The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival: Fields of Straw, Mud and Dreams at Duke Farms

Stuart Mitchner

For four days last week on the Duke Estate just north of Princeton thousands of people were reading, listening to, and talking about poetry. How compelling is poetry in this political season with presidential candidates looking for a soundbite to ride to victory ("putting the American dream on the ballot" for example) and with the first debate taking place the day the festival began? How could "serious poetry," which so few people seriously read, have achieved the status of a national resource claiming April as its own national month? As far as I know, there is no National Fiction Month, no National Music Month or National Art Month. It's almost as though poetry were an endangered species in need of institutional protection. But how many Americans truly care about it? And how many would think it a bit too, well, French of John Kerry if he decided to put in an appearance at a poetry festival or if he were to be caught reading the stuff?

Yet Eli Lilly heiress Ruth Lilly left a fortune to Poetry magazine, which set up a Poetry Foundation committed to putting poetry "in front of people whose lives it can change for the better."

Last week a great many people who would say that poetry has changed their lives for the better gathered on a vast estate where terraces lead grandly up to a fenced off pit around the foundations of a mansion that was never built: "That hole in the ground we took for pit or pit-fall,/mine-shaft, the shaft of some long-stalled elevator," in the words of Paul Muldoon, one of Princeton's three Pulitzer-prize winning poets at the festival. His "The House of Poetry" was written to celebrate this, the first Dodge Poetry Festival at Duke Farms. He read the poem on the main stage Saturday afternoon after being warmly introduced by Joan E. Spero, president of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. All the other introductions on the main stage were delivered by Dodge Poetry Director and poet Jim Haba, "the heart and soul of the festival," according to Dodge's Executive Director David Grant. Looking like a roadie for a rock band or an aging rocker himself in his black festival t-shirt, Mr. Haba was a refreshingly informal master of ceremonies.

Music festivals like the Newport Jazz Festival and Woodstock, which became so much more, were convened around the pleasure of listening. Dodge was about more than listening or celebrating an art form: it was a festival in search of meanings, the central one being "What is poetry? Where can it take us? What can be said?" Another Princeton Pulitzer-prize-winner, Yusef Komunyakaa, in his "conversation on craft" said "We want surprises. That's why we come to poetry."

Nature surprised the 2004 Dodge Festival at Duke Farms by drenching the site with a heavy rain that turned the grounds to mud. Because of Tuesday's deluge, and Thursday's rain on top of that, tons of straw had to be trucked in and spread over the muck. The straw heaped underfoot gave the festival a texture it would not have had otherwise, something you could smell and sift between your fingers. The interior of every tent smelled like a barnyard without animals. Sunday when the sun was there to warm the straw-laden pathways, the smell was drowsy and grainy. The Duke Estate had definitely become Duke Farms.

Voices

Walking the grounds you could hear voices everywhere. Even in the era of the cell phone when the sound of people seemingly talking to themselves is becoming common, there is something haunting about the sound of voices reciting, confessing, declaiming, chanting, all of them muted to murmurings that become almost exotic among the fields and tents, so that you seem to be wandering through an encampment in a foreign land. In the Little Blue Stem Tent reserved for the ongoing open readings, voices recited everything from personal laments about 9/11 to passionate indictments of corporate America. In that context, possibly the most political moments on the main stage came when jazz trumpeter Dave Douglas played, unaccompanied, his own composition, "For the Poets Against the War," a searing protest that also contained eloquently gentle phrasings. When he urged the crowd to work hard for the next month to elect John Kerry, a huge cheer went up. He was followed by poet Jane Hirshfield, who spoke of her vow to always include in her readings "at least one poem about what is going on in the world" and then read a poem about what is going on in Darfur.

Of the poets I heard read on the main stage, there were a number of particularly powerful voices. There was Venus Khoury-Ghata reading in French and the Syrian poet Adonis (Ali Ahmad Sa'id) in Arabic. There was Paul Muldoon's presentation, soft-spoken with the trace of an Irish accent. By contrast, the third of Princeton's Pulitzer Prize winners at the fair, C.K. Williams, read his work with passion, in particular a powerful new poem called "Shrapnel," which is also very much about "what is going on in the world" (in this case, in Iraq). His colleague at Princeton, Yusef Komunyakaa, has a rich baritone voice perfectly suited to his jazz-inflected poetry. And then there was Jane Hirshfield, who could read computer instruction manuals or stock market reports and make them sound like poetry. Hers is the voice you want to hear when you're going into surgery or being worked over by a dentist. And her poetry was almost as fine, fine enough to earn a standing ovation from the audience.

Jane Hirshfield was also the only poet I heard who thanked the stenographers for somehow managing to type everything all the English-speaking poets and translators on the stage of the main tent were saying, the red words lining up on the LED displays on either side of the stage. What was recited, however, did not always make it onscreen in one piece. Occasional words were lost or mangled beyond recognition, or simply transformed. In another poet's reading, for example, "quarrel" became "quarterly." and "cul de sac" became "cull de sack." The possibilities for comic skullduggery here are downright intoxicating. Billy Collins could write a poem about a stenographer as closet poet rewriting whole lines on the spot.

The stenographer who was typing Billy Collins's poetry, by the way, was laughing so hard she could barely keep her fingers on the keys.

Billy Collins is, simply put, amazing. Since it is unlikely that any living poet could follow him, he was selected to close the festival. One of the more unfortunate surprises of the occasion was that the star almost didn't make it. In fact, he missed all his appearances except that last one because he'd been hospitalized with a bleeding ulcer and had suffered serious blood-loss. In spite of that, he gave the big crowd everything they could have hoped for.

Introducing him, Jim Haba rightly felt he had to mention that there is a great deal more to Collins's poetry than the charm and wit that has made him so popular. Certainly the poet himself is aware that he risks being taken too lightly and that popularity can be a burden. How to measure his greatness? Imagine putting a poet in front of an audience of dyspeptic Philistines and grouchy poetry critics, with maybe Tom DeLay and the gun lobby in the front row. This poet could charm them out of their seats in a minute — well, he might need a few more or however long it took him to deliver the poem about the disgruntled dog coming back from the dead to tell off his master or the one about the boy presenting his mother with a lanyard he made at camp.