Festivals Ahead

As mentioned the PodCamp Boston event is coming up at the beginning of September. At the end of September, I will be attending the 11th Biennial Dodge Poetry Festival. It returns to the wonderful setting of Waterloo Village in Stanhope, NJ for four days; Sep 28-Oct 1.

 

What is it like?

 

Well one well known poet tried describing it as follows:

 

Wordstock:
Celebrating the Dodge Poetry Festival

By Billy Collins

To understand the nature of this cultural beast, this mother of all poetry gatherings (“Wordstock” is another name for it) you need to set aside any inherited notions of what poetry readings are all about. Forget the image of a few devotees huddled in a library meeting room or a church basement, and tear up the picture of a coffeehouse where one of the undernourished is inflicting his verse on a few unsmiling listeners. Instead, you need to visualize a kind of Bedouin camp of tents where, for four days, thousands of people navigate their way through a mad-dash schedule of events. The Dodge Poetry Festival is the largest poetry event in North America and it is the most energetic, festive, and high-spirited celebration of poetry I have ever seen.

The long autumn weekend is jammed with panel discussions, lectures, and question-and-answer sessions. But the real draw – the pulsing heart of the festival – is the readings, which feature both regional poets, who hold forth on lawns and in gazebos, and poets of high magnitudes, who read under the big tent – yes, this is a poetry circus – and draw spill-over, four-figure audiences.

A poetry summit such as the Dodge dispels, at least temporarily, the notion that poetry is the most neglected of the arts, the poor little match girl of literature. The spectacle of crowds of people shouldering past one another in all directions, the long lines of book-buyers, the rapt attention to readers, the outbursts of applause, and even standing ovations are enough to convince you that poetry has somehow been restored to its ancient prominence and might even be a force to be reckoned with.

Edited and abridged from Inside Borders, September 2002

Why do I go?

 

I have not yet found a better place go to hear and meet good writers. After all, poetry is the essence of writing, a sort of condensed blogging. It uses the mininum number of words to convey the whole thought, and then co-creation takes over. You and I make of it what we will.

 

If you have the chance to go, I don't believe you'll regret it.

 

For more information, check out the festival web site.

 

For my recap of the 2004 festival you can read it here.

 

 

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