poetry. :)
Epizeuxis? That's bane to the eighth grader in the spelling bee as well as completely new to me. But I looked it up and have added it to my vocab...now just looking for a good opp. to use it! (Is it "Thump. Thump./Thump" that illustrates it?)
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oblivion wrote:These are very beautiful lines: "I cannot tell anymore when a door opens or closes,
I can only hear the frame saying, Walk through."


I like the poem in general. (Did you pick this out for epizeuxis as well:)?) If this is the quality of poets this year at the Dodge Poetry Festival, then I am truly sorry I can't be there!
I suppose that as a translator, you get excited when you spot epizeuxis. Figure the words out and you have an automatic twofer, threefer, fourfer, etc. Poe's "The Bells" must be a breeze!
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Re: 2012 Dodge Poetry Festival

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DWill wrote:
oblivion wrote:I enjoyed this one as well but was taken aback a bit by the use of epizeuxis in such a modern poem (bring on the Greeks!!). I think this might call for buying a book of his poetry. :)
Epizeuxis? That's bane to the eighth grader in the spelling bee as well as completely new to me. But I looked it up and have added it to my vocab...now just looking for a good opp. to use it! (Is it "Thump. Thump./Thump" that illustrates it?)
One of the two of you could have done the rest of us a courtesy and posted a definition!

In rhetoric, an epizeuxis is the repetition of words in immediate succession, for vehemence or emphasis.[1]
Examples:
"O horror, horror, horror." (Macbeth)
"Words, words, words." (Hamlet)
"Rain, rain, rain, rain, rain." (Kay)
"Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers. Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers!" (Steve Ballmer)
"Education, education, education." (Tony Blair)
"Never, never, never quit." (Winston Churchill)
"Location, location, location." (Common phrase tied to real estate)
"The horror, the horror" (Kurtz in Heart of Darkness)
"No, no, no!" (Margaret Thatcher)
"Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!" (Henry David Thoreau in Walden)
"Scotch, scotch, scotch, scotchy, scotchy scotch." (Ron Burgundy in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy)
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Two more poets I am looking forward to hearing recite; Gregory Orr and Jane Hirshfield. Hirshfield was at the 2008 Dodge Poetry Festival - a wonderful reader! She is known for her translation work.

Jane Hirshfield
Image

Jane Hirshfield was born in New York City in 1953. After receiving her B.A. from Princeton University in their first graduating class to include women, she went on to study at the San Francisco Zen Center. Her books of poetry include Come, Thief (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), After (HarperCollins, 2006); Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Lives of the Heart (1997), The October Palace (1994), Of Gravity & Angels (1988), and Alaya (1982).

She is also the author of Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (1997) and has also edited and co-translated The Ink Dark Moon: Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan (1990) with Mariko Aratani; Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems (2006) with Robert Bly; Women in Praise of the Sacred: Forty-Three Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women (1994); and an e-book on Basho, The Heart of Haiku (2011).

This Was Once a Love Poem

This was once a love poem,
before its haunches thickened, its breath grew short,
before it found itself sitting,
perplexed and a little embarrassed,
on the fender of a parked car,
while many people passed by without turning their heads.

It remembers itself dressing as if for a great engagement.
It remembers choosing these shoes,
this scarf or tie.

Once, it drank beer for breakfast,
drifted its feet
in a river side by side with the feet of another.

Once it pretended shyness, then grew truly shy,
dropping its head so the hair would fall forward,
so the eyes would not be seen.

IT spoke with passion of history, of art.
It was lovely then, this poem.
Under its chin, no fold of skin softened.
Behind the knees, no pad of yellow fat.
What it knew in the morning it still believed at nightfall.
An unconjured confidence lifted its eyebrows, its cheeks.

The longing has not diminished.
Still it understands. It is time to consider a cat,
the cultivation of African violets or flowering cactus.

Yes, it decides:
Many miniature cacti, in blue and red painted pots.
When it finds itself disquieted
by the pure and unfamiliar silence of its new life,
it will touch them—one, then another—
with a single finger outstretched like a tiny flame.

Gregory Orr

Image

In 1947, Gregory Orr was born in Albany, New York, and grew up in the rural Hudson Valley, and for a year, in a hospital in the hinterlands of Haiti. He received a BA degree from Antioch College, and an MFA from Columbia University.

Untitled [A house just like his mother's]

A house just like his mother's,
But made of words.
Everything he could remember
Inside it:
Parrots and a bowl
Of peaches, and the bright rug
His grandmother wove.

Shadows also—mysteries
And secrets.
Corridors
Only ghosts patrol.
And did I mention
Strawberry jam and toast?

Did I mention
That everyone he loved
Lives there now,

In that poem
He called "My Mother’s House?"
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