Once inside the unassuming entrance of Roberta’s, if you can cast your gaze past the wood fired stove and pizza gurus, let your olfactory senses take in something beyond the sweet aroma of ricotta pancakes sopping up maple syrup, and put down your mason jar of local beer, you will see, hear and experience the backyard urban oasis – a farming oasis that is. But don’t look out, look up. There is where you will find the first of the rooftop greenhouses.

The hoop greenhouse is built on top of a shipping container that is fitted out as a radio station (more on that later). Another captures waste heat from the condenser unit for the walk-in refrigerator.

The semi vacant lot next door is also being transformed into greenhouse space that will tie into a fledgling compost operation. Look closely as the construction of this greenhouse and you will find yourself peering into salvaged factory windows.

And just when you think the holistic, closed loop vision can’t get any better, you learn that Sarah Trogdon is making soaps from the tallow and oils from the restaurant that are mixed with herbs from the garden (see Goldies Soap).

The brains, brawn and owners behind Roberta’s are Chris Parachini and Brandon Hoy. In a partnership with Ben Flanner of the Brooklyn Grange Farm they come with much more than a dream of “urban farm to fork,” they come armed with a business plan with teeth.

Chris Parachini

They are in the beginning stages of scaling-up this restaurant garden roof venture into a 7 acre Brooklyn rooftop urban farming operation (that’s just for starters). The produce will be sold at a local farmer’s market, and clients like Roberta’s will likely be able to source about 80% of their produce from the Brooklyn Grange Farm in a few years time.

Wait, before you think that this is this some urban warrior plot to cut out the rural farmer, you need to take in the full story. This enterprise is about connecting people to food, and people to people. It is about creating community assets and efficiently using local resources. It is about transforming underutilized urban hardscapes to grow food, while building better relationships with rural farmers to supply the elements that cannot come easily from the urban farm; for example, the meat that comes from farm animals. In fact, Patrick Martins of Slow Food USA fame is part of a growing movement of niche food distributors interested in saving the family farm and diverse livestock. His business, Heritage Foods USA, specializes in selling heritage pigs; and as he says, you save them by eating them. One look at Roberta’s menu tells you how they are a saving grace in this cause.

Sure, there is a greater conversation we all need to have about “eating animals.” Jonathan Safran Foer’s book of this title is a MUST read on this subject, but conversation is just another thing that Roberta’s is serving up. Heritage Radio Network is in its first year of operation and the programming seems to be growing exponentially (maybe there is some magic in broadcasting below a greenhouse). I got there in time to listen in to the end of Anne Saxelby’s Cutting the Curd show (Saxelby Cheese “offers a premier selection of American farmstead cheese”), and on this day she had women cheesemongers from Formaggio Essex (NYC), the Formaggio Kitchen (Boston), and Berkeley’s Pasta Shop talking about their retail adventures – but all share a commitment to farmstead cheeses. The Heritage Radio Network programs are all about the community conversation we need to have around food, land and people.

There was something else about this place that was stimulating – it was the admiration that everyone had for the rich diversity in life (ecological, social, etc.). Then Chris captured it in words, he said that the success comes from fact that the operation is part science/business and part art. That was the clarifying moment. I looked around again and saw the artistry in the vibrant urban palette — it was evident in the cuisine and building design, in the social ventures, and in the patchwork of innovators and community builders who care about all the different entry points that take us to healthy food. The artistry is the secret ingredient in so many social recipes – and the one that does not get captured on food labels. We can extract urban farming models and best practices from site to site around the globe, but the successful recipe requires a pinch of local artistry. Roberta’s is a culinary canvas I encourage you to take in.

What would you add to this recipe? Please join us in conversation here and at Heritage Radio Network.

My interests have always been varied, but fallen mostly into two camps: arts and nature. I could spend equal hours reading plays, watching and producing theatre as I could hiking, watching and caring for wild animals. I count myself extraordinarily lucky, then, to be on the ridge where these two camps overlap; where I can begin to see both the congruencies and unique traits of the arts and environmental fields.

