It’s the first day of four of the Dodge Poetry Festival. The weather was cloudy, kind of tropical, with warm winds. Liza says it’s supposed to rain buckets tonight, but so far not a drop. I flew into Boston on Monday, took a cab to Liza’s where she had Chinese take-out waiting. Tuesday we went into Boston to Newbury Street and shopped, ate lunch at Joe’s and then toured Beacon Hill. Wednesday we drove to New Jersey and after eating at the Macaroni Grill settled into our rooms at the hotel to chart our course for the next day, then watch TV until the wee hours.

On Newbury St. in Boston.

It was a gorgeous fall day in New England. Liza loved it!

This steeple was so stunning.

Today we launched out of the hotel around 9:15 and arrived at quaint Waterloo Village where the festival is held, got our 4-day passes and headed straight for the main tent where Tony Hoagland was going to speak at 10:15. Tony’s been on my favorite poet list ever since I read Donkey Gospel, his first book of poetry. I so identify with his experience of growing up in the fifties and sixties. He talked about how when he first started writing poetry he knew he wanted to find and write about “truth,” to understand himself and his place in the world. He said a good poem has to move, has to struggle with itself, that it has to entertain and give pleasure to the reader. He read poems by John Berryman, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara and Anna Akhmatova, as well as a few of his own.

Tony Hoagland speaking on the craft of poetry

The grounds are so beautiful. Waterloo was once a thriving village. It has a series of small canals where grain was brought to the mill on small barges. It has a blacksmith shop, a church, school, library, barns, and private homes set among the trees (have to find out what kind of trees they are) and ponds and sloping hills.

Thursday is student’s day at Dodge and 5000 high school students and their teachers descend in yellow buses of all sizes from New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and beyond to get a dose of poetry. It’s inspiring to see them and hear them ask questions of the poets.

It’s getting late and I need to take a hot bath, drink some Bedtime tea, take my melatonin, meditate and get a good nights rest before another long day of poetry basking. So, I’ll leave you with photos from the rest of the day and a few tidbits from the talks.

Linda Pasten

Lucille Clifton

Find the myth in the human, the human in the myth. Remember when you are writing that “surely I am not the only one” who has felt this way. Feel into the other. When it comes down to it Lucille says she choses to offend the person rather than offend the poem.

Mark Doty

Poetry is juxtaposing the transcendent and the ordinary moments in life. It is an attempt to say the unsayable. Writing a poem is shining a laser beam on a particular moment in time. Poetry points you back to the fundamental unknowable. We usually have writer’s block when we have too much to say, not when we have too little.

Toi Dericotte, Lucille Clifton, Linda Gregg & Mark Doty speak on “Going Public with Private Feelings”

Linda Gregg: First I contain the poem, then I write the poem. My life is run by the rules of poetry. I feel safe in the world of poetry. I don’t argue with the poem.

Mark Doty: The “wound” becomes the gateway to the real work. Allow the poem to have its own life.

I’ll check in again in the next day or two on the latest goings on. I did connect with poets from Squaw Valley–Alex from NYC with his high school students and Diane & Jill from Canada who are staying in the same hotel as we are. Becca, who was in my workshop group with Jane Hirshfield at Napa last year is here from Chicago. Being here is so inspiring and fills me up with such joy and determination to keep writing, keep those poems coming, keep working to say better what I want to say. What I took away today was about how vitally important it is to write about the most terrible and painful places in our lives, to “say the unsayable” because so much of our communications are on the surface and so, so much of what really matters is in the underground caverns that we carry around in our psyches. This is what brings on depression, neuroses, alienation and a host of other isolations from others and, most importantly, our own souls. As Lucille Clifton said, “Surely, I am not the only one.”