Restoring the Power of Poetry: Geraldine R. Dodge
 The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival’s appeal and its stature as the largest poetry event in North America is largely the result of what the late Stanley Kunitz praised as its “great democratic spirit.” It has not only included Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners, but also just-emerging voices from the spoken word and poetry slam scenes. Festival Poets have ranged in age from eighteen to ninety-eight, and have come from every region of the United States, and from Bangladesh, Chile, China, El Salvador, Israel, Iran, Lebanon, Mexico, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Philippines, Poland, South Africa, Syria, Vietnam, and many other countries. 
At the Dodge Poetry Festival, experiencing a connection to poets and poetry is given center stage. Since its inception in 1986, 140,000 people from 42 states have gathered under the festival tents to celebrate poetry as a living art. For many of the 42,000 high school students who have come to the festival, it is the first time they have experienced a sense of the size of the poetry community.
The festival has given rise to five PBS television series, including four hosted by Bill Moyers and seen by a national audience of nearly 50 million. The footage from those popular series, and audio recordings from past Festivals, now comprises the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival Archive. Consisting of over 2,500 hours of recordings, it is one of the most extraordinary records of contemporary poetry in the world. (Visit Dodge's YouTube Channel to see selections from the archive.)
In its first year, the Dodge Poetry Festival spawned a complementary Poetry-in-the-Schools Program that has since sent poets into every county in New Jersey to work with nearly 3,000 teachers and over 50,000 students. With the ever-increasing accessibility of audio and video materials on the web, it is possible the festival experience can be shared with students, teachers, poets, and poetry lovers the world over.
“The Dodge Poetry Program dispels, at least temporarily, the notion that poetry is the most neglected of the arts… 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.”
--Billy Collins, U.S. Poet Laureate 2001-2003, Inside Borders, September 2002
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