I’ve said informally but I’ll say here too: The organization behind Dodge really impressed.
The city cooperated. Streets were blocked off and police cars and 2 or 3 officers at each closed intersection. The mayor spoke at the opening. The street lights had flags about the festival (which I forgot to photograph). There were large colorful signs at buildings. There were sandwich boards between the 8 sites spread across about 5 blocks by 3 blocks.

There were hundreds of volunteers to direct, at each street corner and between them, at the outside of buildings, inside, at each corner where you could make a wrong turn. There were paper signs as well. For someone who can get distracted within 10 seconds and lost within a familiar block, it was comforting to not be able to get off track.
Techies were on hand to immediate adjust microphones, guide discussions, moderate where the panel didn’t, repeat questions from audience members who refused to use a microphone, refused to stand up or speak up but rambled on anyway. Good summary upshot of question skills from stage.
One could get on with the business at hand and not be distracted by non-poetry.

Rebecca Rosenblum retorts on Why Date a Writer:

15. Writers can find 1000 ways to tell you why they like you. By the 108th you’ll be pretty sure we’re just making them up for fun.
16. Writers communicate in a bunch of different ways. But mostly writing. Hope you don’t like talking on the phone — that shit is rough.
17. Writers can work from anywhere. So you might want to pass on that tandem bike rental when you’re on vacation.
18. Writers are surrounded by interesting people. Every last one of whom is imaginary.

Mark Strand in his session on craft talked about the controversy over Poet Voice. He had a different take than I’ve heard. I’m paraphrasing of course but he said that if one is speaking truly from the voice you compose in, the result is more authentic than if you try to read your poem under a convention of all poems need to sound conversational and prosaic in the air. Why should there be only one way to read a poem when on the page tehre are different ways to mark and break and shape? Clearly a poor reader impedes understanding with a stylistic affectation. But is it a matter of learning to hear a style of sound? He said Robert Lowell’s distinctive reading cadence and Louise Glück read in the rhythm they hear as they write. One must do as one is. The great elusive mystery is why you like what you like and narrowing in on what works for you. What’s personal in a poem is not what you say about your private life and private thoughts but the style and music of your poem that only you can do.
He also mentioned the common issue that young to craft poets are terrified of writing in a form, and reluctant to emulate another poet’s style and fear being influenced by the work of other poets on the basis of perhaps not sounding like themselves if they do. He pointed out that in free verse or conversation or whatever way you communicate, you still don’t sound characteristically yourself. It takes a long time to sound like yourself. He also said if you make a decision to write in a form, then do it completely. When playing tennis, you don’t lower the net by a foot and play with a racquet so huge you’re guaranteed not to miss the ball.
Strand was asked if he writes from feelings. “I don’t begin with a feeling. I don’t feel much. I mean obviously I feel. I live in a social world, but I write to create an artifact that will allow other people to feel.” (emphasis his). He (and a couple other people at other sessions, Rachel Hadas and, was it Oliver de la Paz or Bob Hicok?) quoted T.S. Eliot’s notion of “Emotions recollected in tranquility”.
De la Paz and Strand both remarked on how if you’re in an agitated state, it is hard to write well. Emotion impairs your judgement. You can draw on the emotional force later but letting depth of perception and perspective come helps make the poem more grounded and forceful.
When asked if he knows what subjects he’ll write about, Strand said, “if you know what you want to say before you say it, you become a secretary to yourself. It is much more remote” than if you write to explore and find out what wants to be said to get to the point when you discover what is next which is both surprising and inevitable.
Titles matter. They can make a good poem boring, or irrelevant or making a boring poem relevant. Easy to say, harder to perfect. I found it heartening how he said, 50 years into his poetry publishing career, that he recognizes he’s guilty of bad titles and he thinks he’s making a break thru. “My titles have become better and the poems worse” he said with his characteristic sort of quip-wink. I appreciated how in his reading later he read one old ballad of subway sex, a new poem and then, a few prose pieces. He has an easy sense of humour and amicableness that is disarming. When asked about songwriters vs. poets he said he felt they were a different breed: A song writer believes he is half of the operation or less while a poet believes he’s the whole show. He was asked about how he does his manuscripts and he said he writes until he’s tired of writing then he’s done, written out. He’s tapped and doesn’t write any poems for 2 or 3 years, doing other things in life.
He described how he has only once written a serial poem. He wrote 85 sections in 4 months and threw away 40 sections. It took him at least as long to order the parts as to write them.
I expect to get back to more notes on Dodge next week. Here are a couple dozen photos from Dodge Poetry Festival if you haven’t seen them already.

