We hope you will join us at the 15th biennial Dodge Poetry Festival, our third held in Newark’s Downtown Arts District. Kicking off Thursday with a poetry sampler featuring 15 poets, the four days of the Festival will include 120 events and over 70 award-winning poets from all across the country and some from overseas.
The Poetry Festival features Main Stage Readings by: Richard Blanco, Billy Collins, Natalie Diaz, Mark Doty, Rita Dove, Marie Howe, Yusef Komunyakaa, Sharon Olds, Robert Pinsky, Tracy K. Smith, Gary Snyder, Brian Turner, Kevin Young and many more!
The Poetry Festival Bookstore will be in the Chase Room at NJPAC, and Festival merchandise will be for sale in NJPAC’s lobby. Look for poet book signings throughout the festival there, as well.
Be sure to look for the Dodge Poetry Festival Green Team, who will be helping attendees recycle and compost all waste. Learn more about the zero-waste effort underway here.
Special events include:
- Thursday’s POETRY SAMPLERS: Get a wide sampling of the Festival Poets who’ll be participating in the Festival. Fifteen Festival Poets will read in the morning Poetry Sampler, and Twenty–four will read in the evening. The Poetry Samplers are always one of the highlights of the program, and one of the most popular events. Each poet will read for five to six minutes.
- Friday’s POETRY AND SONG: In these sessions, poets, songwriters and musicians collaborate in performance and explore such questions as: What might we discover if we explore poetry and song as points on a spectrum as opposed to distinct art forms? How do they influence and inform each other? What possibilities arise if we question the boundaries between them?
- Saturday night’s ANOTHER KIND OF COURAGE: Classic war stories often evolve around finding the courage to enter battle, but there is another kind of courage required of veterans and their families as they face the impact and aftermath of war. For this special performance, Yusef Komunyakaa, Marilyn Nelson and Brian Turner are joined by veterans who’ve participated in the Warrior Writers and Combat Paper workshops, and by poets Jehanne Dubrow, Elyse Fenton, Charles H. Johnson, Gardner McFall and musicians and singers from the Tomás Doncker and Parkington Sisters bands.
- Sunday’s POETRY AND THE PRACTICE OF THE WILD: Poet and environmental activist Gary Snyder has written that poets, by the nature of their art, are closer to the fundamental elements of being alive—birth, love, death, —and that this could (and should) lead to a greater attentiveness to the natural world. In this reading and informal conversation with Dodge’s Environmental Director Margaret Waldock, Snyder will share a lifetime’s worth of experience exploring the relationship between poetry and our connection to the world, and how this informs our sense of our place in the animal kingdom, nature, the wild, and geological history.
- Sunday’s A TRIBUTE TO AMIRI BARAKA featuring Billy Collins, Natalie Diaz, Rita Dove, Juba Dowdell, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Yusef Komunyakaa, Marilyn Nelson, Mia X and other poets and guests celebrate the work of Amiri Baraka.
For more information and live coverage of the 2014 Dodge Poetry Festival, visit DodgePoetry.org, and follow them on Facebook, Twitter #DPF14 and Instagram.