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)

BILLY COLLINS
Former United States Poet Laureate Billy Collins has said that a poem should be like a carnival ride: as soon as it is done, you want to get back on and ride it again. Though Collins now has large numbers of readers eager to return to their favorites of his poems, he taught and wrote for decades before finding those readers. He has joked that after college he wrote like a “third-rate Wallace Stevens.” Only later did he develop the confidence to risk writing with clarity. “Clarity is the real risk in poetry,” he has said, “ because you are exposed.” His 10 books of poetry include Ballistics (2008), The Trouble with Poetry (2005), Nine Horses (2002) and Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems (2001). A Guggenheim Fellowship winner, Collins used his time as U.S. Poet Laureate (2001–2003) to launch Poetry 180, a program that encourages students and teachers to spend part of each school day reading or listening to poetry. In 2004, he was the first recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Mark Twain Award for humor in poetry.
http://blog.grdodge.org/2010/05/21/poet ... y-collins/

DW are you paying attention? This one made me think of you.
To everyone: Billy Collins is worth seeing in person. If you are reading this, you should think about attending!

Introduction to Poetry
by Billy Collins


I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Calrke was interesting. I enjoyed her transition from verbs to nouns.

oblivion wrote:Calrke was interesting. I enjoyed her transition from verbs to nouns.

I also liked her use of verbs to nouns.

Saffron wrote:
DW are you paying attention? This one made me think of you.
To everyone: Billy Collins is worth seeing in person. If you are reading this, you should think about attending!

Introduction to Poetry
by Billy Collins


I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

That's good! For a moment I thought he was referring to students, but now I'm sure he's talking to teachers. The image of the interrogation is priceless.

DWill wrote:
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
That's good! For a moment I thought he was referring to students, but now I'm sure he's talking to teachers. The image of the interrogation is priceless.

The more I read this little poem the more I like it. It is really very instructive. I love the two stanzas below, especially the idea of waterskiing over a poem -- to glide over the surface of the poem enjoying the ride you get from just the sounds and rhythm the language of the poem gives; it is always where I begin with a poem.

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.