  | ||||
 |
A Weekend With Poets: Remembering a Trip to the Dodge Poetry Festival
It was dark by the time I got home, and
Johnny was there already, doing push-ups in the alley in front of my
house. I was on my way back from a
graduate class at the University, and I was late for meeting him, so when I saw
his silhouette on the ground a block away from me, I started running, yelling,
“John-Dog, John-Dog!” His shadowy body
got up off the cement, and I heard his voice ask, “Scotty-Boy?” And then we packed my bags into his rented
car, and got in, and headed for points east.
We were heading to the Dodge Poetry
Festival in New Jersey. Johnny had
driven down from Michigan to pick me up in Pittsburgh. This was all part of a long chain of events
that involved Johnny (my former teacher), Tony (my teacher at the time), and
Marie (Tony’s good friend who had recently become friends with Johnny). Marie had invited Johnny over email to come
to Dodge and help her with a booth there—“I can’t offer you a place to sleep,
and I can’t promise food, but please come if you can,” Marie had told
Johnny. And so we were on our way.
Driving through Pennsylvania through the night, Johnny
and I caught up with each other, talked about the good old days in
Kalamazoo—where I had studied under him—and took turns playing albums on the
stereo. It had been a good six months
since we had last seen each other, a fact that felt disturbing when we realized
it. “I can’t believe we’re breathing
the same oxygen again,” I remember Johnny saying.
When I lived in Kalamazoo, I had gone from taking one of
Johnny’s workshops to being his assistant, to being a colleague, to being a
close friend. By the time I left the
city, we were calling each other “Brother” and meeting up once a week to drink
beers and swap poems.
We arrived at Dodge the next morning and talked our way
out of the entrance fee, insisting that we were working a booth. Johnny grabbed a schedule of the events so
we could track down Marie and we eventually found her giving a reading to a couple
hundred people under a large white tent. I remember a group of teenage boys near the front snickering as Marie
read a particularly sexy poem.
Once the reading was over, Johnny and I
introduced ourselves to Marie and she took us to a booth with a banner that
read “Finding a Path to the Future.” Marie introduced us to Mark, who was running the booth with her, and
they explained their idea for it. What
they wanted was to get the poets walking around the festival to do some
impromptu-writing on long sheets of butcher paper that were hanging on all
sides of the booth. They wanted verse
that worked against war and violence, verse that unified people, verse that had
a vision of how we could live peacefully in the future. Johnny’s job—a job he excels at—was to come
up with “starters” for the large sheets of paper. Johnny would write “In the next world…” or “Instead of bullets…”
at the top of the piece of paper, and this would help direct the average poet
walking up to the booth.
After working the booth for a couple of
hours, Johnny and I decided we needed to see a panel. We found one that featured Robert Hass, Robert Bly, Marie and
Mark. Listening to Robert Hass was
mind-blowing. I’d read his poetry and
his criticism for years, and loved a lot of it, but listening to him talk about
poetry for five or so minutes straight—so articulately, so intelligently—was
like nothing I had ever heard before.
After Hass dazzled the audience with
his short lecture, it was time for Robert Bly to show-off. A minute after Bly began to speak, Johnny
leaned over to me and whispered, “He sounds so much like Woods.” Woods was John Woods, Johnny’s mentor back
at Western Michigan University, where I later met Johnny. Robert Bly and John Woods were close
friends, so it made sense for Johnny to hear John Woods’ voice in Bly’s. Bly wowed the audience by reciting from
memory a full poem (“The Scattered Congregation”) by the Swedish poet Tomas
Tranströmer:
We got
ready and showed our home.
The
visitor thought: you live well.
The
slum must be inside you.
“Do you feel that?” Bly
interrupted himself, “Do you feel that shock there?” Bly continued:
Inside the church, pillars and
vaulting
white as plaster, like the cast
around the broken arm of faith
Inside the church there’s a begging
bowl
that slowly lifts from the floor
and floats along the pews.
“That’s a leap—that’s where
the poem leaps,” Bly said, interrupting the poem again.
But the church bells have gone
underground.
They’re hanging in the drainage
pipes.
Whenever we take a step, they ring.
Nicodemus the sleepwalker is on his
way
to the Address. Who’s got the Address?
Don’t know. But that’s where we’re going.
“There’s that shock
again. Do you feel that?” Bly asked
us. Then he said, “Let me read that
again,” and he proceeded to recite the poem again, in its entirety. He talked about what he meant by the “shock”
in a good poem, speaking of it as a kind of electrical charge running through
the language. “I live for that shock,”
Bly said. And Johnny leaning over to me
again, said, “He sounds like a junkie.”
Later that same day, I saw Robert Bly walking around,
trying to get people to sign an anti-war petition. Seeing him speak earlier, I realized how essential Bly was to my
own poetic aesthetic—via Johnny and then John Woods, Bly was something of a
literary ancestor to me. It made sense
why I was so fond of the Surrealist poets Bly had translated—they were further
ancestors. With all of this coming
together in my head, I decided to take action. I went up to Bly and before he could hand me his petition, I said, “Mr.
Bly, I just wanted to thank you for everything you’ve done for American
poetry.” Bly was a little baffled,
chuckling, and saying back to me, “Well…okay.”
