Poetry world

Our December prompt on pilgrims and pilgrimages talked about my own short journey to the garden of Stanley Kunitz and I want to his final poem from his Collected Poems.

I was at the reading captured here on video at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival held at Waterloo Village in New Jersey. There was an electricity that ran through the audience as he read, and a standing ovation when he finished.

�Touch Me� is a love poem that takes place in that garden. In his old age, as a storm approaches and he stakes his plants for protection, he ponders the seasons in a life. To his question�What makes the engine go?� he answers  �Desire, desire, desire.�

It is the last poem he published.

...The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
                        and it's done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.

The Warren County Community College in New Jersey presents "A Celebration of the 30th Anniversary of the Dodge Poetry Festival."

This free event will be on Saturday, October 21, 2017 at Warren County Community College (475 Route 57 West, Washington, NJ 07882)

Poets and panelists include Martin Farawell (Director of the Dodge Poetry Program), Laura Boss, Kenneth Hart, Susan Jackson, Charles H. Johnson, Tina Kelley, Diane Lockward, John McDermott, Peter E. Murphy, Khalil Murrell, Priscilla Orr, Joe Weil, Gretna Wilkinson and Sander Zulauf.

The program will run from 12 noon through 4:30 pm.

12 to 12:45     Panel Discussions
1:00 to 2:15    Poetry Sampler: The Dodge Festival Poets
2:30 to 3:00    Poems by Martin Farawell
3:00 to 3:45    Favorite Poems by Others, as read by Dodge Poets
4:00 to 4:30    Favorite Poems from the First 30 Years of the Dodge Main Stage, as read by Martin Farawell

For directions to the college: warren.edu
For information, please contact BJ Ward

The Dodge Poetry program has offered since 1992 a "Spring and Fountain" series for teachers in New Jersey that meet for several weeks in locations around the state. This year, they added a one-week online version (registration closes 4/21/17) that is open nationwide to teachers, administrators, counselors, librarians and staff at accredited institutions.

Although this was a part of the National Poetry Month celebration, the end of April does not mean the end of poetry.

The Dodge folks sent out a packet of poems for online participants without attribution. You don't know who wrote the poems until they send a list of attributions at the end of the program. (Sure, some people probably couldn't wait and did some online searching.) Why the anonymity? So that you read "as free of judgment and preconceived notions as possible."

Below are a dozen poems that you can try out online that were in the packets used. These are not anonymous.

Dodge suggested that you take some time to slow down and read each poem silently to yourself, then out loud once or a few times. Then, "write a note to the poet who wrote the poem or to the speaker of the poem. It could be a quick thank you note, a series of questions you would like to ask the poet, or a response to questions raised by the poem. This note is not meant to be analysis of the poem, but rather a reflection of your personal response to what you�ve read, the feelings or questions that have bubbled up from a deeper place inside you."

Maybe the exercise will prompt a poem of your own.

1. What Kind of Times Are These
2. The New Religion
3. sorrow song
4. Psalm for Kingston
5. A Partial History of My Stupidity
6. Attitude
7. Zen of Tipping
8. The New Religion
9. The Blue Dress in Mother's Closet
10. Part of Eve's Discussion
11. The Universe as Primal Scream  
12. After Making Love We Hear Footsteps

The largest poetry event in North America comes to New Jersey�s largest city when the 30th Anniversary Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival returns to Newark from Thursday October 20th through Sunday October 23rd, 2016. For four days Newark�s vibrant downtown Arts District will be transformed into a poetry village featuring some of our most celebrated, diverse and vibrant poets and spoken word artists.

Check out the program for the list of poets appearing this year. http://www.dodgepoetry.org/at-the-festival/program/

Burt Kimmelman

Catherine "Cat" Doty

I attended some Lunchtime Poems in Military Park (Newark, NJ) last week sponsored by the Dodge Poetry Festival. The weekly events are a preview for some of the 70 poets who will read at the Dodge Poetry Festival in October. Last week two friends were reading, Catherine "Cat" Doty and Burt Kimmelman.

People in the park on a beautiful summer day brought their lunch or drinks and took in some poems. I saw listeners making notes. People passing would slow down, stop for a few minutes and take in a few lines or a poem or two.

For those of you not near northern New Jersey, check out what is coming October 23-26 at the Festival.

But, if a trip to NJ is just not possible, you might consider Frank O�Hara�s Lunch Poems, a collection that is now 50 years old. They were first published in 1964 as number 19 in City Lights� Pocket Poets Series.

In an essay by Callie Siskel, "It's Cooking,"she says:

O�Hara�s poems are often compared to Abstract Expressionist paintings, but their composition is also akin to jazz. He grew up playing music. In �On Rachmaninoff�s Birthday,� the speaker says he was �miserable, a grope pizzicato,� but O�Hara himself was a classically trained pianist. He studied at the New England Conservatory and entered Harvard as a music major before switching to English. He called writing �playing the typewriter,� but such a phrase downplays the extent to which his poems feel as measured as music. The syncopation that permeates Lunch Poems occurs when the time he marks at a regular rate is juxtaposed with the erratic cadences of his voice.

The collection's title refers to O�Hara�s habit of writing in Times Square during his lunch hour, and probably suggests that a reader could take the pocket-sized volume along and read it during his own lunch hour. They are often about museums, movies, and people and places of 1960s New York.

Lunch Poems includes some of the verses that made him cultishly popular - "The Day Lady Died,"  "Poem [Lana Turner has collapsed!]�(which we used for our gossip writing prompt) and "Ave Maria,"which begins this way:

get them out of the house so they won�t know what you�re up to
it�s true that fresh air is good for the body
                                                              but what about the soul
that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images 
and when you grow old as grow old you must
                                                                  they won�t hate you
they won�t criticize you they won�t know
                                                           they�ll be in some glamorous country
they first saw on a Saturday afternoon or playing hookey

they may even be grateful to you
                                                  for their first sexual experience
which only cost you a quarter
                                            and didn�t upset the peaceful home