Leading up to the 2016 Dodge Poetry Festival in October, we will be posting the tools and information you’ll need to have the best experience possible. Here are some new details we have about Festival programming, which will be fully announced later this summer.
Martín Espada and Claudia Rankine at the 2010 Dodge Poetry Festival.
Among the many of the highlights of the Festival will be:
THE WORK TO BE DONE: POETRY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE
Taking its title from the closing words of Gwendolyn Brooks’ “to the Diaspora,” with its reminder of the work that remains “to be done to be done to be done,” this special event includes a discussion with Martín Espada, U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, Katha Pollitt, Claudia Rankine and a guest moderator, followed by a powerful performance including poetry, music and hip hop.
SILENCE IS BECOME SPEECH: THE EMERGENCE OF WOMEN’S VOICES
“Silence is become speech,” Muriel Rukeyser wrote in “The Speed of Darkness,” one of her groundbreaking poems. Compare the number of women poets in any turn-of-the-19th-century anthology with that of a collection published today and the emergence of women’s voices in the century is dramatic. What has this shift meant to poetry in general? How has it affected what we, as readers, expect or accept from poetry? How has it changed the poems that men write? That women write? What does it mean for women to have a sense of community within the poetry community?
MASKS AND MASCULINITY: POETRY AND THE RITUALS OF MEN
Our cliché notions about the “poetic” personality and the “masculine” one may seem completely at odds, yet many poems have been written that celebrate the rituals of men, their rites of passage, the behaviors that society overtly or tacitly accepts as validating masculinity. Some of these poems, although once part of the “official” canon, are now viewed as misogynistic or celebrating self-defeating, even self-destructive behaviors. How does poetry help men navigate societal demands regarding masculinity? What masks does it offer to hide behind? What opportunities to question them?
WHO IS IT CAN TELL ME WHO I AM: POETRY AND IDENTITY
Having lost all the trappings that secured his identity, King Lear asks, half mad with desperation, “Who is it can tell me who I am?” Poetry, like all the arts, invites us to ask who we are. How we explore, discover, express, define and challenge who we are through poetry will be the focus of this conversation.
TRIBUTE TO GALWAY KINNELL
An event celebrating the life and work of poet Galway Kinnell, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner and long-time Festival favorite, who passed away shortly after the 2014 Festival.
CELEBRATION OF AMIRI BARAKA
A celebration of Amiri Baraka (1934-2014), the Newark-based poet and founding father of the Black Arts movement, and a participant in numerous Dodge Poetry Festivals, including the first two in Newark, will take place the first weekend of October 2016 at Newark Symphony Hall to mark the start of Newark’s October Poetry Month.
Get your tickets, here!
Four-Day and Weekend Festival passes are on sale now!
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Stay updated on the 2016 Dodge Poetry Festival as information becomes available!
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