There are certain winter nights when the sky is so clear we can see that the Milky Way is not only spread across the sky, but has depth: layers of stars beyond the first stars we perceive. Such moments force us to stop and look. We are at once delighted by the brilliance of the stars, but also frightened that we are peering into an ever deepening dark.

Perhaps our fear is held in check by the knowledge it is a distant dark, light years away from us and our daytime lives. We know, because of the years it took the light of the visible stars to reach us, that the night sky we are looking at is already long past. This is, paradoxically, unsettling and comforting.

There is something of this feeling in reading Mark Strand’s best poems. We do have the foreboding sense that we are looking into darker places than we may typically allow ourselves to explore. (It is appropriate that one of his collections is simply titled Darker.) Yet, we are willing to look with Strand pointing the way.

We know, reading a Mark Strand poem, that it is the result of protracted and patient looking. There has been a long time invested in the making of these poems. Whatever he first saw, whether his gaze was turned inward or outward, has been examined, explored and changed. We understand his poem is not the actual darkness. It is not the winter sky. It is a made thing. But it is not assembled out of literary devices. It has emerged from the intensity and persistence of his looking. The poem is how Strand allows us to experience such looking.

A former United States Poet Laureate and MacArthur Fellow, Mark Strand’s most recent collection is New Selected Poems, which includes work from his eleven earlier collections. Visit the Poetry Foundation’s Mark Strand page for a sampling of poems and a detailed biography that reviews his entire career.

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Kay Ryan’s poetry has a quality of wit John Donne and other writers of the English Renaissance would have appreciated. Her poems are witty in our modern sense of showing a quick mind and pointed sense of humor, but they are far more than merely clever. Wit, in Donne’s time, was a prized gift for a poet to possess. It suggested the ability to both stretch logic and compress language to their limits. Big ideas were hidden inside tiny containers. In this sense of wit, part of the poet’s skill is like that of the master of the shell-game: we are always surprised by the outcome and delighted by the practitioner’s skill, even if we get stung by what’s uncovered.

We don’t have to go back four centuries to find this kind of wit. It is a thread that joins Ryan to Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and many other poets who, with the simple turn of a phrase, can twist an apparently innocuous observation into a startling, even discomfiting musing. What all these poets have in common is that, under the nimble surface of their poems is a barely contained surging pressure. Sometimes it’s emotion or the need to get something said that cannot be articulated or even approached without the help of the poem’s form to provide support and structure. Just as often that pressure is created by the force of conflict, by opposing ideas or observations that cannot be reconciled with mere reason, and the poem exists in that place of tension between them.

It is fitting that we must look to a tradition that stretches across centuries to discuss Kay Ryan’s poems, rather than rely on the vocabulary of the conventions of contemporary poetry. Ryan worked for 30 years teaching remedial English in a small community college in Marin County, California. Far removed from any literary center or the world of creative writing programs, she forged an individual style based on the poets from over the centuries who spoke to her temperament. The result is a unique voice that is at once unmistakable as distinctly hers and simultaneously immediately recognizable as coming from a long tradition.

A generous sampling of Kay Ryan’s poetry cane be found in her most recent collection, The Best of It: New and Selected Poems. Visit the Academy of American Poet’s Kay Ryan Page for a biography and audio recordings of her reading a selection of her poems.

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Claudia Rankine will use anything and everything to make her poems. She is not limited by notions of genre, and will blur the lines between poetry, prose and theater. Her style is not restricted by any particular “school” of poetry: she absorbs what she needs from every poetic tradition that has ever spoken to her, and her work bears the mark of lyrical, modernist and language poets. Notions regarding what is appropriately elevated “poetic diction” do not seem to interest her: she will employ the language of pop culture, science and advertising as readily as that of the academy. Nor is she confined by notions of self and other: She will use the autobiographical details of her own life as well as the stories she’s absorbed from friends, family, acquaintances, history and the mass media.

The results may appear experimental at times, but it would be a misnomer to call Rankine an experimental poet. Inquisitive or investigative would be more accurate. John Dewey once defined the difference between recognizing and seeing. When we recognize something or someone, we absorb just enough of the obvious details to allow us to name or catalogue them: sister, forest, accident, neighbor. But to really see, we must stop and look beyond the familiar markers.

