And they said it wouldn’t last.
The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, the biggest in North America, will be back for the third time at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, a city not often associated with iambic pentameter when the festival first announced it was coming there. The 15th biennial festival will be held October 23-26 at the center and other places in Newark’s downtown arts district, featuring almost five dozen leading poets engaged in conversations, readings and performances.
The lineup of poets includes Billy Collins, a former United States poet laureate; the Pulitzer Prize winners Gary Snyder, Sharon Olds and Yusef Komunyakaa; as well as Rita Dove and Robert Pinsky, who are Pulitzer Prize winners and former poets laureate.
The poets reading from the stage of Prudential Hall will also include Richard Blanco, selected to read at President Obama’s second inauguration; Eavan Boland, a highly honored poet from Ireland; and Mark Doty, a winner of the National Book Award for poetry and the T.S. Eliot Prize.
Program highlights this year include a celebration of the life of Amiri Baraka, the poet, Black Arts movement founder, and Newark native who died this year; performances by Brick City Voices, emerging poets from Newark; a program called Another Kind of Courage, featuring readings by veterans and their families; and readings and conversations on poets and disability called Present Imperfect.
The festival is an initiative of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and has been held every two years since 1986. Before moving to Newark in 2010, the festival was held primarily at the bucolic Waterloo Village in Stanhope, N.J., a venue that ran into financial hard times. The festival has involved more than 500 poets, and has drawn crowds of 20,000.
Two- and four-day passes are on sale now at njpac.org and at the box office. Single day tickets go on sale August 11.