By RJ Clarken Held every two years in the even years, the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival is the largest poetry festival in the United States. This year, the Poetry Festival moved to its new and permanent home in Hillsborough, New Jersey. Situated on the grounds of the beautiful and enormously expansive estate of the late Doris Duke, this locale provides the perfect romantic backdrop for poets from all over the world to come and share, to give readings and to offer advice and inspiration to the thousands of people who attended the event and who share a love of poetry. Living approximately five minutes from Duke Farms, I was extraordinarily lucky to have an event such as this one practically in my own backyard. Although the Poetry Festival is a four-day event, I was only able to attend one day, so I went with a friend on Saturday, October 2nd. Unfortunately for the organizers, the poets, the volunteers and the attendees, Central NJ had some rains during a couple of the days preceding the Festival, due to the remnants of Hurricane Jeanne, but despite mud (a lot of mud, actually) and dampness, not to mention occasional drizzle, the event was a huge success. The Festival was held in a variety of tents with names denoting the various sections and lanes of the estate, clever names such as Ginkgo Lane, Mud Lake, Little Blue Stem, Smartweeds and so on. The event was organized by having a first tier of poets who were called the Featured Performers (internationally- and nationally-known poet laureates) and Poets Among Us (published, but lesser known poets). There were tents for attendee readings of works from six pre-selected poets, a tent for amateurs to give a reading or recitation of their own original works, and there was a roving storyteller. There also was a variety of musical guests who performed their pieces, to help set the tone of the fête. When my friend and I arrived, after consulting our programs, we decided to sit in on one of the "Conversations" which were panels of four poets discussing a broad topic, with questions from the audience welcome. We chose Going Public With Private Feelings, whose panel consisted of Edward Hirsch, Jane Hirshfield, Galway Kinnell and Stephen Dunn. Each poet read a selection from his or her poetry and then discussed how each created art, revealed inner self and related what served to motivate them in their writing. This session was really funny. Mr. Kinnell started the discussion off with his reading of The Last God, and commented about the transparency of what he believed poetry to be. Mr. Dunn who read his poem, A Secret Life, which was about both concealment and revelation, followed him. He also added that one should be very bored with oneself when writing about oneself. Jane Hirshfield was more reticent, but very inspirational, reading Portrait of a State of Soul. She talked about fingerprints that we leave on all we touch and she referenced TS Eliot's The Wasteland in emphasizing the strength of overwhelming emotion. She also quoted Marianne Moore in saying that she was, "As clear as my natural reticence allows." Mr. Hirsch then went on (in his booming Eliot Gould sort-of voice) to read his poem I Need Help, which he used to point out the social act that makes poetry what it is. All the panel seemed to say in different ways that writing poetry was both a personal statement and a very public act. All of the poets in this 'Conversation' strongly believed that for most poets, their words were meant to be read by someone - an anonymous someone - for whom the distillation of thought would have some meaning. Mr. Dunn closed with Manifesto of the Selfish, Ms. Hirshfield with The Silence, Mr. Hirsch with My Grandmother's Bed and Mr. Kinnell with The Room. The next tent that we visited was for a trio of poets in the Poets Among Us group. David Black did a reading of his poetry, which was engaging for his use of the everyday and the familiar. His way of writing was quite lovely, but I couldn't help feeling that his written words were far more expressive than his ability to read aloud his own work. However, I especially liked his poem Blue Heron, about his fake koi tank and his young daughters and a bird that frequented his home. Following Mr. Black was Suji Kwock Kim, who claimed her poems were largely all about love and war. She was a strong performer and the power of her words when describing the melting pot of New York City or the horrors or a country torn apart by war were astonishing. Hearing her, one could almost feel like being there. It was frightening. I am still not quite sure how she managed it, but during her reading of Borderlands, which is about the violent occupation of Korea in the 1950's, the sun suddenly retreated behind clouds and the wind blew much colder. It was eerie but incredibly affecting. The last of the trio was Donna Masini. She did a number of readings from her newest book of poetry, which is due to be released shortly. While a lot of her work seemed to practically scream that she still had serious issues left over from an unhappy childhood, one poem, The Chair, was ingenious both for its metaphor and its reality. This poem was about how Ms. Masini and her sister used to play 'confessional' with a chair serving the purpose. She related how her sister usually played the priest and she, Ms. Masini, was the sinner. Ms. Masini said that it was always such fun to make up horrible sins and the resulting poem about this episode of childhood - and in dealing with issues of her religious upbringing - were poignant and very humorous. After a brief lunch, my friend and I focused our attention on the Main Stage tent. The first poet that we had the pleasure of seeing was Paul Muldoon. Mr. Muldoon, a professor of Creative Writing at both Princeton and Oxford, is a wryly-funny poet with a wildly subtle but extremely |