Claudia Rankine’s poems are attempts at this kind of seeing. But such attempts require we look long enough to see beyond our own assumptions and prejudices. Because she is willing to take this time, her poems tend to spread out into extended explorations and meditations. In the case of her collection, The End of the Alphabet, each poem expands into several sections. In Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, although the individual sections can stand on their own, this book-length poem builds like an extended dramatic monologue. The thread of the speaker’s thought–intellectual, personal, philosophical and political–is as suspenseful to follow as the plot of a mystery novel. It is Rankine’s own curiosity, and the power of her need to understand, that compels the reader.

Claudia Rankine’s most recent collection is Plot, published in 2007. For a biograghy of Claudia Rankine and audio recordings of her reading, visit the Academy of American Poets Claudia Rankine page.

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In a publishing career that has spanned nearly six decades, Marie Ponsot has written poems ranging from some so short and compressed they make haikus seem verbose, to others of near Whitmanesque scope. She is equally adept in free verse and in the most challenging traditional forms, and the tone of her poems ranges from despondent, to deeply philosophical, to romantic, to whimsical.

What remains consistent in her body of work is the clarity of her vision and the quality of her ear. Her poems often build by moving from one exact, concise image to the next, and she is attentive to all the senses. But Ponsot also seems to possess the poet’s equivalent of what is called perfect pitch among singers and musicians.

Whether writing formal or free verse, each line, each word, each syllable is carefully weighed and measured for how it contributes to the shape of the whole. Ponsot has said “There’s a human desire to put the body’s pulse into the poem,” and she pays close attention to the rhythms of the body, of speech and of the natural world. The vital connection to poetry as something that moves, physically, through the body, the vocal chords and the air is present in all her poems.

She developed her craft over decades spent writing in relative obscurity. Between the publication of her first collection, True Minds, in 1957, and her second, Admit Impediment, in 1981, she raised seven children. She worked actively as a translator throughout those years, publishing now classic versions of many traditional fables and fairy tales. But her poetry was often written at night, when she could grab a few minutes for herself at the end of the day. In this way, she developed her own unique voice, which, since her re-emergence as a publishing poet, has garnered her critical praise and numerous awards.

Marie Ponsot’s most recent collection is Easy, published in 2009. Springing: New and Selected Poems offers a generous selection from her first four volumes. Visit the OnLine NewsHour for a reading and interview with Marie Ponsot.

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Get acquainted with the conveniently walkable Downtown Newark Arts District through our newly added Festival Village page. Here you can see the layout of the charming and historically rich area which will be transformed into a Poetry Village for the duration of the Festival.

The  Festival will be taking place within the boundaries of the original village of “New Ark,” founded by a group of Puritan settlers led by Robert Treat in 1666. Looking out from NJPAC, you can see the greenery of Military Park, where the town’s Revolutionary militia would assemble. Predating the Revolutionary War is Trinity & St. Philip’s Cathedral, which  sits in one corner of Military Park and served as a field hospital for both British and Colonial armies during wartime.

In addition to the rich history of the area, the Downtown Newark Arts District is home to a rich  cultural heritage that continues today.  Just across the street from Trinity and St. Philip’s, Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Arts, features the work of local artists with a broad range of voices and perspectives.  And just two blocks from Aljira, there’s the Newark Museum, housing exhibits of both new and ancient works , including the largest collection of Tibetan Buddhist art in the Western hemisphere.

For those  who’ve attended past Festivals, you’ll be glad to know  the 2010 Festival  footprint is actually smaller, from end to end, than Waterloo Village.  You can see the scope of the footprint on our map, here. All the venues are within easy walking distance of each other, and only a 10 minute walk from Newark’s two major train stations.  But you don’t even have to take the walk to the train station if you don’t want to: the Newark Light Rail has a stop directly in front of NJPAC.

So keep it green and hop on public transportation and explore the venues which make up the 2010 Dodge Poetry Festival situated in the Newark Downtown Arts District.