Passage Theatre, where I am the producer, is now in its third year of an unprecedented partnership with New Jersey environmental organizations including D&R Greenway, Green Faith, Isles, NJ Conservation Foundation, Stony Brook-Millstone Watershed Association, Sustainable Lawrence, and Sustainable Princeton. Together, we have created a series of events designed to educate, inspire and promote conservation of our natural treasures, placing live theatre at the center of this four-month series ranging from Pine Barrens tracking, to poetry readings, to watershed reclamation. There are myriad ways in which Greening: Common Connections, Growing Community (as our partnership is named) has proved fruitful and engaging to all of us and our respective audiences on both sides of the “ridge,” including: workshops and talk backs that connect audience members with our artists; joint efforts on new initiatives; and changes to “green” basic operations. What started as a seed of an idea from my Artistic Director has blossomed, with the collaboration of our partners, into a sizeable brain trust spanning the state of New Jersey.

The importance of what our initiative is doing was reinforced at a session on sustainability and theatre at the 2009 Theatre Communications Group national conference in Baltimore last June. Of the five audience members (mostly LEED-certified designers and architects) at this session, I was – alarmingly – the only representative of an artistic viewpoint. The crossover between sustainable practices and environmentally-themed art wasn’t on the table for discussion, but I (admittedly) hijacked the conversation and was able to pull ideas from the presenters to bring back to our initiative, while sharing information on artists with whom we had worked. It was an invigorating conversation! The wonderful presenters included Ian Garrett of the Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts, Marda Kirn of EcoArts, Lisa Phillips of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, and Gideon Banner of Green Theater Initiative.

It became apparent at that conference that Greening: Common Connections, Growing Community is one of the first of its kind, and though I could continue to detail the day-to-day operations of our initiative, I really just want to talk about why I find it so cool.

Kaiulani Lee.  Photo courtesy Haskell Wexler.

First, I have met three incredible teams of artists working on this project: Kaiulani Lee brought A Sense of Wonder, a brilliantly performed bio-play about Rachael Carson, to Passage in our inaugural year. Peter Donaldson followed in year two with Salmonpeople, a play enlightening viewers on the importance of watershed stewardship. On March 25th and 26th of this year, we are thrilled to present Brooklyn-based Climbing PoeTree’s Hurricane Season, a tapestry of poetry, theatre, dance, and multi-media, woven with a breathtaking musical score performed with live instrumentation. Rhythmic and uplifting, raw and moving, Hurricane Season takes the view that environmental justice and social justice are one and the same.

Peter Donaldson, Salmonpeople

Climbing PoeTree, Hurricane Season. Photo courtesy Layla Love.

Second, these artists live and breathe their work, foregoing more lucrative jobs in order to carry their messages to audiences: that it is up to us to save our ridges and valleys, no matter what camp we fall into. In the process we will be saving a core part of our humanity – our connection to each other and the world we live in. This will become the mission of my generation over the next 50 years. I have watched these artists bring tears of shame and joy and hope to the eyes of audience members, elicit laughter and stoke imaginations. There is an emotional and interactive aspect to live performance that can make information a reality in ways paper cannot.

Third, I have been privileged to work with leaders and practitioners in the fields of urban reclamation, land conservation, sustainability and watershed restoration (to name but a few) who are as passionate about their life’s work as the artists on our stage. It has been incredibly gratifying and humbling to watch these women and men in action in the state of New Jersey, fighting the hard fight of science, numbers, money and politics to move us toward a sustainable future. It has been equally gratifying to participate in and witness events our partners host as part of this initiative, which entertain and educate in physical, visceral ways.

What I have learned, from both artists and environmental practitioners, is that the common connections exist all around us. Where there is just enough overlap in mission and passion we can find ways to pool resources, get the word out, and support each other. It is always better to ask, “Where can we collaborate? Where can we help each other? Who do I know that you should know and vice versa?” than to ask, “Can we collaborate at all?”

I don’t know if I’m giddy because the air is thin up on this ridge, or the heights are dizzying, or if it is simple elation at seeing the cross-pollination of our industries and strategies working to change people’s minds and behaviors. I do know that I’m having a blast up here, where the air is clear enough for me to see a future that I am not afraid of, because our partnership is only one of the first to find common connections between us and our audiences, which have strengthened our community and our solidarity as citizens of this world. My hope – my belief – is that there are many more partnerships to come.

