Dodge poetry: a dream that was too good to be true?

When I found out that the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation withdrew funding for the next Dodge Poetry Festival, it felt like the wind was knocked out of me. To cope, I headed for my laptop.

In an effort to show people what the festival offered I started a series of columns that featured interviews with poets showcased in past festivals.

Even though the bi-annual poetry bash that was organized by Jim Haba went off without a hitch for more than 20 years, in the off-years I waited with bated breath for the next one. The Dodge Poetry Festival always seemed too good to be true.

Thousands and thousands of poetry lovers convened in one place--a place that wasn't too far from my home. Top poets from around the world gathered to read their poems to fans, and to each other.

I was in heaven every time. To paraphrase Robert Frost, why is it that nothing gold can stay? I'm not the only one who was left gasping for air after hearing that the next festival was cancelled.

Poet Jane Hirshfield was featured at the Dodge Poetry Festival three times over the years and was scheduled to appear in 2010.

"I was devastated when I heard it had been canceled," she wrote in a recent e-mail to me. "It just seemed terrible that the body of knowledge and excitement that go into this festival could be lost--for American poetry, a huge blow. I myself attribute what I think has been a large resurgence in interest in poetry in more recent years to the Bill Moyers public television specials about the Dodge [Festival]."

Hirshfield was born in New York City in 1953. She was in the first graduating class at Princeton University to include women. She went on to study at the San Francisco Zen Center. Her many books include "After," "Given Sugar, Given Salt" and "The Lives of the Heart."

The following is from an interview that I conducted with her in 2006. The first topic we discussed was the three-year period Hirshfield spent in a Zen monastery where she was instructed to do nothing but practice Zen. This meant poetry would have to leave her life for a while. But the hiatus only created a deeper connection to poetry within her.

Gene: How did that [break from writing poems] affect you?

Jane: My feeling at the time was that I would never be much of a poet if I didn't learn a great deal more about how to be a human being... It's very difficult to say how anything affects you... But I think that it affected everything because so much of Zen practice is about learning to pay attention to not only the inner world, but also the outer world... Learning to give your full attention is at the very heart of Zen practice and also, it is at the very heart of poetry.

Gene: In your book of essays, "Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry," you wrote that "any good artist's work is to find the right balance between independence born of willing solitude and the ability to speak for others." Who is it that you mean to speak for?

Jane: I don't make any presumptions about that. Basically, whenever I am writing, I am always working out something, which I need to understand more fully or experience in a more multidimensional way... You don't write poems because you have an answer. You write poems because life has presented you with a question and the poem is the only way to address that question. So I suppose the others that I speak for are anybody who is made the same way that I am.

Gene: In your poem "Mathematics" you ask, "Does the poem enlarge the world, or only your idea of the world?" Would you expand on that?

Jane: That was an actual question, which was asked of me in a question and answer session... It struck me as one of the most interesting things that anybody has ever said to me. So it became the seed of this poem in which I answer how can you tell them apart... Is there a knowable world besides the world we know? How could you separate that within our consciousness? I could say yes or no to either. I could say yes of course a poem enlarges the world. But then somebody could say which world? It's truly metaphysical.

Gene: Where does your desire to write come from?

Jane: I was born as one of those people always hungering to live more deeply. This is also why I read other people's poems. This is not just about my own writing. It's about what poetry can do for any of us.

Gene: Which is?

Jane: Magnify and clarify our existence and allow us to travel through an expanded world.

For those of us who hungered to "live more deeply," who searched for clarity, it does seem like the Dodge Poetry Festival was too good to be true. We may have to wait with bated breath for much longer for the poetry to return this time.

Contact Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation:
163 Madison Avenue
Post Office Box 1239
Morristown, NJ 07962-1239
Phone (973) 540-8442
Fax (973) 540-1211

info@grdodge.org

One of the greatest joys of my life is in jeopardy

The bi-annual Dodge Poetry Festival started in 1986 thanks to funding from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.

The first festival drew less than 5,000 people. As word spread that number grew to about 20,000.

In January, the Dodge Foundation announced that it would not provide funding for the next festival, which would have taken place in 2010.

Poet and Dodge Foundation director Jim Haba was at the helm every time. He crafted each festival to be both “a work of art” and “a good party.”

The biggest names in poetry took part: Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Robert Bly, Lucille Clifton, Jorie Graham, Coleman Barks and Gwendolyn Brooks, just to name a few.

Just like any good party, there was food, music and great conversation. Poetry fans got the inside scoop on what it’s like to create poems, how to read poetry and the lives of poets from the poets themselves.

There were numerous venues where poetry lovers could share their own poems, take workshops or listen to music throughout the day.