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The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark is October 7 – 10
For more information, visit the Poetry website

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Through nine collections of poems, Sharon Olds has turned an unflinching eye toward the ecstasies and sorrows of living in the human body. Every stage of life is meticulously observed and explored: childhood, adolescence and the awakening of sexuality, marriage, the birthing of children, divorce, the care-taking of aging parents, their deaths, and the confronting of ones own mortality.

Although a sharp observer, Olds has never allowed the fierceness of her looking to dull her compassion. Even describing acts of human cruelty, whether those of political leaders or of her own parents, it is her search for understanding that compels the reader to continue through revelations that, otherwise, might be unbearable.

In a Sharon Olds poem, attention to physical detail is the act of cherishing the world and the body in our brief moment of corporeality. Acknowledging the frailty of the body is part of this cherishing. In “Little Things,” an early poem, Olds writes, “I am/ paying attention to small beauties,/ whatever I have—as if it were our duty to/ find things to love, to bind ourselves to this world.”

While many of us might allow fear and shame to censor what we are willing to discover or reveal, Olds refuses to be so limited. It is as if for her fear and shame are absolutely reliable signals: Something is hidden behind them that we must explore if we are ever to understand our true selves. The deeper the fear or shame, the more tenaciously she will insist on exploring further.

So it is no surprise that Olds should be inspired by Neruda to write odes on such elemental subjects as “Poem for the Breasts” and “Ode to the Hymen.” Her odes, like all her poems, are unrelentingly inquisitive and tender. What may surprise some of her readers is her great sense of humor and obvious delight in sharing it.

Sharon Olds’ most recent collection is One Secret Thing. For a generous selection of poems from her first six books, see Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, 1980-2002.

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A graduate of Ohio State University’s MFA program for both poetry and creative non-fiction, Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of Miracle Fruit, At the Drive In Volcano, and a forthcoming collection from Tupelo Press.  A dynamic poet, Nezhukumatathil is active in both the worlds of teaching and touring—she has set out “to make sure that no student ever says ‘I never knew there were Asian-American poets’ again” (every other day).  Through poetry, she shares her life experiences in a way that is accessible to readers of all ages.  Nezhukumatathil feels that her teaching and writing influence each other: her best teaching days lead her to write, and her best writing days excite her to teach (How a Poem Happens).

Nature plays a huge role in Nezhukumatathil’s poetry.  Her poetry often examines life by linking “average” occurrences with scientific or biological information (see “Fugu Soup Blues” and “Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia”).  Much of Nezhukumatathil’s work is research-based, and every one of the many morsels about science or natural elements is true.  Nezhukumatathil feels she owes the reader accuracy within her poetry; although the poems are not truly autobiographical, the “trivia” bits are completely factual.  She often uses biology as a jumpstart when writing poems.  In an interview with Poetic Asides, she confides, “Mother Nature is the greatest poet of all. I just take my cues from her.”

Nezhukumatathil teaches creative writing and environmental literature at the State University of New York-Fredonia.  She encourages aspiring writers to “read often and a lot. Floss. Invest in a good pair of shoes and write letters more often. Listen to the paper take the ink when you sign your name” (Poetic Asides).  Read poems by Aimee Nezhukumatathil on 2^nd Avenue Poetry and Octopus Magazine.  Hear her poetry and Q&A’s on From the Fishhouse.

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By Leonardo Vazquez, AICP/PP, Arts Build Communities

If you’re struggling to get more support in your community for arts, take a walk in the woods or go to your local farmer’s market.

Cultural organizations and their supporters throughout New Jersey work hard to show that art is more than decoration or entertainment for elites – it makes important contributions to the health and wealth of all communities. Environmental advocates have also worked hard to make their pitch for a greener planet – and have had the kind of success most politicians could only dream about. Over the past 15 years, the vast majority of efforts to support open space got passed by voters¹. In at least 218 of New Jersey’s 566 municipalities, residents passed bond or spending measures to preserve open space and farmland.

There are three keys to the success of the open space/farmland preservation movement: The movement connects to what many voters value most; people see and feel real benefits to themselves (think farmer’s markets); and there are a number of advocacy groups that work from the national to the community level to promote environmental protection.

