Dodge Poetry Festival this September

The poets lineup for the 2008 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival is a full and varied sampling of poetic voices. CD Wright, Brenda Hillman, Coral Bracho, Robert Hass, Martín Espada,Franz Wright, Linda Pastan, Maxine Kumin, Naomi Shihab Nye, Jane Hirshfield, Taha Muhammad Ali, Ted Kooser, Mark Doty, Edward Hirsch, Chris Abani, Charles Simic, Joy Harjo, Lucille Clifton, Sharon Olds, and last but not least Billy Collins.

As many as 20,000 are expected in the historic Waterloo Village in Stanhope, New Jersey for the 12th biennial event which will run from Thursday, September 25 through Sunday, September 28, 2008.

Event tickets and other items are available at the online Festival Shop

Journal bits this past week

Poet at table

• A swatch of scalp lay silent/a plug of zoysiagrass/encroaching upon our sensibilities




• It was the summer of gas lines/so hot the legs of ants curled under




• ...How we stood/on the hill and cradled/our paranoia, keeping/to ourselves...

The Merit of following our own compulsions

The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions. - John Updike

Your Privacy For Sale

Small wonder the Bush administration has insisted on immunity from prosecution for AT&T and other telecommunications that granted government access to private phone conversations and e-mails without due process or order from any court. The political action committee at AT&T contributed the maximum amount allowable by law to the Bush/Cheney campaign — twice.

CIA in the news....

• CIA rejects secret jails report
• CIA jails in Europe 'confirmed'
• UK apology over rendition flights
• US judge blocks CIA flight case - "The very subject matter of this case is a state secret," Judge James Ware wrote in a ruling.
• Inquiry into destroyed CIA tapes
• US 'may' use waterboarding again
• Doctors' Group Says It Has Evidence US Military Tortured Detainees

Sad but largely true...

What most persons consider as virtue,

after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy. ~Voltaire

Thoughts on the Making of a Poem

Nick Laird is a young novelist and poet born in Northern Ireland who this past weekend had a piece in the Guardian about the physicality of language. He starts out:

"You should put that in a poem. A thing to say to the people who write
poems; the offering of some strange coincidence or anecdote. Poets if they are
like me, sip their drink and agree, privately certain it won't give rise to
anything at all."

Laird goes on... "You can make fiction and drama from reported stories, from hearsay and incident, but not poetry."

It is my own experience that words rather than a particular story do indeed tend to go much further towards the success of a poem. It's not that I have not tried the other approach, and likely will again (I tend to be stubborn like that), but it is the cohesive junction of a word and an image, or a word and a smell or some other word and sense linkage that is more likely to drive a poem forward than anything else I've found.

Lair also quotes Edward Thomas , the early 20th century English poet on the subject of what poetry is made of, "Anything, however small, may make a poem; nothing however great is certain to." The times I have sit down with pen and paper to specifically forge a poem on some grand storyline have almost always met with failure or disappointment on my own part.

Sometimes, I have found it helpful to lift a very short line from another poem or sentence of some other type of work and use it to start a new poem. I try to let those few words allow some image to direct me forward with what I am putting on the page. Later, the opening line can be dropped, just as any of the the rest of the work can be modified and rewritten any number of times. I find it's just a really good way to jump start a poem into being.

So I tell myself here that I need to resolve that I am going to stop trying to force something into being. I must periodically remind myself of this. I do it here, once again. Sigh.