The Dodge Foundation has been instrumental in making Greening: Common Connections, Growing Community possible with its generous support. We give our deepest, heartfelt thanks to the staff for their continued encouragement and enthusiasm for our initiative.

To read more about Greening: Common Connections, Growing Community, visit Passage Theatre’s website or click here. You can also see a sneak peek of Hurricane Season by watching the video below:

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The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark is October 7 – 10!
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Andrew Motion was the son of a brewer, and grew up in an environment that he describes as “very unbookish indeed.” Yet he went on to become a critically acclaimed literary biographer, established the Poetry Archive project and website in the United Kingdom, and was England’s Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009.

His background is often reflected in the imagery and diction of his poems. The setting is often domestic or rural, and the tone of the poems decidedly understated. We feel both comfortable and welcomed. Within the first few lines of “A-1 Mechanics” we feel that this poet is a guide we can trust, taking us to a place immediately recognizable.

The vivid images Motion creates with such lucid language bid us enter deeper into his poems. We go willingly because we feel we know the place and the speaker. Once we enter fully into an Andrew Motion poem, we discover, again and again, that beneath the inviting surface more troubling emotions and memories lie submerged.

Motion’s many poetry collections include: Selected Poems 1976-1997, Public Property, and most recently, The Cinder Path. His Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life, which won the Whitbread Biography Award; and his life of John Keats, Keats, are considered essential reading for students of these two poets.

Be sure to return for upcoming Poetry Fridays, when we will feature many poets from past Dodge Poetry Festivals in the weeks ahead.

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

Follow the Dodge Poetry Festival on Twitter
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We give our thanks to the contributors to this series:
Stacey Kennealy of GreenFaith
Winnie Fatton of Sustainable Jersey
Caitlin Wargo of Far Hills Country Day School
David Hallowell of Sustainable West Milford

As well as to Jaimie Cloud and Leah Mayor of the Cloud Institute.

Today, we’re happy to hear from Angela Clerico of Banisch Associates, a community planning and design firm in Flemington, New Jersey, about her New Jersey Learns experience:

In a profession where the goal is to plan better communities it seemed to me that we were going about things the same way we had been for decades. Sure, over time the focus shifted away from sprawling communities and toward “smart growth” – building homes near major transportation corridors, protecting the environs. But, there had to be something more… a better way, still, to create more livable communities and communities that thrive, not just survive.

When I was introduced to the NJ Learns program, I was interested because I had an interest in the topic of sustainability. It has been called the largest social movement this planet has ever seen – only you don’t actually “see” it happening. Millions of people all over the world in town halls, school libraries, and community centers are getting together to implement their visions for change. They’re organizing events to inform their local officials and the community-at-large. It’s a movement alright, and I wanted to learn how to better communicate the concept. I learned more than that!

Participating in the NJ Learns program, I had many “aha” moments. From learning how to teach the concepts about and the data for sustainability to a better understanding of how people perceive sustainability and their concerns for changing behavior, I could see how the shift would not only have to come from the community, but that the local leaders would have to set the example. The lone planner in a room full of educators, I began to see how educating my audience would be a little different since I am not a teacher, per se, but that it could be just as powerful. Now, every time I walk into a planning board meeting the topic of sustainability is on my mind and is communicated through my work.

The hard part is that it is a process and results may not be seen overnight. In the NJ Learns program, we participated in a simulation where, in groups, we were fishermen. We had to fish the ocean in a manner that, with an average replenishment rate, the ocean would remain sustainable. The ocean would continue to produce fish for us to catch to maintain our livelihoods. The problem, however, was the same all around: everyone “crashed the system” by overfishing. It took many of the groups several tries, if not more, to figure out that we just had to make it through the down times in order to remain sustainable. Instead, different mentalities took over. “Everyone else was taking more than their share, so I should too!” “I could see this was not going to work, so I jumped on the bandwagon.”

These mentalities translate right into our communities and it is hard for residents and local leaders to see the benefits, when it is such incremental change.

