Spring and Fountain Online Poetry Retreat

The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation's Dodge Poetry program is offering a free "Spring and Fountain Online."

If you would like to join educators and students of poetry nationwide from the comfort of your home and on your schedule, you can register by April 20.

For one week, from April 22-29, participants will receive a daily e-mail that will give you access to a “Giving Voice” packet of contemporary poetry, suggestions for daily activities (including journal prompts and writing activities), videos of poets reading their work and access to a Google Group where participants can communicate and connect about their experiences.

For information and to register, go to dodgepoetry.org/schools/sfonline/

Stanley Kunitz's 'Touch Me' and Love in the Garden

Our December prompt on pilgrims and pilgrimages talked about my own short journey to the garden of Stanley Kunitz and I want to his final poem from his Collected Poems.

I was at the reading captured here on video at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival held at Waterloo Village in New Jersey. There was an electricity that ran through the audience as he read, and a standing ovation when he finished.

“Touch Me” is a love poem that takes place in that garden. In his old age, as a storm approaches and he stakes his plants for protection, he ponders the seasons in a life. To his question“What makes the engine go?” he answers  “Desire, desire, desire.”

It is the last poem he published.

...The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
                        and it's done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.

A Celebration of the 30th Anniversary of the Dodge Poetry Festival

The Warren County Community College in New Jersey presents "A Celebration of the 30th Anniversary of the Dodge Poetry Festival."

This free event will be on Saturday, October 21, 2017 at Warren County Community College (475 Route 57 West, Washington, NJ 07882)

Poets and panelists include Martin Farawell (Director of the Dodge Poetry Program), Laura Boss, Kenneth Hart, Susan Jackson, Charles H. Johnson, Tina Kelley, Diane Lockward, John McDermott, Peter E. Murphy, Khalil Murrell, Priscilla Orr, Joe Weil, Gretna Wilkinson and Sander Zulauf.

The program will run from 12 noon through 4:30 pm.

12 to 12:45     Panel Discussions
1:00 to 2:15    Poetry Sampler: The Dodge Festival Poets
2:30 to 3:00    Poems by Martin Farawell
3:00 to 3:45    Favorite Poems by Others, as read by Dodge Poets
4:00 to 4:30    Favorite Poems from the First 30 Years of the Dodge Main Stage, as read by Martin Farawell

For directions to the college: warren.edu
For information, please contact BJ Ward

Extending This Month of Poetry

The Dodge Poetry program has offered since 1992 a "Spring and Fountain" series for teachers in New Jersey that meet for several weeks in locations around the state. This year, they added a one-week online version (registration closes 4/21/17) that is open nationwide to teachers, administrators, counselors, librarians and staff at accredited institutions.

Although this was a part of the National Poetry Month celebration, the end of April does not mean the end of poetry.

The Dodge folks sent out a packet of poems for online participants without attribution. You don't know who wrote the poems until they send a list of attributions at the end of the program. (Sure, some people probably couldn't wait and did some online searching.) Why the anonymity? So that you read "as free of judgment and preconceived notions as possible."

Below are a dozen poems that you can try out online that were in the packets used. These are not anonymous.

Dodge suggested that you take some time to slow down and read each poem silently to yourself, then out loud once or a few times. Then, "write a note to the poet who wrote the poem or to the speaker of the poem. It could be a quick thank you note, a series of questions you would like to ask the poet, or a response to questions raised by the poem. This note is not meant to be analysis of the poem, but rather a reflection of your personal response to what you’ve read, the feelings or questions that have bubbled up from a deeper place inside you."

Maybe the exercise will prompt a poem of your own.

1. What Kind of Times Are These
2. The New Religion
3. sorrow song
4. Psalm for Kingston
5. A Partial History of My Stupidity
6. Attitude
7. Zen of Tipping
8. The New Religion
9. The Blue Dress in Mother's Closet
10. Part of Eve's Discussion
11. The Universe as Primal Scream  
12. After Making Love We Hear Footsteps

Dodge Poetry Festival - the 30th Anniversary

The largest poetry event in North America comes to New Jersey’s largest city when the 30th Anniversary Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival returns to Newark from Thursday October 20th through Sunday October 23rd, 2016. For four days Newark’s vibrant downtown Arts District will be transformed into a poetry village featuring some of our most celebrated, diverse and vibrant poets and spoken word artists.

