The Archive

The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival Audio and Video Archive

At Drew University and on YouTube

Since 1986, video camera crews have been a common sight at the Dodge Poetry Festival.  Less noticeable, but equally important, have been the sound engineers making audio recordings of nearly every performance.  More than 1,000 hours of audio and almost 700 hours of video have been recorded for future audiences. 

The recordings that comprise the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival Audio and Video Archive include Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners, U. S. Poets Laureate, and many other poets of international stature captured in readings, interviews, conversations, and discussions, often in groupings that occurred in no other time or place. 

What makes the audio and video footage in these archives so exceptional is that it was recorded by recognized industry professionals at the highest broadcast standards.  There is simply no other archive of such scale and quality of twentieth and twenty-first century poets.  

Materials from the Dodge Poetry Archive are being preserved and transferred to digital format by VidiPax, an industry leader in audio and video archive preservation.

To date, only a tiny fraction of these archives has been made available to the public.  Much of that was through several popular PBS television series hosted by Bill Moyers: Power of the Word, Language of Life, Fooling With Words, and Sounds of Poetry.

To ensure that this invaluable resource be preserved, protected, and shared, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and Drew University have agreed to establish Drew University as the Academic Home of the Dodge Poetry Archive.

The long-term goals of the agreement between Dodge and Drew include making the Dodge Poetry Archive available to teachers, students, poets, scholars, and to any interested member of the general public.

As the first step in achieving this goal, we have launched our own channel on YouTube through their Non-Profit Program.  Our intention is to gradually increase the number of videos available until this becomes a major resource for poetry-lovers around the world. 

To view the first videos, all from the 2006 Festival, visit the GRDodge channel on YouTube at www.youtube.com/grdodge. To receive notices when new videos are posted, subscribe to our channel.