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Take Two:The Woodstock Poetry Festival

Although the event is scarcely two years old, already there’s national chatter about Woodstock Poetry Festival “magic”. Among last year’s headliners, Billy Collins (slated for an encore) was named United States Poet Laureate and Stephen Dunn won a Pulitzer Prize after accepting invitations to appear. This time around, featured reader Li-Young Lee agreed to the gig and then wound up on the cover of Poets & Writers, which, while it might not sound as portentous, is an equally coveted honor among the national literati. Then there are the festival tie-in stories heard closer to home. Thanks to kismet at last summer’s gathering of versifiers, Kingston resident Janice King has published her first poetry collection, Taking Wing. Robert Bly, in the audience at King’s reading, wrote the cover blurb. Wowed as well during festival 2001 by Hudson Valley legend Mikhail Horowitz’s spoken-word renditions delivered at the Poet’s Ball, he invited him to perform at the 28th annual Great Mother and New Father Conference, hosted by Bly in Nobleboro, Maine. King and Horowitz, members of the same writers’ group, meanwhile will share billing at Woodstock Poetry Festival 2002.

Festival director Laurie Ylvisaker, who had the original vision for its theme and format, takes particular delight in these developments because she wished them into being right from the start. “I wanted to bring poets of accomplishment and renown to this already special community of writers and artists to inspire their work,” she told me as we sipped sodas in a Rondout café. “If that were the only accomplishment, that would be great.” Indeed, she’s happy just seeing Woodstock denizen Tom Fletcher, author of Falling Through the Earth (1991) and an active member of the arts community, “motivated to renew his poetry-writing passion, commitment and effort” as a result of his participation in last year’s event. At this year’s festival, expect to hear new work from this poet, who explores boundaries between the psyche and the natural world.

Ylvisaker would not call herself “executive producer” of the festival (but as Cinderella learned, Laurie, if the shoe fits…), crediting as magical helpers in booking talent and scheduling locations a collection of tireless year-round promoters of poetry in their own right, including Woodstock Poetry Society creator Bob Wright, bookseller Barry Sanders, frequent literary-circuit host Phillip Levine, über-storyteller Gioia Timpanelli, Woodstock Town Library poetry series director Michael Perkins, Heliotrope editor Susan Sindall, SUNY Ulster Poetry Series creator Larry Berk, and “godfather advisor” Ed Sanders, Woodstock’s own poet laureate. Still, it’s Ylvisaker who has kept all the balls in the air, overseeing nearly every detail as well as creating the festival brochure all by her lonesome. Yet nowhere on any promotional materials does her name appear, nor will she be reading at the festival. Knowing what it’s like myself to book merely one well-known poet for a single audience, the fact that she assembles dozens who will read at simultaneous events (and if last year’s turnout is any indication, some with audiences numbering more than 100) truly inspires awe.

For take two, the 2002 festival committee again presents four solid days of poetry reading and performance, music, open mike, and related activities, beginning noon on Thursday, August 22, and continuing into the evening of Sunday, August 25. All the events will be held at historic sites in and around Woodstock, such as Maverick Concert Hall, Bearsville Theater, Byrdcliffe, and Colony Arts Café. Just as last summer’s program featured a cross-medium jazz extravaganza with Robert Creeley and friends, this time around a “gala artists reception” and meet-the-poets night, featuring paintings by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, goes off Friday at The Kleinert. Additionally, and also an upshot of last season’s success, Omega director Elizabeth Lesser (an attendee and admirer of the inaugural festival) created in collaboration with Woodstock’s program a five-day poetry conference called “The Deep Heart’s Core,” to be held at the institute’s Rhinebeck campus August 26-30. If you “stay a little longer” to attend, as the festival program recommends, you can get closer looks at feature acts Collins, Ferlinghetti, Lee, Sharon Olds, and Kate Rushin, as well as see celebrated poet Louise Glück in her only area appearance.

Fully 90 percent of readers overall are new to Woodstock Poetry Festival this year. Moreover, the committee, and in particular Ylvisaker, listened to those folks attending in 2001 who longed for greater diversity among presenters. Thus, to the eclectic roll call of featured performers already started above, you can add the names Anne Waldman, Kate Barnes, and Nancy Willard (whose stunning poem “A Wreath to the Fish” I never grow tired of reading out loud); as well as quasi-apostates of the genre Robert Kelly and Michael McClure (like Waldman, both featured in Norton’s Postmodern American Poetry anthology); also historian and philosopher William Irwin Thompson, best known for establishing the counter-culture think-tank Lindisfarne Association. What Waldman said in an e-mail correspondence to me concerning her own work as a writer and activist could apply to several readers on the starring lineup, particularly African-American poet Rushin. “I live to challenge and take on ‘master narratives,’” the Beat Generation grande dame and curator of curricula at The Kerourac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University wrote.

Though I’m as boastful as a rock concert junkie when it comes to chronicling the number and celebrity of poetry readings that I’ve attended, I’ll be hearing Ferlinghetti, Waldman, and Lee for the first time at this month’s festival. Last spring, I taught Ferlinghetti’s classic A Coney Island of the Mind as the lead-off volume in a graduate seminar on contemporary US poets, and we all agreed that the book still holds—and then some. In the same class, we listened with pleasure to Dial-a-Poem recordings that feature kingly counterpart to the Beat grandmama Waldman. (Ditto on the same LP, one finds her 1960s, Lower East Side “comrade-in-poetry” Sanders, as well as McClure.) The author of over 30 books, most recently Vow To Poetry: Essays, Interviews & Manifestos and Marriage: A Sentence, as well as one of the originators of postmodern spoken-word poetry who often takes on a “hag” persona when she performs, Waldman is sure to dazzle. I’m also looking forward to Lee, whose lyrical masterpiece, the 1990 Lamont Poetry winner The City in Which I Love You, documents his family’s immigrant-American experience with startling, universal appeal.

Another book favored by my recent seminar participants was Collins’ new and selected Sailing Alone Around the Room. Always a terrific reader—funny and “hospitable” as he likes to say—the now famous bard is making his third appearance in Ulster County in as many years, and during that time has never failed to respond to my students who wrote or e-mailed him. Also not to be overlooked at this year’s Woodstock Poetry Festival is elder stateswoman of the craft Kate Barnes, who sounded to me when we spoke over the phone like a shaman, a fairy godmother and a prophet. The first poet laureate of Maine, her lyrical, mythic verses seek redemption from human suffering in observation of the natural world. In the process they offer poignant cultural critiques—fierce, brave, and terrifying though rendered in lines that whisper. Her book Where the Deer Were has just come out in paperback, and her chapbook The Rhetoric of Fiction is slated to be the centerpiece of her next collection, Kneeling Orion. A treasure trove of additional national, regional, and locally recognized poets appearing on the program promises to make Woodstock Poetry Festival magic shine on.

—Pauline Uchmanowicz