One of the great things about the Dodge Poetry Festival is meeting the poets.
Poetry can be a lonesome calling, and these folks are delighted to chat with people who appreciate them. Ask nicely, and they even may read for you.
Brian Turner, the Iraq War veteran who authored Here, Bullet, obliged us on Thursday. We bumped into him at the festival book store.
Here is how The New York Times Book Review summarized Here, Bullet:
“The day of the first moonwalk, my father’s college literature professor told his class, ‘Someday they’ll send a poet, and we’ll find out what it’s really like.’ Turner has sent back a dispatch from a place arguably more incomprehensible than the moon — the war in Iraq — and deserves our thanks…”
The short poem in this video reflects on an 11th century Arab scientist from Basra.
Alhazen was a pioneer in optics and the study of light; what would he make of the darkness shrouding his birthplace a millennium later?
You can hear more from Brian Turner, and from other veterans from the Warrior Writers and Combat Paper projects, at the festival tonight, Saturday, Oct. 25, 2014.
The session, titled Another Kind of Courage, takes place inside Prudential Hall at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark.
Ticket information and a schedule for the biennial poetry festival–which concludes on Sunday, Oct. 26–are here. The event is sponsored by the Morristown-based Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.
The Dodge Foundation has my thanks and appreciation for making this possible. I’ve forgotten much of what I learned in school but those poems our classes memorized still bring pleasure every time I see a daffodil or a tree or a fork in the road.