There are a few popular phrases in local government that tend to set the tone for creating sustainability strategies. One is “How can we get the biggest bang for our buck?” Local leaders want to do right by their taxpayers, providing quality of life, but they don’t want to enforce practices that may cost money. The other is “Let’s look at the low-hanging fruit.” This is a good strategy for getting something off the ground. It is a quick way to get a project done and shows that the local leadership is doing something for the community. It also provides momentum for a larger-scale project that may take more time. However, it often doesn’t take into account the bigger picture.

The topic of sustainability is a tough web to untangle and make sense of. Land use planners are typically the ones to break down these issues and present them in a meaningful way so that local leaders can make decisions. Planners guide the development of ordinances, policies, and regulations, at the same time, supporting community-wide campaigns for residents to become more aware of how they can green their lifestyles. If all planners were speaking a shared language of planning for sustainability, we could create a paradigm shift toward sustainability and livable communities from the top-down and the bottom-up.

My NJ Learns training and practice of the program continues every day I am working to create more livable communities in NJ.

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Thanks again to Angela and to all of the New Jersey Learns guest bloggers.

New Jersey Learns introduces teachers and community leaders to Education for Sustainability. Education for Sustainability (EfS) is a whole system approach to schools and communities learning together for a sustainable future and includes the Cloud Institute’s EfS Core Content Standards. The program brings community-based teams to participate in one year of introductory training, implementation, coaching and assessment activities.

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The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark is October 7 – 10!
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If you are new to the Dodge blog, you can read the first three installments of the New Jersey Learns series here (Stacey Kennealy of GreenFaith),  here (Winnie Fatton of Sustainable Jersey), and here (Caitlin Wargo of Far Hills Country Day School). Today, we hear from David Hallowell, President of Sustainable West Milford who has been training with New Jersey Learns for two years now.

From Action to Thinking and Back Again!

When I first learned of the NJ LEARNS Educating for Sustainability opportunity, we were well on our way to making changes in West Milford. We had established a nonprofit called Sustainable West Milford and grown our membership from 6 to over 400 people in just one year. We had a variety of action-oriented and educational programs including: monthly educational presentations; “Buy Local” campaigns; an organic community garden: and an annual GreenFest.

We were excited with the prospect of learning more, getting some new tools, and making some connections with other groups around the state to help move our efforts forward. The NJ Learns program delivered all that and more. I was in the first year of the training, and even continued my training for a second year! Not that I’m all that remedial, (well, maybe a little!) , but that fact is, I learned even more in the second year. And more importantly, I learned different things that have shaped the way I think about sustainability.

After the first year of Educating for Sustainability (EfS), my focus was on using the wonderful tools and information provided to better engage community members and convince them of the need to change their actions, for as Jaimie Cloud points out, “everything you do or DON’T do, makes a difference.” After the second year of the EfS training, I have become keenly aware of the need to change the thinking of our community in order to change their actions.

Often during presentations on sustainability, I am asked to describe what sustainability “looks like” in the community or in a school. My old answer used to include the usual suspects – they recycle, use renewable energy, buy local, compost, etc. In short, promoting different actions. Now, my answer begins with “they think differently – and that thinking leads to different actions”.

The old expression, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink” provides a wonderful analogy to describe our shift. We have done a great job of leading the horses (tons of information and reasons why we should be acting more sustainably) and providing the water (actual opportunities to act differently through our programs), but not all were drinking. Many were, and indeed, many more did with each additional opportunity we provided. For example, Sustainable West Milford’s Farmer’s Market initiative was so successful last year that we attracted 14,000 shoppers. That is 14,000 people promoting our local economy, local agriculture, and effectively acting more sustainably.

But how do you get more people to drink the water? The answer is in helping them to start thinking differently. If we follow the problem of unsustainable actions “upstream,” to their source, we find faulty thinking. For example, in our culture, we tend to focus relieving the symptoms of a problem rather than the problem itself – we take a pill to lower our blood pressure while ignoring our lack of exercise, poor diet, and excess weight. This is an example from EfS of a mental model called “Shifting the Burden Archetyp.e” Using this thinking leads you to working hard to resolve the symptoms of a problem while essentially ignoring the fundamental problem. Similiarly, SWM’s efforts have targeted community member actions while largely ignoring changing community member thinking – the fundamental problem.