But the highlight of each day happened in the main tent—a tent that could accommodate 2,000 people. Under its big top, the most amazing, logic-defying feats were pulled off with ease.

Only in this tent would it make sense for the penultimate hip hop group The Roots to be the warm-up act for a 96-year-old man who had no props, but the podium and his cane.

That man was poet Stanley Kunitz and he brought the house down that night with a poem about Halley’s Comet.

Not only did the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation cut funding for the next festival, it was also reported that Haba resigned.

Many fear this could be the end of America’s largest poetry festival.

In an effort to show people what they might be missing, (I say might because the township of Montclair has approached the Dodge Foundation with an offer to host the event) I am writing a series of columns that will feature interviews with some of the poets who came to Haba’s parties.

Coleman Barks is a poet and translator. His translations of Jalal al-Din Rumi—a 13th century Sufi poet–are the best selling poetry books in America.

Thanks to the Dodge Poetry Festival, I had a chance to speak with Barks about how poetry can make life more spiritual.

Gene: Your translations [of Rumi] remind me of Buddhist writings.

Coleman: There was a strong Buddhist influence in Afghanistan in the 13th century. Rumi’s father’s school has lotus motifs on the columns, which means that they were big into meditation. Coming down the Silk Road, Buddhism, Sufism, Hinduism, Judaism and Christianity met and produced this very beautiful, flexible form that Rumi worships within. He did not divide people up into religious groups. He sees everyone as being part of a single family.

Gene: Have you been to Afghanistan?

Coleman: I have. In March of 2005 the State Department sent me over there.

Gene: What was that like?

Coleman: It was exciting! I didn’t know where I was—meaning that I just didn’t acknowledge that there was danger. But there was. Everywhere that I went there was an SUV with automatic weapons in front and an SUV with automatic weapons behind and I was in the middle. It was amazing. I found myself in the Afghan Ministry of Culture reading a poem of Rumi’s and everybody in the room – all of the cabinet ministers – were saying the poem in Farsi as I said it in English. They knew that poem so well. It was a magnificent cultural experience. I’ve never been in a culture that honors poetry like the Persian-speaking world does. It feels like home to me, or it feels like the Dodge Poetry Festival!

Gene: Why is it that Americans don’t have this appreciation for poetry?

Coleman: We haven’t found the use for it that they have. It comes up in conversation. They have chunks of it memorized. That’s an unusual thing for the United States… For grown men to recite poetry to each other.

Gene: In a culture where poetry is pervasive, how does that change the culture?

Coleman: It gives them a soul place that they can meet…That is a meeting place that we don’t have.

Gene: What do you think Americans are looking for when they pick up a book of Rumi?

Coleman: I don’t know why Rumi has been so popular over the last 10 years. My translations alone have sold over 500,000 copies, which is amazing in the poetry world. As for why that has been happening, there is some kind of place where we have been lonesome for a certain kind of human being. He’s an aesthetic and he is wise and he has a kind of gentleness… those qualities come through and I think that that nourishes the psyche.

Gene: What do you think people look for when they pick up your poetry?

Coleman: Gee, I don’t know. I had a humbling realization once, numerically. Rumi sells 100 copies a day. My poems sell 12 copies a month, worldwide.

Gene: It seems like, in a lot of your poems, people are not alone. There is always more than one person in the poems. Does that go back to waking up on the cot by yourself in school? [Referring to a poem in which a young Barks wakes up alone having slept longer than his classmates]

Coleman: That kind of emptiness that I felt in kindergarten was profound. I think that friendship is a beautiful thing, but the deepest truth is that we are alone. And that aloneness is absolute.

Gene: That reminds me of a Rumi poem that you translated.[You thought union was a way / you could decide to go. / But the world of the soul follows / things rejected and almost forgotten.]

Coleman: The mystics say that love has to fail… [Rumi’s friend] has to leave Rumi alone so that he knows that the friendship is not the deepest knowing. It’s one of the great human enigmas that somehow on the other side of our love there is something that is even deeper than that.

Gene: How important is spirituality in your everyday life?

Coleman: It’s the whole thing. I love that old story about a theologically inclined bunch of fish who schooled together and discussed the possibility of the existence of the ocean as they swam in it. They divided up into study groups as they tried to figure it out… I’ve felt that mystery my whole life.

Gene: What draws you to a poem?

Coleman: I guess it’s an image that comes to me first. The first poem that I was drawn to write was about an image of laying back in a river, so that your ears are under water and your eyes are out of water. You have an underwater world that you can listen to and an out of the water world that you can see. The underwater world seems to be further away. You can hear around the bend. You can hear a motorboat coming. That way of being in two places at once is an image of how it feels to be me. I feel like my ears are underwater most of the time!