By Audrey Levine, Staff Writer
For East Mountain Road resident Jim Haba, the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival was not just about the poets who shared their work, or the hundreds of people who attended the biennial event.
It was about allowing people to immerse themselves in a form of literature with which they were previously unfamiliar, and even a little afraid.
”What moved me the most was the way in which the technical people (working at the event) became completely absorbed in the festival itself,” said Mr. Haba, who served as the festival’s director from its first year in 1986 until his retirement in 2008. “The people who were there didn’t stay immersed in their distant jobs, but fell into the world of poetry. The idea of the festival was always that it existed for people who didn’t know what poetry was, but who fell into it.”
In 1986, Mr. Haba was a professor in the English department at Rowan University when representatives from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation approached him to assess his interest in organizing a festival dedicated only to poetry.
”At the time, I was also organizing poetry events on campus and had a grant from the state to do a year-long poetry program,” he said. “The foundation had done a survey and found that less than 2 percent of funding for arts went to literature, and a smaller portion than that went to poetry. They decided to develop a festival to change this.”
For Mr. Haba, working with the festival which was usually held in Waterloo Village, in Stanhope, but spent 2004 at Duke Farms was an opportunity to make poetry important, especially over a sustained period of time. He said he enjoyed watching people becoming thoroughly immersed in the festival as they listened to the about 50 poets who attended each year, and spread their time among the between six and 12 events happening at any one time during the days.
”People gave up the resistance they had to poetry,” he said. “I enjoyed creating that experience.”
As director, one of Mr. Haba’s main jobs was to find the poets who could possibly read at the festival each year. He said he would only invite people who he had heard read their work beforehand.
”It was my job to find and bring poets who could be effective to the audience, and be available and interesting to them,” he said. “I invited people I had heard reading because it was about the physical experience, not books published and awards.”
Especially for Mr. Haba who was used to working with about 10 to 30 students in one semester, having the opportunity to share poetry with hundreds of people was a special treat for a man who, himself, did not start writing poetry seriously until more than 20 years after he first expressed interest in it at 12 years old.
”I was interested in poetry then, when I got a sense of what a poem was,” he said. “But I came to art from a point of view of visual art.”
Still, Mr. Haba said he had a real interest in the art form, and arranged for poets to read to students while teaching at Rutgers University from 1966 to 1972, in addition to holding poetry workshops.
According to Mr. Haba, the festival broke traditions of how poetry was originally taught in the classroom, where students were forced to read work out loud, and poems were often “used to humiliate.” He said the festival eliminated the structures of prescribed learning to allow people to just immerse themselves in the poems.
What also helped, Mr. Haba said, were some early changes made to the festival that added days for only students and only teachers, with the remaining two days for the general public. He said the festival was initially only scheduled to be held on Friday night, all day Saturday and Sunday.
In conducting a general survey with teachers, however, Mr. Haba said they found there was a desire to bring students to the festival as part of the curriculum.
”We immediately changed the festival to accommodate,” he said, saying they opened the festival during the day on Friday. “The initial concept did not include a day for teachers and students.”
Then, after the festival in 1996, Mr. Haba said, a fourth day was added to the festival.
”This was all very exciting on this scale,” he said.
Now, in the first months after his retirement from directing, Mr. Haba will serve as a consultant to the Dodge Foundation, and is working on the archives of the festival, gathered from video and audio recordings of all the poets and activities over the years. He said the recordings were usually done with three or four cameras, all moving around with intimate and varied shots.
”There are more than 2,000 hours of audio and video archives,” he said. “They are very high quality recordings.”
Mr. Haba said the foundation is working with Drew University to create permanent archives, and is planning to look for a grant from the federal government.
”The foundation put $13 million into the (festivals), and that included the funds to record them,” he said. “It is up to someone else to pay for what to do next.”
With all the funds used for previous festivals, the scale of the event might be lessened in the coming years because of dwindling money. According to Martin Farawell, the program director for poetry with the festival, there are no definitive plans for the future.
”A number of municipalities and institutions have reached out to us, interested in hosting the festival,” he said. “At this point, we are simply trying to understand what such a partnership might look like, and to explore options with those who have expressed interest.”
Mr. Farawell said the archive project will continue, but plans for the festival itself remain unsure.
As for Mr. Haba, aside from his work in the literary arts, he said he has also long dabbled in the visual arts, having studied drawing and sculpture, and creating such work for many years. He said he paints paper collages, which are abstract pieces of work.
”I like the absence of words, and the directness of the textures and colors in relation to each other,” he said. He said he makes separate pieces all of different sizes, weights and colors then assembles them together to create one piece of art. “I like being surprised by what happens when I assemble it. It is a kind of language, but not in a linear sequence.”
In the past, Mr. Haba said, he has also made ceramic tile murals that he sold in Boston, New York and Princeton.
Now that he is retired, Mr. Haba said, he is looking to focus more on his visual arts work, possibly putting together a gallery, and is looking to devote more time to his own writing. Before starting with the festival, he said, he put together a manuscript for a book, but put it aside while working with the Dodge Foundation.
”The world is made up of networks and favors,” he said. “I didn’t want that. I wanted choices for the festival to be based on what worked for the audience, and not on the perception of favors (for my work).”
Mr. Haba said he can now focus on his own work, but is proud of the work he did with the Dodge Festival.
”Some of the most moving letters I got (about the festival) were from students who didn’t want to go, but ended up loving it,” he said. “It was an amazing opportunity to make poetry central to people’s lives.”