You can tell what people value most by what they are willing to give up or spend more to get. In most of New Jersey, residents are willing to give up what large cities offer – a wide array of public transit, the ability to walk to shopping or entertainment – for more space in their homes and green space outside. For some residents, protecting farms feels like protecting your heritage – or at least the myth that their community could be a Norman Rockwell-type town nestled in Americana. Another desire is preserving and “protecting” a place from outsiders². (Consider that in New Jersey, open space initiatives tend to be more successful in places that are fast growing and have a high percentage of homeowners.)

One of the biggest challenges to getting support from community members is answering the question: “What’s in it for me?” The open space movement excels at this. When people see the green “Preserved Farmland” sign that seems to stop a subdivision in its tracks, walk through the woods, or buy a plump Jersey tomato at a farmer’s market, they can see, feel, and touch the benefits.

What can artists and leaders learn from the environmental movement?

1. Connect the arts to what your audiences value most. Watch and listen before you advocate. What do they spend money on, even in a tough economy? What do they worry about? What do they hope for themselves and their families? Arts Build Communities interviewed dozens of cultural professionals who were successful in their communities and what we found could help you. Please see “Building communities that support and nurture the arts: What works best?”

2. Show influential people how arts and artists help make their communities better places to live. Encourage them to go to your opening or show. Promote public art. Connect to and support the groups that leaders belong to. Lend a hand. Tell the story (or draw the picture) of how the arts connects to more vibrant and prosperous communities. To get more tips, please visit Arts Build Communities blog NJ-ArtiFacts or its sister publication, PDI Advisor

3. Connect to the advocacy organizations working from the national to the local levels. Americans for the Arts is perhaps the biggest arts advocacy group in the nation. ArtPride New Jersey works to promote the arts around the state, and has a number of resources to help you make your pitch. (Full disclosure: ArtPride is a partner in Arts Build Communities.) If your community has an arts council, get to know the people there. If not, think about collaborating with your neighbors and fellow artists to create your own group.

Above all else, remember that it takes time to change beliefs and behaviors. Even though the environmental movement is quite successful today, it took decades for it to bloom.

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¹ In their article, “Selection and Design of Local Referenda for Land Conservation,” Spencer Banzhaf and his colleagues say that between 1998 and 2006, more than 75% of 1,550 ballot initiatives supporting open space passed. The article was published online in Journal of Policy Analysis and Management this month.

² This idea was explored by Stephan Schmidt and Kurt Paulsen in their study of open space voting patterns in New Jersey. To find out more, please see “Is Open Space Zoning a Form of Exclusionary Zoning?” Urban Affairs Review, September 2009.

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Leonardo Vazquez, AICP/PP, is the Director of the Professional Development Institute and The Leading Institute at Rutgers University’s Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy. He is an urban planner and leadership expert who specializes in cultural planning, community and local economic development, leadership and organizational development and strategic communications. He is a licensed planner in New Jersey and a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners. He is the author of Leading from the Middle: Strategic Thinking for Urban Planning and Community Development Professionals and edits two online publications, NJ-ArtiFacts and PDI Advisor. Recently, Arts Build Communities and the Bloustein Online Continuing Education Program launched a Professional Certificate Program in Cultural Planning and Development. Learn more about the certificate program and Deep Learning courses.

Images:
Jersey tomatoes: Molly de Aguiar/Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation
New Jersey Keep It Green campaign banner
Preserved farmland sign: Hillsborough Township, NJ
Gallery: Arts Build Communities
ArtPride NJ Logo

Last week, Steven Slater became the new poster boy for every stressed, overwhelmed, and harried person in America when he activated the literal and metaphorical emergency slide to escape his job as a JetBlue steward.  Every news outlet covered the story, some appealing to our common frustrations with airlines and others focusing on worker liberation from an unhappy or stressful job situation. All identified with the feeling of living on the edge of collapse.

A recent article in the New York Times suggests that there could be other alternatives to taking Slater’s dramatic career-ending route and even increase the happiness quotient in our lives.  In fact, the stark realities of the economic downturn have yielded some unexpected positives in American’s lives as they have had to save more, spend less and simplify their lives.  There is a raft of research suggesting that accumulating more money and more “stuff” does not yield more happiness, and people are now shifting priorities and investing in experiences that have a greater happiness return.

