Walt Whitman as the poet laureate of America

The work of the poet has been known at times to be at odds with the norms and expectations of his society. Allan Ginsberg faced multilple trials for the indecency of his poetry and Amiri Baraka lost the position of Poet Laureate of New Jersey because of the apparent hatefulness in one of his poems. Nineteenth-century poet Walt Whitman also occasionally earned the disapproval of his peers and his readers on account of his the sensual passages in some of his poems. However, like most poets who earn more attention from scandal than from their actual art during their lifetimes, Whitman wrote more than his scandalous reputation revealed. He wanted to be the greatest American poet and to be famous for centuries beyond his lifetime and thus wrote poetry not only for his contemporary audience, but for generations of readers to come.

One poem in particular in his collection Leaves of Grass is a prime example of Whitman's insightfulness into the permanence of his literature in America. In "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," Whitman addressed not only his contemporary fellow passengers on the ferry, but all the passengers down through the generations who would also take the ferry from Manhattan to Brooklyn. He saw that, even though a hundred years may pass, people on the ferry would have joys and sorrows and hopes and dreams like his fellow passengers in the nineteenth century, and the river connected them all. Whitman's foresight in his poetry extended far beyond the Brooklyn ferry to include all of America, which he saw in the same way as composed of many different types of people from completely different walks of life combined to form one nation. Therefore, despite the occasional scandal he caused with the sensual nature of some of his poems, Walt Whitman spoke to Americans of all backgrounds with an intimacy of expression that few poets have matched.

FONTE: http://www.examiner.com/
http://www.examiner.com/english-literature-in-national/walt-whitman-as-the-poet-laureate-of-america

FOTO: lisawallerrogers.wordpress.com

The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival

Monday, November 22, 2010

By Ayesha Rehman

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The biennial Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival is the largest poetry event in North America. The poetry festival, held in even-numbered years since 1986, immerses high school students, teachers, and poetry lovers in discussions and readings focused on poetry. Well-known poets such as Billy Collins, Sharon Olds, Kay Ryan, Amiri Baraka, and Marie Ponsot attended the festival.

This year Bryant high school students and English teacher Ms. Roach went to the festival with great enthusiasm as students have waited for this festival in New Jersey for two years. “All my friends were going there and [also] some of my favorite poets were going to read aloud,” said Bryant senior Tashrique Khandaker, expressing his desire to go.

Upon reaching the poetry village in Newark, NJ, students split intto three different groups to hear read aloud presentations from some of the famous poets. All Bryant students were impressed by the vast arrangements put forth for the festival.

The festival also featured a Q&A session titled “Conversation on the Life of the Poet” with a small audience. Bryant students attended one with Kwame Dawes, Claudia Rankine, and Kay Ryan. In this discussion, the audience was given a chance to ask the poets questions pertaining to poetry and life in general.

This festival has helped to engender educational, cultural, and innovative ideas among poets coming from all across the country. Khandaker expressed his learning experience as exhilarating after hearing Baraka’s sound-induced poem reading. “I learned that poems could be made more interesting and fun if a simple aspect such as sound is added.”

Poetry books, shirts, bottles with the festival’s logo, and different accessories were sold. It will truly be one of the most memorable experiences for the approximately 5000 high school students and teachers who had come to the festival. A student from Bryant said, “Festivals like this makes me realize that there are so many people out there with a common love for poetry. The world is big, but it becomes understandable when all with the same passion come together.”

FONTE: my.hsj.org

http://my.hsj.org/
http://my.hsj.org/Schools/Newspaper/tabid/100/view/frontpage/articleid/392231/newspaperid/3499/The_Geraldine_R_Dodge_Poetry_Festival.aspx

IMAGEM: en.wikipedia.org

Dodge Poetry Festival Features Pulitzer Winners, U.S. Poet Laureates

Kay Ryan (left) and Carol Adair, who also teaches English at the College of Marin, were married in a ceremony at San Francisco City Hall in 2004. (Provided by Kay Ryan)

Posted by Hannah Elliott

Bill Murray must be beside himself. Next week 24 poets including Kay Ryan, Billy Collins, Rita Dove, Mark Strand and the brothers Matthew and Michael Dickman will converge in Newark, N.J., for a poetry sampler of the highest order.

The 13th biennial Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival is the largest and most famous poetry event in North America. Organizers expect it to attract more than 20,000 people Oct. 7 – 10, plus 4,500 high-school students from 250 schools across the country.

Poets will lead discussions, readings and seminars at multiple locations in the Newark area, including main events at Prudential Hall.

If you don’t know the work of Kay Ryan or Billy Collins, you should. Ryan, the current U.S. Poet Laureate, writes frequently for The New Yorker and The Atlantic. She was named to Entertainment Weekly’s “It List” and even has a poem permanently inscribed at New York’s Central Park Zoo.

“Her poems are compact, exhilarating, strange affairs, like Erik Satie miniatures or Joseph Cornell boxes,” J. D. McClatchy told the Academy of America Poets. “She is an anomaly in today’s literary culture: As intense and elliptical as Dickinson, as buoyant and rueful as Frost.”

Collins, U.S. Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003 and named “Poet of the Year” by Poetry Magazine in 1994, is perhaps most famous for his compilations The Art of Drowning and Questions About Angels. He writes for Harpers, The Paris Review, and The New Yorker.

The Dickman twins are a special treat, especially to younger poetry lovers. They grew up with little intellectual stimulation in a rough neighborhood in Portland, Ore., before Pablo Neruda (and a desire to bag girls) got them interested in poetry. A recent feature in The New Yorker called their work “an illustration of the distinctiveness of the imagination.”

“Michael’s poems are interior, fragmentary, and austere, often stripped down to single-word lines; they seethe with incipient violence,” Rebecca Mead wrote last April. “Matthew’s are effusive, ecstatic, and all-embracing, spilling over with pop-cultural references and exuberant carnality. Reading Michael is like stepping out of an overheated apartment building to be met, unexpectedly, by an exhilaratingly chill gust of wind; reading Matthew is like taking a deep, warm bath with a glass of wine balanced on the soap dish.”

The brothers will speak along with their mentors Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar as part of the “Poets and Mentors” conversation at 2 p.m. this Saturday.

Other featured poets include Pulitzer Prize-winner and McArthur “Genius” Fellowship recipient Galway Kinnell (the 83-year-old will read in its entirety his definitive translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, which event spokesperson Ilene Antelman compared to “Sir Laurence Olivier reading the Shakespeare soliloquies in his later years”), Amiri Baraka, Kwame Dawes, Bob Hicok, Martin Espada, Dunya Mikhail, and Joseph Millar. Bobby Sanabria & Quarteto Aché, a Latin jazz group, will also perform.

Tickets for the weekend cost $60, or $54 for seniors and $30 for students. A four-day pass costs $100 for general admission. Click here for more details.

Read more:

Bill Murray is Leading a Poetry Revolution

Baby Steps With Bill

Watch: Bill Murray’s Construction Worker Poetry Slam

Follow me on Twitter: @HannahElliott

FONTE: Forbes (blog)

http://blogs.forbes.com/

FOTO: marinij.com