Check out the program for the list of poets appearing this year. http://www.dodgepoetry.org/at-the-festival/program/

Lunch Poems

Burt Kimmelman

Catherine "Cat" Doty

I attended some Lunchtime Poems in Military Park (Newark, NJ) last week sponsored by the Dodge Poetry Festival. The weekly events are a preview for some of the 70 poets who will read at the Dodge Poetry Festival in October. Last week two friends were reading, Catherine "Cat" Doty and Burt Kimmelman.

People in the park on a beautiful summer day brought their lunch or drinks and took in some poems. I saw listeners making notes. People passing would slow down, stop for a few minutes and take in a few lines or a poem or two.

For those of you not near northern New Jersey, check out what is coming October 23-26 at the Festival.

But, if a trip to NJ is just not possible, you might consider Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, a collection that is now 50 years old. They were first published in 1964 as number 19 in City Lights’ Pocket Poets Series.

In an essay by Callie Siskel, "It's Cooking,"she says:

O’Hara’s poems are often compared to Abstract Expressionist paintings, but their composition is also akin to jazz. He grew up playing music. In “On Rachmaninoff’s Birthday,” the speaker says he was “miserable, a grope pizzicato,” but O’Hara himself was a classically trained pianist. He studied at the New England Conservatory and entered Harvard as a music major before switching to English. He called writing “playing the typewriter,” but such a phrase downplays the extent to which his poems feel as measured as music. The syncopation that permeates Lunch Poems occurs when the time he marks at a regular rate is juxtaposed with the erratic cadences of his voice.

The collection's title refers to O’Hara’s habit of writing in Times Square during his lunch hour, and probably suggests that a reader could take the pocket-sized volume along and read it during his own lunch hour. They are often about museums, movies, and people and places of 1960s New York.

Lunch Poems includes some of the verses that made him cultishly popular - "The Day Lady Died,"  "Poem [Lana Turner has collapsed!]”(which we used for our gossip writing prompt) and "Ave Maria,"which begins this way:

get them out of the house so they won’t know what you’re up to
it’s true that fresh air is good for the body
                                                              but what about the soul
that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images 
and when you grow old as grow old you must
                                                                  they won’t hate you
they won’t criticize you they won’t know
                                                           they’ll be in some glamorous country
they first saw on a Saturday afternoon or playing hookey

they may even be grateful to you
                                                  for their first sexual experience
which only cost you a quarter
                                            and didn’t upset the peaceful home

Poets List for the 2012 Dodge Poetry Festival

The official list of poets for the 2012 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, October 11-14, has been released.

Taalam Acey
Cynthia Arrieu-King
Amiri Baraka
Ras Baraka
Brian Barker
Nicky Beer
Dan Bellm
Richard Blanco
Eavan Boland
Henri Cole
Eduardo C. Corral
Emari DiGiorgio
Sharon Dolin
Nikky Finney
Emily Fragos
Terrance Hayes
Juan Felipe
Herrera Lamar Hill
Mark Hillringhouse
Jane Hirshfield
Fanny Howe
Adele Kenny
Kurtis Lamkin
Dorianne Laux
Paul LeGault
 Philip Levine
Ada Limón
Timothy Liu
Thomas Lux
Salgado Maranhão
Rachel McKibbens
Taylor Mali
Joseph Millar
John Murillo
Idra Novey
Michael O'Hara
Gregory Orr
Gregory Pardlo
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Baraka Sele
Narubi Selah
Joan Siegel
Patricia Smith
Arthur Sze
Larissa Szporluk
Natasha Trethewey
C.K. Williams
Raúl Zurita

Information on poets is also on their blog at http://blog.grdodge.org/category/poetry

For tickets and information visit www.dodgepoetry.org

Dodge Poetry Festival 2012

The 14th edition of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Poetry Festival will return to Newark, New Jersey’s largest city, for a second time in fall 2012.

The festival is a biennial event that has been held since 1986. The first 12 festivals had been held in more rural settings, mostly Waterloo Village in NJ. The Foundation moved to Newark for its 2010 festival.

Dates for the Festival have not been finalized at this time.

