Princeton Poetry Festival features poets from Ghana to Princeton

To Paul Muldoon, putting together the Princeton Poetry Festival is like creating a menu — only instead of food, he is organizing a range of poetry to appeal to all tastes.

The Princeton Poetry Festival is back for its third year, giving a stage to poets from as far away as Ghana to as close to home as Princeton. The event, which occurs every other year, is presented by the Princeton University Lewis Center for the Arts Performance Central and will be held in the Richardson Auditorium on Friday, March 15 and Saturday, March 16.

“Just gradually over the course of the couple of years, I’ve put together the program, mindful again of having a balanced diet,” said Muldoon, festival organizer and Howard G.B. Clark ’21 University Professor. “It’s like putting together a menu.”

Muldoon, who was born in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, ensured that the poetry menu had an assortment of cultures and ages — for both educational and enjoyment purposes.

“I like the idea of expanding the world pictures of readers and indeed of writers,” Muldoon said in an interview in his university office.

Featured poets include Bei Dao and Xi Chuan from China, Bejan Matur from Turkey, Don Paterson from Scotland, Gabeba Baderoon from South Africa, and a host of U.S. poets, including former University students like Monica Youn and Lizzie Hutton.

“We try to get some of the better-known poets and some of the poets that people won’t have heard of,” Muldoon said.

The two-day festival kicks off with the New Jersey State Finals of Poetry Out Loud, a national poetry competition for high school students. The winner and runner-up will participate in an afternoon gala reading, Muldoon said.

“I’m excited about the Poetry Out Loud,” said Gary Whitehead, featured poet and panelist who is also an English and creative writing teacher at Tenafly High School. “I think it’s a great way to open up the festival.”

Aside from the special Poetry Out Loud showcase, there will be daily readings and panel discussions.

Whitehead as well as Lizzie Hutton, a University alumni currently working toward her PhD at the University of Michigan, are two of the poets involved in a panel centered on difficulty.

“What I thought I’d do this year was to ask the poets to respond to the idea of difficulty — just to think about the word ‘difficulty’ and what it might mean to them,” said Muldoon.

As educators — Hutton taught at the University of Michigan for 12 years before going for her PhD — Muldoon, Whitehead and Hutton are particularly excited to expose young people to poetry, especially given its somewhat complex nature.

“For students, I think it’s a really valuable experience to go out and hear poetry and see it performed and to see it appreciated by a mass audience,” said Whitehead. “So often poetry is something that is done in school and I think some students can see it as difficult, a task they don’t want to necessarily engage in.”

According to Hutton, having a poet actively read his or her work will add a relatable element to the poetry. Audience members will actually see and hear the work from the poet.

“To be involved in something like the Princeton Poetry Festival, it just gives me a stage where people can hear me that I would not get elsewhere,” Whitehead said.

Whitehead will be reading poetry from his new book “A Glossary of Chickens,” slated for release in early March by the Princeton University Press, as well as new and old material, while Hutton will read poems from her 2011 book “She’d Waited Millennia.”

For Hutton, one of the draws to poetry is that it grants the discussion of otherwise challenging topics.

“Things that are harder to talk about become more possible in poetry because of the way it can deal with language,” Hutton said. “And the effectives that it achieves are not necessarily rational effects; they’re musical or aesthetic effects.”

Similarly, Muldoon said that people turn to poetry to make sense of situations.

“Poetry is, whether we know it or not, important to us,” he said. “And we do know it at key moments in our lives. When someone is born, when someone gets married, when someone dies, people reach for a poem.”

Muldoon hopes to attract people from all over to come and really learn about poetry. “I think people who come to this festival will come out enlivened by their sense of what poetry is like in the world,” he said. “I really believe that.”

He did create a menu with variety, after all.

For further information, visit princeton.edu/arts/poetryfestival. Readings and discussions begin at 2 p.m. both days and are ticketed: $15 a day for a single ticket and $25 for a two-day pass. The student fare is $10 a day. The Poetry Out Loud component is at 10 a.m. on Friday and is free admission. Advance tickets can be purchased through University Ticketing (609) 258-9220.