The events and lineup for the Dodge Poetry Festival is being announced. So far: Kathleen Graber, Penny Harter, Rachel Hadas, Santee Frazier, Rita Dove, Kwame Dawes Billy Collins, Kay Ryan, Michael Cirelli, Mark Strand and Rigoberto González.
Oct. 7-10th they’re back!
For those keeping track, it was announced to be a victim of its own popularity and was to either end, or regroup and come back much smaller. Run by a charitable foundation with the byline of “a society more humane: a world more livable”, it aims to connect and educate people, among other things, on the power of the word.
The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival is neither an academic symposium nor a writing conference. Through a wide range of poetry readings, storytelling sessions, and musical performances, participants are invited to spend four days immersed in our most ancient arts.
With 2 dozen poets and some events seating 50 and others up to 2700 people, it’s nothing small scale. The regular sessions they have before have been reinstated much the same. (yay!)
Poets on Poetry sessions in which individual Festival Poets discuss their own relationship to poetry by presenting and discussing poems (by others and by themselves) which are important to them.
Conversations: On the Life of the Poet bring together two to four poets to talk with each other and the audience about their lives and their art.
Other Conversations with panels of Festival Poets have included such topics as “The Mysterious Life Within Translation,” “Poetry and Jazz,” “Poetry and the Dignity of the Ordinary,” and “Going Public with Private Feelings,” among many others.
The Festival offers the public the chance to talk with accomplished poets in Conversations on Craft, which include discussions of work patterns and work habits as well as specific matters of poetic craft.
Now I want to watch the lineup develop, and maybe wrangle a route to a road trip. Who’s in?