Poetry On Video

A number of people have created videos to accompany poems. Not everyone gets the opportunities to go to festivals, workshops and reading and hear poets live, so sometimes video is the only alternative. And some videos are interesting films in themselves.

There are 11 Billy Collins poems animated at Billy Collins Action Poetry. (Also a Collins interview from Forum with Michael Krasny available to play (audio only). 

Four Seasons Productions has made short films set to classic poetry. There are 21 that have won festival prizes and produced a DVD. Their best “poem videos” are available on their YouTube channel. and include Langston Hughes’ “The Weary Blues,” “Only Breath” by 13th century sufi poet Rumi and “100 Love Sonnets IX” by Pablo Neruda in the original Spanish.



Poetry Everywhere has 34 short videos of contemporary poets, one poem per video, hosted by Garrison Keillor, using footage from the Dodge Poetry Festival.

The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation's YouTube channel has video highlights from past Dodge Foundation Poetry Festivals, some of which have been featured on PBS.



Brian Turner reading "Caravan" and "Eulogy" at the 2006 Dodge Poetry Festival.

Live Webcast From The Dodge Poetry Festival

Can't make it to the Dodge Poetry Festival this week?  There will be two free live webcasts done by NJN.


Thursday, October 7, 2010 7:30 - 10:30 (EST)
Opening Night "Poetry Sampler" featuring: Amiri Baraka, Tara Betts, Jericho Brown, Michael Cirelli, Billy Collins, Kwame Dawes, Matthew Dickman, Rita Dove, Martín Espada, Rigoberto González, Rachel Hadas, Bob Hicok, Tyehimba Jess, Galway Kinnell, Dorianne Laux, Dunya Mikhail, Nancy Morejón, Joseph Millar, Malena Mörling, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Sharon Olds, Marie Ponsot, Claudia Rankine, Kay Ryan


Sunday, October 10, 2010, Noon - 1 pm (EST)
U.S. Poets Laureates read: Billy Collins, Rita Dove, Kay Ryan, Mark Strand

Webcast link: http://www.njn.net/arts/dodgepoetryfestival

Geraldine R. Dodge Festival Begins Today

The 4-day Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival begins tonight.

Now in it's 24th year, the biennial festival - the largest poetry event in North America - will be held for the first time in Newark, New Jersey, the state's largest city.

A Poetry Sampler reading on Thursday evening, October 7th, features 24 poets and launches the Festival.

Friday is High School Student Day.

The full Festival schedule is online as a printable pdf document, and a list of festival poets with biographies is also online.

Events will be held in venues accommodating anywhere from 100 to over 2,700 people. The evening programs will be held in NJPAC’s Prudential Hall - a world-class performance space.There are single and multi-day ticket options.

The Festival is accessible via Newark's mass-transit hubs, including an international airport, major bus lines, a light-rail system and PATH service from Manhattan.

Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival October 7-10

The 4-day Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival is now just 3 weeks away. Marking its 24th year, this largest poetry event in North America will be held in New Jersey's largest city - Newark.

The hope is to create a “poetry village” in the heart of the city’s arts district around the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. They will be using not only NJPAC's state-of-the-art concert halls, but also intimate cabaret rooms and prime meeting spaces within nearby cultural institutions, museums, galleries and churches to ensure a rich, varied experience for all festival-goers.

Amiri Baraka

Billy Collins

A Poetry Sampler reading on Thursday evening, October 7th, launches the Festival.

Events will be held in venues accommodating anywhere from 100 to over 2,700. The evening programs, long the centerpiece of the Festival, will be held in NJPAC’s Prudential Hall: a world-class performance space for a world-class poetry event. As in the past, interludes of music and storytelling will underscore the spirit of community.

The relocation also makes the Festival more accessible than ever before. As one of the largest mass-transit hubs, Newark is home to an international airport, major bus lines, a light-rail system and PATH service from Manhattan. This will enable more visitors to leave their cars behind and further the Dodge Foundation’s ongoing commitment to creativity and sustainability as we plan toward a “greener” Festival.

The full Festival schedule is now posted online as a printable pdf document, so you can plan when and where Festival Poets will be reading, as well as what topics they will weigh in on, and who will be performing alongside them.