Poetry: October 2010, Vol CXCVII, Number 1, from p. 10-11, “Feeling the Draft” by Bob Hicok*,

We were young and it was an accomplishment
to have a body. No one said this. No one
said much beyond “throw me that sky” or
“can the lake sleep over?” The lake could not.
The lake was sent home and I ate too many
beets, went around with beet-blood tongue.

(* In that interesting interview he says, “By the end of the night, I felt distilled to a grin.”)
The Cloud Corporation, Timothy Donnelly (Wave Books, 2010). p. 33

It is the habit of a settled populaton to give ear to
whatever is desirable will come to pass, a carressing
confidence — but one unfortunately not borne out
by human experience, for most things people desire
have been desired ardently for thousands of years
and observe —they are no closer to realization today
than in Ramses’ time. Nor is there cause to believe
they will lose their coyness on some near tomorrow.

Frogpond Vol 33:3, 2010. p. 9, Mike Harris’

no moon a neuron reroutes a red alert

This, Patrick Kelley (chronopsis flipbooks, 2010)

IS
THIS

Blue Wherever, Barry Dempster (Signature Editions, 2010) p. 54 from “Library Book Sale”

You’ve already missed
most of your life in Miscellaneous.
Fact is, somewhere in here, a book
is calling you by name. Alphabetical
just a synonym for belonging.

Glimpse: Selected Aphorism, George Murray (ECW 2010) p. 15

You are in your element when you don’t know who will
next walk through the door but you’re confident that
whoever it is will be just fine.

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, Elizabeth Smart (Harper Collins reprint, 1945) . 25-6

The frustrations of past postponement can no longer be restrained. They hang ripe to burst with the birth of any moment. The typewriter is guilty with love and flowery with shame, and to me it speaks so loudly I fear it will communicate its indecency to casual visitors

Sandra Beck, John Lavery (Anansi, 2010) p. 136-7

He was marvelling at how the cluttered life of the apartment was relegated entirely to the floor, there being no decoration on the walls of any sort, no shelves or bookcases, and no furniture, apart from the TV, the sofa, the legless couch that might well have been a bed, when his eye was caught by a partly buried head, a bald head, over which was combed a shiny blck strip of hair reminiscent of a warped phonograph record. His heart leapt. Hasty escavation uncovered

The Niagara River, Kay Ryan (Grove Press, 2005), p. 24

Tenderness and rot
share a border.
And rot is an
aggressive neighbour
whose irridescence
keeps creeping over.
No lessons
can be drawn
from this however.
One is not
two countries.
One is not meat
corrupting.
It is important
to stay sweet
and loving.

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers, Xiaolu Guo (Vintage 2007). p. 193

there is a line you draw between you and me. There is a limit, from your heart, from your lifestyle, which makes love feel like friendship. You live inside of me, but I don’t live inside of you.
You said Frida Kahlo is one of your heroes. Of course I knew that. I knew that from your book shelf. I knew that because I knew your heroes are always in pain, and died of young.

Names Above Houses, Oliver de la Paz (Southern Illinois University Press, 2001). p. 13, from “Insects in Maria Elena’s Kitchen”

Beneath the house, they make their way with their hungers close to earth. They make no apologies when leaking between floorboards. They know about the body. They move with the glow of something stolen.

It will be for sale at the Ottawa small press book fair, Oct 16 along with lit lovelinesses from apt. 9, AngelHouse Press, room 302 and who?
(cross-posted at 53-365)