While working the booth, I got to take in a few readings,
since the booth was directly across from the large amphitheater. One of the readers was the great Polish poet
Adam Zagajewski, who I’d heard read once before in Pittsburgh. He read his poems in English translation with
a slight lilt—which sounded good in his accent—and occasionally, he read a poem
in Polish.
Zagajewski didn’t say very much between
poems, though I remember, at one point, he said, very slowly, “It is very
strange…when you sign a book here…because you write your name…and then the
date…and then Waterloo…and you feel like Napoleon.” He was referencing that the festival was being held at a place
called Waterloo Village. Later that day, I decided to buy a copy of one of his
books and—though I’m not usually fond of autographs—get him to sign it so I
could remember the anecdote.
The next morning, it was already
Saturday, the last day that Johnny and I would be at Dodge. We spent most of the day working in the
booth. Johnny, whose high energy requires
that he exercise at least three times a day, ran back to our hotel at one point
to use the exercise machines. I stayed
on at the festival, and made friends with some of Marie’s students who were
also running the booth.
Taking a break at one point, I
wandered around the festival and found a small white chapel that was full to
capacity. The windows were open, and
people outside the chapel were sticking their heads in to listen. I squeezed my way in through the back door
and saw Li-Young Lee standing at the front talking in a near whisper to the
crowd. Before I ducked out, I heard him
recite from memory a lengthy Robert Frost poem.
Later in the day, Marie dropped by the
booth and gave Johnny and I tickets to a free dinner. It turned out, it wasn’t just any free dinner, but the free dinner—the dinner that all the
big name poets go to before the evening’s big events. Walking into the dining room, I felt as if I were walking into
the Academy Awards. There was Amiri
Baraka. And over here, Gerald Stern and
Li-Young Lee. Oh, and this table, this
is the former-poets-laureate table—Robert Pinsky, Robert Hass, Rita Dove, and
Stanley Kunitz.
I decided I needed to approach at
least one of the poets I admired. Li-Young Lee was sitting quietly by himself, so I went over to him. I introduced myself and explained that I was
studying at his alma mater. He seemed
genuinely interested in talking to me and that put me at ease—so much so that I
let my guard down and said to him, “I can’t really believe I’m in the same room
with all of these famous poets.” “I
know,” he whispered back to me, sounding just as enthused, “I mean, look
there’s Billy Collins.” Just then
Collins turned our way, nodded, and casually said, “Hi Li.”
We ate dinner, and soon the dinner
party waned until there were only us stragglers. Everybody was going to the big tent for the final events of the
evening. I found Johnny, who had
chatted up Stanley Kunitz at the dinner. Johnny had given Kunitz his latest chapbook. “He was so generous to me,” Johnny said, “He treated me as if I
were the first person he’d ever met.”
I went over to the large tent and
found a good seat while Johnny went for a jog around the festival grounds. The program under the large tent featured
all of the big name poets reading two poems a piece—one by a poet they admired
and one of their own. The star of this
event was Stanley Kunitz, who was the last to read. The 97-year-old poet slowly made his way up to the podium, took a
moment to look out to the audience (some 3,000 or so of us), and he said,
When I was a young man, studying at
Harvard in 1926, I was walking one day
through
the stacks of the library. While I was
walking through the section on English Poetry of the 19th Century, I
came upon a book lying on the floor in the middle of a row. The book was open to a poem called “God’s
Grandeur.” I stood there, in the
library, and I read that poem…and it rocked my world.
I got chills. And I don’t think I was the only one. The audience clapped and cheered for Kunitz. Kunitz read the poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and then his own
poem “The Flight of Apollo,” reading the poems very slowly, as if savoring each
word.
Johnny came and found me just before
Marie and Mark took the stage for what would be the final event of the
evening. While musicians played in the
background, Marie and Mark took turns back-and-forth, reading lines written at
the booth we had helped to run. Once
and a while, the audience laughed or cheered for a line or two. For the final lines, Marie read a poem
called, “If You Are Lucky in This Life,” a poem written by Cameron Penny, one
of Johnny’s inner-city fourth-graders back in Detroit. It was this poem that had connected Johnny
and Marie through Tony and I:
A
window will appear between two armies on a battlefield.
Instead
of seeing their enemies in the window,
they
see themselves as children.
They
stop fighting and go home and sleep.
When
they wake up, the land is well again.
There
was a hush over the crowd when Marie finished reading that poem. When Johnny remembers that moment, he claims
that that poem changed everyone’s breathing patterns. Finally, the crowd exhaled, and we all started cheering. It was as if we had all simultaneously won
something, as if we had defeated all that was ill or ailing—defeated it with
poetry. We were victorious, and the
Cameron Penny poem proved it.
While the cheering continued, Johnny
and I ran down to the front of the stage, where all of the big name poets were
cheering too, and laughing, shaking hands or embracing each other, embracing
total strangers even. The music swelled
and people were still cheering. I
turned around, and caught a glimpse of my teacher Tony, smiling and kind of
dancing with Gerald Stern.
“We
gotta go,” Johnny said, and I said, “Okay.” And we ran to the car, shaking our heads in disbelief at all that had
just happened. We drove off, away from
Dodge, and the car was silent for a long time. “I’m speechless,” Johnny said finally, driving through the darkness, “I
can’t say a word.”
|
|
||