Rita Dove

Sharon Olds

Festival Poets Announced for 2010 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival

The line-up of Festival Poets (to date) for the 2010 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, has been announced.

The list includes many nationally and internationally acclaimed poets, four US Poets Laureate, Pulitzer Prize winners and MacArthur Fellows.

To date, the poets listed below have agreed to participate in the 2010 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. 

Amiri Baraka	Michael Dickman	Dunya Mikhail
Hadara Bar-Nadav	Rita Dove	Joseph Millar
Marjorie Barnes	Martín Espada	Malena Mörling
Tara Betts	Santee Frazier	Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Jericho Brown	Rigoberto González	Sharon Olds
Teresa Carson	Kathy Graber	Marie Ponsot
Michael Cirelli	Penny Harter	Claudia Rankine
Billy Collins	Bob Hicok	Kay Ryan
Kyle Dargan	Tyehimba Jess	Margo Taft Stever
Kwame Dawes	Galway Kinnell	Mark Strand
Oliver de la Paz	Dorianne Laux	Jerry Williams
Matthew Dickman	Laura McCullough	check updated list

Tickets for the Festival, which is October 7 – 10 in Newark, New Jersey, will go on sale through the New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC) box office on Friday, April 23rd at 10 am.

The full press release has brief bios of the Festival Poets, ticket options and prices, and accessibility of the venues for patrons with mobility, visual and hearing impairments.

The Festival website, which we will be updated regularly between now and October, is the place for all Festival details.

You an also follow the Dodge blog for more on the poets and get updates via their Twitter and  Facebook page.

Lucille Clifton Dies at 73

Lucille Clifton  1936-2010

Lucille Clifton, who achieved some of the literary world's highest honors as a major American poet, died today at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore at age 73.
Clifton had been ill for some time with an undiagnosed infection and had undergone surgery to remove her colon yesterday. 

Clifton lived in Columbia, Md., and was the former poet laureate of the state. She was a two-time Pulitzer Prize nominee and won the National Book Award in 2001 for Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000 and in 2007, she became the first African-American woman to be awarded one of the literary world's highest honors — the Ruth Lilly Prize for lifetime achievement by the Poetry Foundation.

 

Lucille Clifton reads "What Haunts Him" and "Sorrows" at the 2008 Dodge Poetry Festival

SELECTED BOOKS BY CLIFTON

• Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980
• The Book of Light
• Next: New Poems
• Quilting: Poems 1987-1990

Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival 2010

The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival festival will be held this year in Newark, New Jersey, beginning on Thursday evening, October 7th and ending Sunday afternoon, October 10th.

Considering that a year ago it seemed that there would be no festival, the news is encouraging to the poetry community in and beyond NJ.

Tickets will go on sale in April, National Poetry Month. Information about all aspects of the Festival will be available and continuously updated over the next several months. For continuing information, check on the festival website and follow the festival on Twitter.

The new incarnation of the festival includes a new financial model with the principal funding and artistic direction coming from the Dodge Foundation, but with other sponsors (such as the New Jersey Performing Arts Center and The City of Newark) also supporting the event.

Also, a Friends of the Festival effort has been created for individuals to donate in order to continue the Foundation's work with poets, teachers and students through the Dodge Poetry Festival. (All Friends of the Festival will be acknowledged in the Festival Program, and those who are able to donate $100 or more will receive a card entitling them to a 10% discount on Festival merchandise.)

Having attended all but one of the festivals, and having volunteered at the last five, I would love to see the Foundation make a greater effort to use the many "Dodgers" who have benefited from the poetry program as students, teachers, writers and readers and who would be willing to volunteer to help.

Robert Hass at the 2008 Festival

Laughing At Poetry

Take a listen to these three poems read by Billy Collins at a Dodge Poetry Festival.

Collins is much loved, and equally criticized, because his poems are accessible - even enjoyable.

These three are not so typical of that.

I particularly like the idea behind "The First Night" which was inspired by this line by Juan Ramón Jiménez:  "The worst thing about death must be the first night."

I can sense the audience wondering if Collins means to be funny with some lines.

I used a few of his poems in a class last week. Students read "The Lanyard" silently first. I heard no laughter. Then I read it - pretty seriously - aloud. I didn't notice any chuckles from the crowd. Then I played an audio file of him reading it with an audience who laughed throughout the poem. The class wasn't rolling in the aisles, but they did laugh, smile and do that little exhalation of breath that shows they "got it."