At Dodge, we have the honor to support many nonprofits who spend every day working to help people access these experiences.  Last week I visited one of these  self-renewing opportunities in action.  Every summer for the past 35 years, Arts Horizons hosts two Artist/Teacher Institutes (aTi), one held at Rutgers Camden Campus  and the other at William Paterson University.  I had the pleasure of experiencing the fruits of 40 teachers, artists and administrators’ two weeks of labor in intensive workshops focusing on book arts, installation art, Latin dance, poetry, memoir writing and glass painting.

WiredPRNews.com interviewed Jenifer Simon, Arts Horizons’ Director of New Jersey Programs, Partnerships and aTi, about how the summer opportunities allowed participants to explore their creativity and gain new perspective on their artistic or teaching practice.  “For teachers, aTi is an opportunity to become ‘the student,’ while connecting with a community of peers…aTi helps teachers find their inner artist, and then helps them bring this creativity into the classroom. Many teachers comment that aTi gives them a new lease on life for teaching.”   You can get a 30 second taste of the program by watching this terrific coverage of the Camden experience on NY1

It is inspiring to see a group of people pay money and dedicate two weeks of their summer to doing something that deliberately takes them outside of their comfort zone.  Yet, at the end of the intense immersion in art making, they were ecstatic with the results.

Dr. Donald Ford is a practicing veterinarian, a professor, and a dapper dresser who was able to take his passion for protecting endangered species and create two installation pieces that explored the relationship between the demand for endangered animal products and importation of these products and the people who peddle them.

Dapper Dr. Ford (left) and his chair (right)

Sarah Kaplan is an elementary school teacher and she discovered how to make an explosion page book to help her to teach about the color wheel.  The color wheel moved in unimaginable ways taking all sorts of shapes.  I was enthralled by it; imagine what a six year old would think!  What I loved most was when the other teachers gathered around Sarah to discuss all the opportunities the new design opened up to them, building ideas upon ideas.  It was creativity in motion.

Sarah Kaplan and her color wheel

The entire glass painting class learned about this ancient craft and paid homage to the history of the great glass artists by creating a window of saints, but replaced the faces of the saints with images of their present classmates to whom they had grown to respect  and love.  It is stunning.

Perhaps your internal voice is resisting saying something like, “That’s fine and dandy if you have two weeks to spare and the money to take advantage of this kind of opportunity.”  Well, Christine E. Salvatore, an AP English teacher in Egg Harbor Township school district and a second year aTi graduate, suggests an antidote to this pushback through the poem she wrote in her poetry workshop.  Please enjoy it and I, for one, am going to make it a practice until I can schedule the flamenco class at Alborada Spanish Dance Theatre and Bikram Hot Yoga I have been wanting to take for two years.

Praise for the Ordinary

Do not blame your mundane life
on piles of laundry, unmade beds,
and the never ending heaps of mail.
You can, without fail, find pleasure
in the ordinary, contrary to what
you’ve always been told.
We build our lives task by task,
so do not ask where all the time
has gone.  We should learn
to praise each day.  Tonight
instead of our quiet waltz
of dirty dishes and leftovers,
I’ll suggest a jitterbug.
Wine glasses raised, and barefoot,
We’ll dance on the living room rug.

- Christine E. Salvatore

Let us know what your prescription for stress is and how you increase your happiness factor.

Though her poems are minimalist and simple, Mörling finds a way to celebrate common things — such as the wind, trees, light, dusk, etc. — very much present and overlooked in urban landscapes. Nothing escapes her: the little girl sitting next to her on the airplane, the unnamed man she sees everyday at Grand Central Station, and the night’s darkness falling on objects in the house. Mörling is more than a idealistic dreamer or passive observer. In a sense, she is keenly aware of the possibility to be in a world within the world constantly pulling at us. (See “If There Is Another World”).

Mörling earned degrees from NYU and Iowa Writer’s Workshop. She currently teaches at The University of North Carolina, Wilmington and in the Low-Residency MFA Program at New England College. For more poems by Mörling, see “First Thought” and “A Wake.”

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