Make no mistake: this strategy of changing community members’ actions by providing information and opportunities to make real changes has been extremely effective and essential in building momentum, exposure, and support, but like most strategies, it has its limitations. For one thing, it is not fast enough – our window for change is a narrow one, and for another, we can only do so much!

So, this year, in addition to our action-oriented strategy, we introduced a companion strategy to address this need for a change in thinking. If community members change the way they think, they will lead themselves to make the choices that will result in a truly sustainable community. As Jaimie reminded us during our training, there is never just one reason for a problem and there is never just one solution!

Stay tuned: the last of our New Jersey Learns series will appear on the Dodge blog on Wednesday.

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New Jersey Learns introduces teachers and community leaders to Education for Sustainability. Education for Sustainability (EfS) is a whole system approach to schools and communities learning together for a sustainable future and includes the Cloud Institute’s EfS Core Content Standards. The program brings community-based teams to participate in one year of introductory training, implementation, coaching and assessment activities.

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The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark is October 7 – 10!
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Kurtis Lamkin is a contemporary American embodiment of the ancient West African griot tradition, which blurs the boundaries between poet, singer and storyteller.

The griot, bard or troubadour has been a fixture in all cultures since before the advent of written language. It is believed that such bards passed down the legends of the Trojan War and Beowulf for generations before they were set down in the versions now familiar to us, and that Homer himself likely half-chanted half-sung large sections of the Illiad and Odyssey and accompanied himself on the lyre.

When he performs, Kurtis Lamkin often accompanies himself on the kora, a twenty-one-stringed West African harp-lute. He not only composes on and plays the kora, but he makes them by hand. This sense of the intimate bond between performer and instrument is also part of the griot tradition.

In recent decades, there has been much debate in academic circles in the United States regarding the place of politics in poetry. But in the griot/bardic tradition, there is no debate. The poet is seen as someone directly involved in the life of the community, and commentary on events that impact the community is not only accepted, but expected.

We assume our troubadours will sing us love songs, and Lamkin gives us one, but they have also been seen as the chief chroniclers of their times. In Elizabethan England, the news stories of the day were passed on through popular ballads. Like Lamkin, the griots and bards of the past always performed this function with humor and satire.

Lamkin has released a number of CDs of his work, including: My Juju (1995), El Shabazz (1998), and Queen of Carolina (2001).

Be sure to return for upcoming Poetry Fridays, when we will feature many poets from past Dodge Poetry Festivals in the weeks ahead.

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

Follow the Dodge Poetry Festival on Twitter
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One of the major benefits of moving to our new office space in the heart of downtown Morristown is that it offers us a chance to connect more easily with our friends and partners here, in addition to enjoying the hum of the neighborhood, which includes the shops and places to eat and the people out and about on the street. Morristown is a vibrant city with much to offer, including, now, a substantive focus on sustainability and livability for its residents and people like me who work here during the week.

At Dodge, we were pleased to hear the news that Morristown Mayor Tim Dougherty recently created a Sustainability Office for the town, pledging a more “cohesive development strategy with sustainability as its centerpiece.” Doughtery appointed Paul Miller, who led the Morristown Partnership’s Step Ahead campaign, as the town’s first-ever Sustainability Coordinator.

This newly-created position will help Morristown expand and build upon its Sustainable Jersey efforts. In November of last year, Morristown was one of 34 towns to achieve Sustainable Jersey certification in the inaugural year of the program. For those not familiar with Sustainable Jersey, it is a comprehensive sustainability program for communities which offers a full suite of resources, like technical support and tool kits for participating municipalities. New Jersey is the first state in the nation to have a program of this kind.

We are looking forward to watching Morristown’s progress in its sustainability efforts.

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The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark is October 7 – 10!
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From innovative instructional partnerships to curriculum design, NJ Learns is building capacity among educators, parents, community members, and, ultimately, our youth, to “live responsibly and well within the means of nature.”