Did they need permission to laugh? Was the laughter contagious? (Watch a comedy in a full theater and alone in your house for comparison.) Don't they know that poems can be funny?

Next we listened to him read "The Revenant" - a poem in the voice of a dog who was put to sleep to its owner. The laughs came much easier.

I asked them if they thought this poem was like most other poems - "You know, if the poet says it's a dog, it's probably not a dog. What would this poem be saying if he's talking about people?" 

A nice discussion followed. One student said it was similar to what happens in class: "You don't really know us. We don't really know you. We behave the way we are supposed to behave in class, not the way we really want to behave."

"We are all good dogs," I said.

"You got it," he replied.

Dodge Poetry Festival 2010

I have been blogging about the Dodge Poetry Festival since the start of this blog and have attended the festivals since 1988. Today in the NYTimes.com, comes word that the 2010 Dodge Poetry Festival, which was "canceled" earlier this year, will probably be back in a new form and location.

The Dodge Foundation announced in May it was seeking prospective partner cities and 8 New Jersey towns, cities and organizations responded. This summer they narrowed the list to Montclair, Newark and Trenton.

The biannual Festival started 1986 and by the 2008 festival had grown to 19,000 attendees for the 4 September days at Waterloo Village in Byram Township.

David Grant, president and CEO who is stepping down in June, and Martin Farawell, the foundation’s poetry director, are planning to present the Dodge board of directors with a final proposal early in September and announce the new location by the end of the month.

Poems About Politics

I actually have avoided writing and reading poems about politics. They usually don't work for me. But, the past few years, I have become more of a news junkie and politics (and economics) have started to get under my skin more and more.

Here are two poems by Naomi Shihab Nye that do work for me. The first is "Letters My Prez Is Not Sending" (the Prez being Bush 2 then) which just hits you in the face. Let me amend that - it throws punches at you, but just stops before it makes contact. But you will flinch and wince anyway.




The second poem is "Ted Kooser Is My President" and it is lighter and easier to take but closer to my own apolitical approach to political poetry.

On the Dodge blog, Martin Farawell writes of Nye:

A poet could avoid the dilemma by taking the position that poetry shouldn’t be “political.” But Nye’s poems are attempts to stay connected to the world and to others. She refuses to abandon the attempt despite the violence and injustice she must therefore bear witness to. It is almost as if she discovers how we are connected through the act of bearing witness. Perhaps for Nye poetry itself is our humanity’s survival mechanism.

Nye has also said the courage she most admires is that of people who keep giving attention to the simple acts of everyday life—talking over coffee, getting kids ready for school, sweeping the front porch stoop—while there is chaos and danger all around them.

You can find “Letters My Prez Is Not Sending” and “Ted Kooser Is My President” in her newsest collection, Honeybee.

It's the End of the Dodge Festival As We Know It

and none of us feel fine.

Many of you who read this blog probably received this email from David Grant, President and CEO, Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation this week.

Greetings to you all at the beginning of a new year.

Some of you may know that we have reduced the Dodge Foundation's grantmaking budgets annually since 2002 in an effort to develop a sustainable approach to grantmaking and initiatives in relation to our assets. During that period, we have reduced all areas of our giving except for Poetry. The severity of the recent. financial downturn – a 30% decline in assets -- has meant that we must finally reduce that budget as well, at least for the near future.

I know how much Dodge’s work in Poetry means to so many of you, and I wanted to let you know the Foundation will remain committed to Poetry as a signature interest. But financial realities are forcing us to take a different approach to our Poetry activities in 2009 and 2010. Specifically, and most importantly, we know we will not be able to produce a Poetry Festival in September 2010 on the scale of past Festivals.

We will maintain much of our work with New Jersey teachers of poetry this spring, and we will actually expand our efforts to make the audio and video archives of past Festivals readily available via YouTube and other means for all who want to enjoy them. Yet we must at least take a cycle off from the biennial Festival as you have known it and, depending on how things turn out, we may need to “reinvent” the Festival on either a more affordable scale or in a more affordable venue. (Unfortunately, over the last three Festivals, the production costs have more than doubled, and a mere 20% of the Festival budget went toward hiring the poets at the very center of the event.)

