Billy Collins on the Dodge Poetry Festival

Wordstock:
Celebrating the Dodge Poetry Festival
By Billy Collins

To understand the nature of this cultural beast, this mother of all poetry gatherings (”Wordstock” is another name for it) you need to set aside any inherited notions of what poetry readings are all about. Forget the image of a few devotees huddled in a library meeting room or a church basement, and tear up the picture of a coffeehouse whereone of the undernourished is inflicting his verse on a few unsmiling listeners. Instead, you need to visualize a kind of Bedouin campBillyCollins1_2008_250x375_web of tents where, for four days, thousands of people navigate their way through a mad-dash schedule of events. The Dodge Poetry Festival is the largest poetry event in North America and it is the most energetic, festive, and high-spirited celebration of poetry I have ever seen.

The long autumn weekend is jammed with panel discussions, lectures, and question-and-answer sessions. But the real draw – the pulsing heart of the festival – is the readings, which feature both regional poets, who hold forth on lawns and in gazebos, and poets of high magnitudes, who read under the big tent – yes, this is a poetry circus – and draws spill-over, four-figure audiences.

A poetry summit such as the Dodge dispels, at least temporarily, the notion that poetry is the most neglected of the arts, the poor little match girl of literature. The spectacle of crowds of people shouldering past one another in all directions, the long lines of book-buyers, the rapt attention to readers, the outbursts of applause, and even standing ovations are enough to convince you that poetry has somehow been restored to its ancient prominence and might even be a force to be reckoned with.

Edited and abridged from Inside Borders, September 2002