If you missed them, you can read the previous NJ Learns entries with Stacey Kennealy of GreenFaith and with Winnie Fatton of Sustainable Jersey. Today, we hear from Caitlin Wargo, the Director of Sustainability and Energy Management for the Far Hills Country Day School.

Far Hills Country Day School students making natural bird feeders

By Caitlin Wargo, Director of Sustainability and Energy Management
Far Hills Country Day School

The Far Hills Country Day School team (who are Jen Berry, parent; Jen Wagar, fifth grade teacher; Ben Yu, Pre-K teaching assistant and I) almost didn’t make it to NJ Learns. A freak power outage shut down the school on the day everything was due. FHCDS parent and Energy Committee member Jen Berry had power at her house, so we went there to finalize our application, along with an apology for not including any of the attachments, which were stuck on my computer at school.

That was about a year ago, and I know I can speak for our team when I say that we have gotten so much more out of this program than we could have imagined.

I thought I might walk away from the workshop with some helpful tips for the school’s new Energy and Sustainability Initiatives. Far Hills had been recycling and composting long before I was hired, so our students already had a stewardship in their “think.” The new Energy Initiative, on the other hand, charged us with achieving energy independence in ten years, a lofty goal offering us a significant opportunity to impact our students’ mindset regarding energy. From the outset, we saw this first and foremost as an opportunity to educate, so we have involved our students in all of our plans, enabling them to be the decision makers charting the course of the initiative: from researching renewable options to speaking on behalf of the school in front of the Planning Board.

Post-workshop, I met with our Head of School, Jayne Geiger, and told her I wanted to change up my whole approach. I think the words I used were, “Put my money where my mouth is.”

The information on systems thinking and brain science presented by Jaimie Cloud made so much sense, and helped me understand what we as a school needed to do if we were to really let the kids be leaders in this initiative.

The timing couldn’t have been better for Far Hills. We had just launched a new strategic plan emphasizing 21st century and project-based learning, as well as fostering global perspectives and building community. The EfS standards dovetail seamlessly with these, setting the stage for a collaboration that will have meaning at FHCDS and our community for years to come.

Here are some great things that have come about since our team took part in the NJ Learns workshop last year:

1. We played the fish game with the entire school faculty at the start of the school year. Feedback was unanimously positive and our faculty engaged in lively discussions about preserving the “commons.”
2. We taught the Jaimie Cloud’s one-day seminar over the course of two evening sessions to a group of ten co-workers and school parents, who were so enthusiastic that we had a hard time wrapping up each session. Some of those same teachers are now planning to attend the Curriculum Design Studio at the Cloud Institute this summer.
3. Jen Wagar is using the EfS standards as her team revises the third grade curriculum.
4. Jen Berry is organizing parents to host a film series/discussion group on sustainable themes for the school and community.
5. Ben Yu is working to put in a school garden. This garden will provide endless opportunities for learning about sustainable practices on a level that can be understood by our youngest learners. He is working with a group of interested students to decide what we should grow. One of the first suggestions was “puppies,” which may take a little work!
6. After taking part in NJ Learns, I revamped my environmental club to use a project-based learning approach. Within this new framework, the students generated several ideas. They decided to fix our defunct composting system and to rehab an underused courtyard at the school with outdoor seating and to create art installations and bird feeding stations. They also want to put in a small pond – I am not bursting their bubble yet. Who knows? It just might fly. As part of their research, are interviewing several community members who have offered to lend their expertise.
7. This spring, I will be working with eighth graders who want to help me determine the school’s most effective renewable energy options as part of their research project requirement.
8. The Science Department is working with the Upper Raritan Watershed Association to revise our existing Pond Project so that it includes data on the effectiveness of our retention basins in filtering runoff from our parking lots and drives.
9. FHCDS joined Sustainable Jersey in Bernardsville and will have students participating in their community information session in March, alongside students from the local public high school.

FHCDS students hanging their bird feeders

Where do we go from here? We’ve built a strong, committed team, and as Jaimie Cloud says, “This isn’t instant orange juice.” As a result of Far Hills Country Day School’s participation in the NJ Learns program, however, I think our students will be even better prepared to take their place as the leaders of the future.