Under these circumstances, our esteemed colleague Jim Haba will move this year from Poetry Director to Consultant to the Foundation. His longtime associate Martin Farawell will take on the role of Program Director for Poetry and lead our efforts with the Archive and other Poetry initiatives.

Neither you nor we have seen the last of Jim, but I wanted to take this opportunity to acknowledge and celebrate his remarkable achievements as the guiding spirit behind the Dodge Poetry Festivals since 1986. First as a consultant working with the Dodge Founding Executive Director Scott McVay, then later as our full-time Poetry Director, Jim strove tirelessly to create, in his own words, “a space in which poetry can assume its rightful place at the center of our imaginative and emotional lives.” The result has been a singular international poetry event, one which instead of featuring scholarly papers or professional advice always gave priority to the simple, direct and profound experience of coming together and listening to poets and poetry. The late Stanley Kunitz went to the heart of the matter, I think, when he praised the Festivals’ “great democratic spirit.”

Over the course of its twenty-two year history, the biennial Festivals drew approximately 140,000 people from 42 states ¾ including 17,000 teachers and 42,000 high school students who attended without charge and traveled from as far away as Florida, Maine, Minnesota and California. The Festivals also gave rise to several NPR radio programs and five PBS television series, including The Power of the Word, The Language of Life and Fooling with Words, all hosted by Bill Moyers and seen by a national audience of nearly 50 million.

From the outset, Jim strove to include poets and audiences from a wide base of the culture, and to invite unknown and unrecognized voices from those groups traditionally excluded from the Western canon. He recognized that America and American poetry could not thrive unless they had a deeper connection to the poets and poetries of other cultures, and so poetry-in-translation has been a central feature of every Festival. Under his leadership, the Festival spawned a complementary Poetry-in-the-Schools Program that has since sent poets into every county in New Jersey to work with thousands of teachers and students.

For me, Jim’s brief essay in the Dodge Foundation’s 2000 Annual Report, Slowing Down for Poetry, will always be the best rationale behind the Foundation’s significant (over $13 million since 1986) and ongoing investment in Poetry as an art form. He describes how “Poetry redeems our human possibilities,” and reminds us in this frantic modern world:

Image by image, thought by thought, feeling by feeling, poetry invites us to sink even more deeply into a kind of “before” time, at once achingly familiar and exhilaratingly new. Only by slowing down for poetry can we hope to accept its delicious invitation.


Perhaps the most lasting testimony to Jim’s achievement will be the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival Audio and Video Archive. Consisting of over 2,500 hours of audio and video recordings, recorded by industry professionals to the highest broadcast standards, the Archive is already one of the most extraordinary records of contemporary poetry and poets in the world. In the months and years ahead, the Dodge Poetry Program will work to make as much of this archive available to as wide an audience as possible, and we will be considering ways in which the Archive can continue to grow through newly designed events. The Festival experience itself cannot be duplicated, but we take heart that it can and will be shared by students, teachers, poets, and poetry lovers the world over. It is a remarkable legacy – not yet ended – but one for which Jim Haba has our everlasting gratitude, respect and affection.


1/13/09

Dodge Poetry Festival on YouTube

The Dodge Poetry Festival’s YouTube channel is available online at YouTube.

The first offerings are readings from the 2006 Dodge Poetry Festival – including Billy Collins, Linda Gregg, Ekiwah Adler Belendez, Jorie Graham, Mark Doty, Lucille Clifton, Ko Un, Linda Hogan, Toi Derricotte, Tony Hoagland and Taha Muhammad Ali – can now be seen on YouTube.

Dodge Foundation Poetry Festivals, some of which have been featured on PBS. Over the years a remarkable group of poets from around the world has read to enthusiastic audiences and discussed a broad range of topics related to poetry.

Beginning in 1986 multi-day Dodge Poetry Festivals have been held every other year, usually in the highlands of New Jersey, and they have always attracted a diverse audience of poetry lovers. Recent Festivals have drawn audiences numbering between fifteen and twenty thousand people.





Here's Mark Doty reading "House of Beauty" which is set at a fire in Jersey City, New Jersey - but, of course, being a poem by Mark Doty, it's about so much more.