Serendipity35

The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival starts today. It is held at Waterloo Village in Stanhope, New Jersey and runs through Sunday, September 28. This is the 12th biennial festival. I have attended ten festivals (missed that first one!) and it has always been the poetry highlight of that year.

I'll be there today through Saturday this time, so there will be no Internet and no live blogging for me.

Billy Collins wrote about the festival:

"To understand the nature of this cultural beast, this mother of all poetry gatherings (Wordstock€€ is another name for it) you need to set aside any inherited notions of what poetry readings are all about. Forget the image of a few devotees huddled in a library meeting room or a church basement, and tear up the picture of a coffeehouse where one of the undernourished is inflicting his verse on a few unsmiling listeners. Instead, you need to visualize a kind of Bedouin camp of tents where, for four days, thousands of people navigate their way through a mad-dash schedule of events. The Dodge Poetry Festival is the largest poetry event in North America and it is the most energetic, festive, and high-spirited celebration of poetry I have ever seen."

Check out the list of poets, storytellers & musicians who will there this year. Lots of the big names in poetry - Coleman Barks, Coral Bracho, Billy Collins, Lucille Clifton, Mark Doty, Martin­n Espada, Joy Harjo, Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Edward Hirsch, Jane Hirshfield, Ted Kooser, Maxine Kumin, Naomi Shihab Nye, Sharon Olds, Linda Pastan, Charles Simic, C.D. Wright, and Franz Wright.

The setting is great, though the festival is getting so big that it's hard for the historic Waterloo Village to handle the crowds. (The village was actually taken over by the State of NJ for improvements and they are reopening it just for this festival.) They expect audiences of up to 20,000 for the four days of poetry. It's an old canal stop along the Musconetcong River with historic buildings that are used for readings along with tents among the trees and a huge main stage tent for larger readings and music events.

What originally got me into the festival was participating in some of the the great other programs that the Dodge Foundation does in supporting teachers and students to use poetry.

Today is student day with buses of high school students coming. There's a kind of 1960's feel to seeing them wander from reading to reading, hanging out and trying to look literary cool or totally bored with poetry. There's a place for their open readings and you'll see little groups of them on the grass reading, writing and talking.

Teachers who pre-registered are admitted at no charge on Thursday and Teacher Day on Friday. They expect about be about 2000 teachers this year. (There were 1500 teachers from 30 states and all grade levels on hand at the 2006 Teacher Day.)

It's not just readings. There are Poets on Poetry sessions with discussions about their own sense of poetry, partly through reading and discussing poems by others that have been important to them, and partly through reading and discussing their own poems. Poetry Conversations bring together two to four poets to discuss topics like €On the Life of the Poets Going Public with Private Feelings,€ €Poetry and Jazz,€ and AA€The Mysterious Life within Translation. Poets for Teachers sessions, reserved for teachers, provide opportunities to discuss with a Festival Poet ways to bring poetry to life inside and outside the classroom.

In the big tent, about 20 Festival Poets will each read two or three poems in the very popular Poetry Samplers. There are also evening programs on the main stage that generally include music and poetry.