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New Jersey Learns introduces teachers and community leaders to Education for Sustainability. Education for Sustainability (EfS) is a whole system approach to schools and communities learning together for a sustainable future and includes the Cloud Institute’s EfS Core Content Standards. The program brings community-based teams to participate in one year of introductory training, implementation, coaching and assessment activities.

* * *
The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark is October 7 – 10!
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When Lucille Clifton set out to be a poet she had no models to follow; the figures in the canon did not look or speak like her, did not have her stories to tell.  She realized if she was going to have a life as a poet, she would have to make it herself.  And she did.

To hear Lucille Clifton read was to know immediately you were in the presence of an authentic voice.  She once said, “I don’t write to be admired.  I write to be understood.”  And, we might add, she wrote to understand.  She questioned and explored every aspect of her own life and experience, and turned an unrelenting gaze onto the times and the nation she lived in.

Under the force of her determination to communicate whatever she saw, she compressed and pared down language to a fierce clarity.  And she did not turn away from anything her vision revealed, regardless of the sorrow, regret or fury it might bring her.  Instead, she invited us to “celebrate with me/ what i have shaped into/ a kind of life.”

For anyone lucky enough to have witnessed them, her readings at the Dodge Poetry Festival remain indelible reminders of what poetry can aspire to and inspire in us.  Everyone at the Dodge Foundation is deeply saddened by her passing.  At the end of her poem, “sorrows,” she asks, “but who can distinguish/one human voice/amid such choruses of desire?”  We can answer her easily.  We can, Lucille.  We will know your voice anywhere and everywhere we hear or read it.

A generous sampling of Lucille Clifton’s poetry can be found in Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000.  More recent collections include Mercy (2004) and Voices (2008).

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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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As I move through my last six months at the Dodge Foundation, I find myself appreciating the “gems” of New Jersey life all the more.  One of them is coming up this weekend: the Marion Thompson Wright Lecture at Rutgers-Newark, affectionately referred to by its devoted followers as MTW.

For thirty years, it has been an event of note during Black History month.  Indeed, there has been nothing like it as a sustained showcase of public scholarship on African-American history and culture.  But it is even more than that.

Picture the big meeting room upstairs at The Paul Robeson Campus Center overflowing with people, on a Saturday morning.  The Mayor is there; the President of Rutgers is there; sometimes the Governor is there.  So are Newark high school students and their teachers.  There are grandmothers with great hats and people who look like they haven’t glanced up from their Blackberries in months.

It is a joyfully diverse crowd at this most diverse of universities, and they greet each other as if this were a reunion – or maybe a concert where everyone felt lucky to have a ticket.  In an age where it is hard to get anyone’s attention for more than a few minutes, they settle in for the day – because MTW takes its time for the civilities of civic engagement.

For me, MTW is a vision of how universities and their communities should ideally interact.  It is about scholarship without being stuffy.  It is about important and potentially divisive matters, but it exudes a generous and inclusive spirit.  MTW assumes we can learn from our shared history, and we can make sense of it together.  I have said in another blog entry that I think art may save us. I feel the same way about the MTW celebration of ideas and human connections over time.

At the center of MTW, standing at the podium calling the event to order and welcoming us into its world, is the embodiment of its spirit, Rutgers Distinguished Professor Dr. Clement Alexander Price.  Perhaps it is more accurate to say MTW is the embodiment of Clem’s spirit, and that of his long personal and professional friendship with MTW co-founder Giles R. Wright, from the New Jersey Historical Commission.  This is the first MTW Giles did not help plan, as he died a year ago this month

This 30^th incarnation of MTW will take place over two days, not one, beginning on Friday afternoon at 1 p.m. and ending on Saturday at 4 p.m.  The 2010 MTW Letcure itself will be given on Saturday morning by Rutgers Professor Annette Gordon-Reed, whose book The Hemingses of Monticello, won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize.  The theme of the two days is Laboring in the Vineyard: Scholarship and Citizenship, and fourteen former MTW Lecturers are returning to Newark to be part of the program.  See the Rutgers’ website for details.

The 2010 MTW program is dedicated to the memory of Giles Wright and John Hope Franklin.