Community Notebook > Event

Woodstock Poetry Festival 2003
BY Pauline Uchmanowicz . Photos by Beth Blis

In a world desperate for peace and cultural understanding, poetry can provide a message that crosses borders under the radar screen of mass media sound bites. Expect the lineup of international poets appearing at Woodstock Poetry Festival 2003 to explore the richness and complexity of life in our global village. Headliners include Pulitzer Prize winners Paul Muldoon (2003), Philip Levine (1995), and John Ashbery (1976); Jamaican poets Edward Baugh, Kwame Dawes, Lorna Goodison, and Pamela Mordecai; Robert Bly, Naomi Shihab Nye, Natalie Goldberg, Ed Sanders, and Nick Flynn. Now in its third season, the summer extravaganza runs from Thursday, August 21 through Sunday, August 24 at various historic locations in and around Woodstock. Scheduled events include more than a dozen poetry readings, art exhibitions featuring paintings by Natalie Goldberg and photographs by Allen Ginsberg, a performance by Kate Pierson of the B-52s, and a Rasta vegetarian luncheon with Jamaican chef Jah Morris.

An oddsmaker speculating on the rise of the literati would do well to shadow WPF founder Laurie Ylvisaker. Billy Collins was named Poet Laureate of the United States and Stephen Dunn landed the Pulitzer Prize within weeks of accepting her invitation to the 2001 inaugural festival. Paul Muldoon, Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, earned this year’s Pulitzer for his ninth poetry volume, Moy Sand and Gravel, after signing on for WPF 2003. Other WPF readers have grabbed the limelight in smaller ways. For instance, with his name added to the 2003 roster, Nick Flynn’s Blind Huber showed up on the cover of a booklist promotional brochure put out by small-press extraordinaire Graywolf.

Newcomer to Woodstock’s spoken-word celebration, John Ashbery—New York state poet laureate and Charles P. Stevenson Jr. professor of languages and literature at Bard College—reads Friday at 4PM in Bearsville Theater. The author of more than 20 books and a central figure of the New York school, Ashbery’s poignant lyricism pervades his dreamlike verses, which test and question the limits of experience.

On Friday evening, a meet-the-poets gala and reception at the Woodstock Artist Association celebrates Natalie Goldberg’s paintings beginning at 6:30PM. Best known for her how-to manual Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within (1968), Goldberg last year released Top of My Lungs (published by Woodstock’s Overlook Press) which contains 40 poems and 20 color paintings, the subject of the Woodstock exhibit.

The international flavor of WPF 2003 whips up later Friday night at Colony Arts Cafe with “Irie Jamaica,” featuring readings by the four Caribbean poets followed by a reggae-band dance party. The poets come to the festival with the cooperation of Intermedia Foundation, and the Jamaican Consulate will be in attendance.

Elder statesman of the group, Edward Baugh, professor of English and public orator at University of West Indies, earned acclaim for his first poetry collection, A Tale from the Rainforest. His recent volume, It Was the Singing (2000), chronicles the Jamaican experience in both universal and particular terms. Baugh’s narrative poems frequently take on personas of Creole speakers in a witty and subtly political manner, as in “View from George Headly Stand,” in which men share jibes about a cricket match, race relations, and “epistemology”.

Woodstock's own poet laureate, Ed Sanders, author of The Poetry & Life of Allen Ginsberg: A Narrative Poem (2000), will host a tribute reading for the legendary Beat on Saturday afternoon at Bearsville in connection with “Snapshot Poetics,” the Allen Ginsberg Photography Exhibition and reception at Fletcher Gallery later that day from 5:30 to 7:30PM. Culled from the Howard Greenberg Collection, it features 50 of Ginsberg’s photographs, signed with the bard’s handwritten captions and notations.

Saturday at 8PM, Paul Muldoon headlines a reading at Maverick Concert Hall. Born in County Armagh, Northern Ireland and currently the Howard G.B. Clark professor of humanities at Princeton University, Muldoon worked in radio and television for the BBC in Belfast during the 1970s. He began publishing at the age of 19 and is now one of Ireland’s leading contemporary writers. Following publication of Poems 1968-1998, his collected works, the Times Literary Supplement lauded him as “the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War.” A lyric poet, Muldoon considers geographic destiny in verses that traverse pastoral, suburban, and political landscapes. Multi-layered and imagistic, his work is known for its wit and structural inventiveness. Reading Muldoon, it’s hard not to crack a smile, admiring his wordplay, especially the ability to discover rhyme variations in the most unlikely places, as with “oxhide” and “battle-ax” (“As”). His long poem “Sleeve Notes,” a series of fragmented meditations on classic rock’n’roll albums (e.g., records by Jimi Hendrix, Cream, The Beatles, Blondie, Talking Heads, and others), qualifies the Irishman as a kind of patron saint of Woodstock.

Chronicler of the Arab-American experience, Naomi Shihab Nye reads at Bearsville Theater on Sunday at 3PM. Born in the United States to a Middle Eastern father and an American mother, she has written about geopolitics her entire life. In 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (2002), Nye visits Jerusalem and the West Bank, Palestine and Lebanon. Steeped in ancestor reverence for inhabitants of these war-torn regions, her stunning poems shimmer with delicate, precise portraits and settings. “I’m not interested in / who suffered most. / I’m interested in / people getting over it,” she writes in the opening stanza of “Jerusalem”. A portion of both poet’s and the publisher’s proceeds from the book, which contains a haunting introductory poem about 9/11, will be donated to the organization Seeds of Peace.

Author of 17 books of poetry, Philip Levine will follow Nye at Bearsville. Born in Detroit to immigrant Russian-Jewish parents, Levine eloquently documents life among the urban working class. In addition to winning the Pulitzer for The Simple Truth (1994), he earned a National Book Award for What Work Is (1991) as well as for the essay collection The Bread of Time (1994). In The Mercy (2000), he continues his lifelong exploration of the immigrant experience in sprawling narrative poems, such as “Reinventing America.”

[Editor’s Note: Philip Levine (b. Detroit, 1928) should not be confused with Chronogram poetry editor Phillip Levine (b. Brooklyn, 1956)—note the two “l”s in Phillip. Levine (the younger), a featured reader at the WPF in 2001 and 2002, will be hosting the Chronogram-sponsored Wealth of Poets reading on Friday afternoon, 12-3PM at the Colony Cafe, in addition to the open mike on Saturday afternoon, and the Dead Poet’s Social (co-hosted with Michael Perkins) on Sunday morning at the Woodstock Artists’ Cemetery.]

Rounding out the festivities at WPF 2003, audiences can look forward to inspired readings from award-winning poets Nick Flynn, Kate Light, Deborah Bogen, and Richard Tillinghast. Among the many talented local participants, newcomer Sofi Hall of Saugerties, recently back from pursuing work on poet Elizabeth Bishop during a Fulbright in Brazil, promises to satisfy with a spoken-word performance backed by her celebrated musician father John Hall of Orleans.

Tickets for Woodstock Poetry Festival are on sale in town at booksellers the Golden Notebook and Mirabai, or by mail c/o Woodstock Poetry Festival, PO Box 450, Woodstock, NY 12498. A weekend ticket, $165, is good for access to all events other than the Rasta Luncheon (Sunday 11:30AM at New World Home Cooking) and the Opus 40 Campout on Saturday night. Tickets also are available a la carte, with seating available on a first-come, first-served basis. For more information visit www.woodstockpoetryfestival.com.