Postcard: Poetry Central -- Thoughts that breathe and words that burn
From The Baltimore Sun, Arts & Society, October, 2002
After four hours of driving, I turn off the highway into the Skylands (cq) region of northern New Jersey. The two-lane road is wooded. Breaks in the trees offer glimpses of unfarmed fields and quiet ponds. At 6 PM, the parking lot of Historic Waterloo Village is still crowded.
The last school groups are loading teenagers onto buses. Though they’ve been here since early this morning, students from the Milwaukee High School of the Arts in Wisconsin are debating about who gets to stay for the evening concert. The kids are exhausted, but want to see and hear more. Their enthusiasm is not for pop artists or even classical musicians. At this event, the main attraction is poetry; the stars are poets.
Stephanie Pfeifer (cq), a 16-year-old junior at the school, said “It was a bit overwhelming at first because there was so much to do and so many places to go.” Now she is pleading with teacher Glenscott (cq) Copper to let her stay.
This is Copper’s 2nd field trip to the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, a four-day, biennial event billed as the largest poetry festival in North America. Copper said, “It gives them a different experience [of poetry] that I can’t give them at home.”
Students, teachers, and the general public come here every other year not only to enjoy the spoken word, but also to meet and chat with poets famous and unknown. It’s not unusual to bump into old friends. Copper unexpectedly met a former student. Such reunions give the event a homey atmosphere, despite the fact that 15,000 people attend.
The first two days, while open to the general public, are designated for students and teachers. Over 6,500 of them are attending free of charge. The tab is picked up by the Geraldine R. (as in Rockefeller) Dodge Foundation. The foundation is known for its generosity to the arts, particularly in New Jersey, where festival director Jim Haba (cq) also spearheads an ongoing poetry outreach program in the schools.
It is a short walk from the parking lot to the Village entrance, but passing through a tunnel of trees and out of sight of the cars is like entering a world apart. Waterloo’s restored historic buildings and centuries-old canal intermingle with tents, large and small, where the poets read.
The enormous concert tent hosts the evening events. Poets Marie Howe, Marilyn Nelson, Gerald Stern, and Lucille Clifton each read for half an hour. “Sets” are punctuated by live music.
Clifton, a Maryland resident and one-time state poet laureate says the festival draws so many people, “because poetry speaks to something in us that so wants to be filled. It speaks to the great hunger of the soul . . .. I think that this [event] feeds that.” She has been a “Featured Poet” at every festival but the first, in 1986.
Over 65 poets participate. Top billing goes to the five U.S. Poets Laureate from 1993 to present: Rita Dove, Robert Hass, Robert Pinsky (cq), Stanley Kunitz (cq) and Billy Collins, whose term ends next year. It’s also a festival tradition to include international poets. Palestinian Taha (cq) Muhammad (cq) Ali and Adam Zagajewski (cq) of Poland are among this year’s featured poets.
Despite the all-star line-up, Haba says that this is not a gathering of the poetry in-crowd. J. C. Todd, a poet and translator, said, “When you come to the Dodge, you see those barriers are completely permeable.” The poets become real people. Poetry becomes something that everyone can participate in – a community event.
I opt to see Ali for the first morning session. He’s reading with his translator in a small tent near a willow-lined stream. Ali is charming and grandfatherly, with a deep, gravelly voice. It’s a wonder to hear him read his poems in Arabic and then watch him as translator Peter Cole reads in English. He plays the role of conductor – gesturing, smiling, and nodding the poem along.
Between sessions, attendees are serenaded by Yarina (cq), a group of musicians from Ecuador. A festival mainstay, these brothers play traditional Andean music on panpipe, guitar and drum, literally dancing around Waterloo Village.
The job of nurturing the event’s celebratory atmosphere – music, location, even the concessions are carefully chosen -- belongs to Haba. “This is really a whole person experience,” he said. “What the festival has the luxury of doing is imagining the whole person and trying to provide for it.” Attention is even paid to how often the bathrooms are cleaned. Haba wants people remember the poetry, not bland food or dirty toilets.
At lunch, my friends and I look over nearly a dozen food stands before deciding on freshly stir-fried chicken and vegetables. We find a picnic table near a waterfall and discuss the poetry we heard that morning. The combination of good conversation, beautiful setting, and delicious food gives a person space to relax and enjoy.
Michael Murphy, who teaches at an urban New Jersey middle school, said, “It’s very hard to find silence anywhere [in daily life] and the setting of course is perfect for augmenting that. There is space for quiet conversations. You lean on a tree, you listen to the wind and you go back and you listen to a poet.”
Veterans of the event often have a great festival story. Margaret Valentine, a New Jersey high school teacher, describes walking with W.S. Merwin at the 2000 festival. As the poet signed her book, “Behind us there was this hole in the ground where these baby turtles about walnut size started coming out of the ground.” The newly hatched turtles were rescued and brought to the pond.
Valentine points out that those who rush around trying to see everything miss the heart of the festival. It is better, she says, “letting the whole place happen to you. It’s kind of a gluttony of words. It’s just such a wonderful, freeing experience.” And moments shared between poets and poetry lovers are part of what makes the Dodge festival unique.
Erma (cq) Terrezza (cq), is serving lunch at Big Joe’s Deep Fried Turkeys. She has found herself caught up in the spirit of the event. “The atmosphere is beautiful,” she said. “I was just amazed that everyone comes from all over and they’re so excited.” Terrezza planned to take time off on Sunday to hear Billy Collins. She will return to the next festival, she says, whether or not Big Joe’s is back.
After lunch, it is standing room only at the concert tent for “A Poetry Sampler”. At this poetry mini-marathon, twenty poets read in just two hours.
A few dozen people sit on the grass outside the tent. People read or write. One man rocks his baby to sleep. Others play Frisbee and sun themselves. But everyone is silent. Todd said, “This festival just encourages that – that you become all ear. You can conduct your life amid the poems. . . . Yes, you didn’t hear three poems or a piece of music, but. . . there’s always more.”
So what is it like when 15,000 poetry enthusiasts gather for four days? Haba said, “It’s actually quite peaceful . . . it’s all types of people who care about a kind of interior life . . . that doesn’t [necessarily] have to do with poetry but with being alive with feelings.”