DISPATCH #1 FROM THE DODGE POETRY FESTIVAL - September 25th 2008
From Larry Janowski, roving Poetic Reporter

After a noneventful 12-hour drive Wednesday, Thursday was a fine fall day in Western New Jersey, nothing like the eastern, overcrowded part of the state.

Here's a summary of a few of the talks from today's festival.

Chicago poet Edward Hirsch observed that at the heart of lyric poetry is the idea that we're going to die, and that this fact is unbearable. Unacceptable. From this come two poetic impulses: first is celebration, joy,the sheer exultation of the joy of living — praise. The second is grief over what we're losing simply because life ends. These are at the center of poetry because we want, in some way, to hold on to what is fleeting.

Charles Simic, former poet laureate and resident of Oak Park (not simultaneously) was asked by a student: "Your poems are so evocative. When I read them my mind goes in so many different directions. Did you intend, as a poet, that your words have this effect? Simic replied that a poet is certainly aware of the connotations of the words he or she uses. That's part of the poet's work. How someone else reads them, however, sometimes surprises him. He said sometimes he disagrees these readings, and sometimes he must admit that, although he hadn't intended it, that other dimension really is there.

Mark Doty spoke a great deal about Walt Whitman, about whom he is in the process of writing a new book, not of literary criticism and not a biography, but his personal relationship with the 19th century poet. Speaking to the hundreds of young (high school) poets present today, he encouraged them to be open to revising. Young or new writers are, he said, "inspiration driven"—they write when they are often by a painful experience. They resist revising because they are afraid that a revision might lose some of that original "feeling" and spontaneity. But once that writer can place some objective distance between herself and the work, the real work of the poet begins.

Naomi Shihab Nye began her session by reading a letter she received this summer from someone called Victor in Ohio. He wrote to her out of the blue about a poem of hers called "Making a Fist" which, he said, he never liked very much, but which his wife had on their refrigerator for years. This summer, Victor had a medical emergency which left him comatose. He could hear his wife and the doctors talking about the gravity of his condition, though he himself could not respond. He remembered Shihab Nye's poem and began opening and closing his hand in a fist. His wife noticed, and insisted that the doctors begin "working on him" immediately rather than taking the wait-and-see course for 48 hours which they had proposed. Shihab Nye said that if she ever had any doubt that poetry could save a life, she no longer has! Here's the poem.

MAKING A FIST

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

"How do you know if you are going to die?"
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
"When you can no longer make a fist."

Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.
Naomi Shihab Nye Mark Doty
Edward Hirsch

Larry Janowski is a Chicago poet at the Dodge Poetry Festival
He is the author of BrotherKeeper.