crafty way of saying what he needs and wants to say. In fact - while sitting in that tent listening to him, all I could think was, "Bloody brilliant! Bravo!" With his lilting Irish brogue, Mr. Muldoon captured the imagination of the 3,000-some audience members in the tent with him. He read poems about the birth of his daughter, about Apple Orchards, about the haunts of his Irish youth and even about Soccer Moms. The half hour allotment for these Main Stage readings was simply much too short. The audience went wild. I believe that the crowd would have stayed there all day if Mr. Muldoon could have continued to speak to us. I stood in line in the drizzle afterwards, just so that I could thank Mr. Muldoon - and to have him autograph my copy of Moy Sand and Gravel. When we finished at the signing tent, my friend and I went back across the road to the Main Stage once again, to hear Jane Hirshfield in her concert. I have to say that I do not believe I can ever read poetry the same way again after hearing this lady perform some of her pieces. One of the poems that she read was called Manners and it was written about the atrocities in Rwanda, but could have been meant equally about the current events in the Sudan as well. She mentioned this, too. In her well-modulated but highly charged emotional reading of this horror, Jane Hirshfield literally brought me to tears. Ms. Hirshfield's command of every syllable of every word she writes is truly a master class in the art of writing poetry. She finished her recitation with a poem that was an elegy for the late Lithuanian poet - her mentor and friend - Czeslaw Milosz. Ms. Hirshfield admitted that she had never read this particular piece out loud before, and based upon remarks from her part in the panel from earlier in the day, I knew it was a rare and unusual occurrence for her to have written about someone she knew in such an intimate and personal way. It was unbelievably affecting. After this concert, when I was back in the signing tent to get Ms. Hirshfield's autograph on my copy of Nine Gates, I asked her if there were parts of her elegiac poem that were difficult for her to read to the audience. I wondered if certain passages of it, by the sheer volume of emotion, made it a struggle to share with 3,000 people in the tent. She admitted frankly to me that that was indeed the case. She said that there were parts of this poem that, when she came to them in her reading, she wasn't quite sure if she could continue with the reading. She seemed genuinely pleased that I was so caught up in that moment and that I thought to ask her about it, too. In a brief interlude before my friend and I were to head off to the next tent's event, we decided to wander the property just a bit, and walked up the hill to the terrace just above the Main Stage tent. This was the location of the original foundation for the main house that was never built, by Doris Duke's father, James (Buck) Duke, founder of the American Tobacco Company, Duke Power and Duke University. It was an odd thing seeing this place on such a misty and overcast day: an abandoned and enormous cement and stone construction, several stories deep, for what never came to be a grand and elegant mansion. With the Poetry Festival on its grounds now, it seemed almost to say, "At last. I have found my purpose." After strolling around the aging fountains by this huge excavation of a place, my friend and I went back down to the Gingko Lane tent for another panel 'Conversation.' This one was called, Poetry and Class, and the panel included Joyce Carol Oates, Franz Wright, Lucille Clifton and Philip Levine. For some reason, this session seemed awkward, and some of the panelists seemed uncomfortable with the topic. The panelists' remarks didn't seem to quite hit the mark with the points they were trying to make. With the exception of Lucille Clifton, who read her lyrically beautiful The River Between Us, the other panelists read and cited other poets' works rather than their own. I was a bit disappointed in this discussion, which surprised me, given the talent that was sitting in front of me, and my friend felt similarly. We ended up leaving this group and we went to another tent with another panel 'Conversation' was called, Finding Poetry's Inner Music, Saying the Unsayable, with a panel comprised of Coleman Barks, Marilyn Chin, Yusef Komunyakaa and C.K. Williams. While having unfortunately missed the beginning of this talk, even coming in late was a treat. This particular tent was situated to the side of the old foundation and right on the edge of a lake. It was just lovely. The discussion, which included lively audience participation, was funny, interesting and thought provoking. Ethics and secrets were of strong importance in this discussion, and I liked C.K. Williams and Coleman Barks emphasis on the point that poetry was in essence, "the language of abstraction for some things that cannot be said." They both stressed that there was a quality of mystery and danger in poetry, while being largely about the mundane. As it was starting to get late and my friend and I were tired and weary, but filled fulfilled with literary overload, we started heading over to the exit of the park to get our respective cars and drive home to our families. However, as my friend and I were about to say good evening to the events of the day after this last 'Conversation' concluded, we casually dropped into the tent where some High School and Junior High School kids - young budding poets - were doing their open mike, amateur readings. While several readings sounded like a good sampling that was largely representative of teenaged angst, there were a few who had incredible power in their words and tremendous grasp of language. These poets included a boy who rapped about global concerns, a girl who spoke of revenge exacted on those who bullied her and a young fellow mourning the loss of a beloved uncle. A couple times, I just felt like walking away from it, but was compelled to listen to them anyway. Hearing these future poet laureates was strong encouragement for the future of poetry. |