Nobody Reads Poetry Anymore

By Anthony Buccino

NJ.Com - Sept. 24, 2008 -- If it weren't for the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival getting a few headlines every two years, the consensus on the other side of that hopeless little TV screen would be that nobody reads poetry anymore.

How often does PBS TV run a special on poets? Maybe you hear a poem once in a while on public radio. Someone tells me one of the cable-access channels has a poetry show on Saturdays. I couldn't say for sure.

Can you name three New Jersey poets besides Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg?

Read between the lines and you'll see that poetry in New Jersey is flourishing. The bienniel Dodge Poetry Festival is the highlight. In season, you can find someone reading poetry somewhere in New Jersey every weekend.

POETRY ALL AROUND YOU

Last June at the West Caldwell Library there was a one-day poetry festival. Last September there was the Warren County Poetry Festival, a one-day affair. You can find a lot more regional poetry festivals at New Jersey Poets and Poetry, or sign on to the email list at PoetryNJ!

The New Jersey Poetry Society has education and events, you can check their web site for the latest info.

Plus, there are a gazillion poetry groups throughout the state. Here are a few: Delaware Valley Poets, Carriage House Poetry Series, The Write Group, South Mountain Poets, PoetsWednesday & More, MEWS, and the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College has monthly events and workshops.

Find a Jersey poet's web site or blog and that will lead you to other readings across the Garden State.

DODGE POETRY FESTIVAL

None less than the Christian Science Monitor called the Dodge Festival "a new Woodstock."

The four-day festival this year may have more in common with that long ago event if the thunderstorms predicted flood out the hills and rills at Waterloo Village in Stanhope.

Here's what the copywriters have to say:

As I type this, the busy-as-a-bee workers are getting the nearly shuttered facility ready to open in a few hours.

ALL EXPERIENCE IS PAST

Two years ago I attended the festival not knowing what to expect. Maybe there'd be a bunch of beatniks sitting around a candle snapping their fingers. Maybe there'd be loud rock music and a non-stop poetry slam with a mosh pit?

It was actually poetry in the wild. Or, poetry in the raw, if you will. Maybe even poetry in the woods. Yeah, that's it.

Facilities at Waterloo included rows of port-o-potties. There were long trails into the woods which, it seemed, many pairs of students sought to explore in the off-peak afternoon hours. And since the venue is in the middle of the woods, there were plenty of trees. See, something for Joyce Kilmer.

For the poets visiting the northwest Jersey woods, there were hills and rills and ferns and mews.

Out in the woods there you are unlikely to hear a jet plane pass overhead. You might see hawks, that is, real, live hawks, not sports fans. It's easy to get away from the highway, but there is a lot of walking. You walk from your parked car to the entrance, to the main tents and the scattered locations of other readings and, why many poets show up in the first place, the locations of the open readings.

Along your walk, you shouldn't be surprised to find a Kodak spot for your digital camera to do its thing. Perhaps you'll appreciate live more in the aughts when you visit the worn tombstones of the 17th Century graveyard, or the equally primitive church from the same era.

Outside you can walk along the remnant of the Morris Canal. That transport mode moved freight from the Delaware to Jersey City and vice versa ... until the trains came along and changed things nearly one hundred years ago.

The heartbeat of poetry will be setting the pace for young and old poets this weekend out in the western woods. I'll be watching for the newbie who walks around, looking at all the poets gathered, and mutters to himself, wow, I'm not the only one who loves poetry.

No one's reading poetry this weekend in New Jersey, they are living it. Hope to see you there. I'll be the guy with the squishy shoes.

First published: NJ.COM, New Jersey Voices, Published: Sept. 24, 2008

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