Festival season is filled with events that celebrate flowers, music, cultural heritage, regional history and the arts. Last June, a new category joined the roster when Writers & Books hosted the city’s first annual Poetry Festival at the Highland Park Bowl.
Writers & Books executive director Alison Meyers wanted to found an open-air poetry festival that would bring together a diversity of voices and audience members from all walks, celebrate the power of the spoken word and bridge presumed divides.
Her work and faith in the community paid off — over the course of three weather-blessed evenings, more than 500 people gathered to hear the poets’ voices resound in the natural amphitheater. Attendees brought blankets, picnics and pups to the sylvan hilltop park, creating an idyllic scene on the sloping lawn that could have been pulled from an antique painting. Passersby on evening strolls and bike rides were drawn in by the voices and lingered, some returning on subsequent nights.
“It’s as out in the open as it could possibly be — a space everyone knows,” said Tyler Barton, one of the 2024 poets who is now artistic director at Writers & Books. (He was previously based in Saranac Lake and served as the program manager for the Adirondack Center for Writing.)
“It was a beautiful and rewarding way to spend a summer evening,” Barton said. “I’m used to reading in clubs or bookstores, small corners of spaces where there are often other things going on and the poetry reading is just kind of shoved in the corner. It was great to have poetry take center stage.”
Barton kicked off his turn at the mic with a reading of “I Come from There” by beloved Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, taking the opportunity to share his platform with a voice crying for freedom, self-determination and safety for family and community in his homeland.
Though Darwish died in 2008, Barton reminded a receptive audience about the enduring silencing of Palestinian voices.
“Writers are an essential part of any society, and if we let ourselves become ignorant to the deaths of the hundreds of journalists killed in Gaza over the last year and a half, then we’re only training ourselves to be silent when writers, artists, and the press face oppression here in America.”
In addition to platforming Darwish’s perspective, Barton aimed to give listeners who were there to hear him an insight into his own artistry and humanity: “I’m glad when writers let audiences know where they stand, because it helps me understand their work better.”
Bearing witness to diverse and sometimes suppressed perspectives is entirely the point of such a festival, which last year also included local and regional treasures Lu Highsmith, Albert Abonado, Chen Chen, Jessica Cuello and Cornelius Eady. Rochester-based writer, educator, and community activist Tokeya C. Graham will read this year, including work from her new book, and reflections on her community-based initiative, “The Black Healing Project.”
Graham believes writers have a responsibility to tell the truth, but also embody the possibility of love and hope. She noted that, in a time of stepped-up censorship of the written word and danger to writers themselves, in-person meetings and spoken words are paramount.
“I believe that art is political, right from the moment that a person decides to claim their voice — from an oral tradition, to use that voice to tell news, to create a lasting family history, to agitate a system, to love, to laugh, to sing, to emote — writers and poets have always been the storytellers, the history makers and keepers,” said Graham.
This year’s event has an emphasis on intergenerational connections and the role of writers in creating social change; an influence of the headlining artist, New York State Poet Laureate Patricia Jones Spears. She has been collaborating with Writers & Books throughout the spring to present “Across Generations: Creating New Democratic Vistas,” a statewide set of workshops and programs meant to elevate civil discourse and promote work toward a shared future.
Toward that end, the 2025 roster features both established and emerging poets, including tweens from Rochester Academy, who will present work created during the Writers & Books in-school creative writing program.
The festival will also feature Brooklyn-based, disabled and queer poet of the Bangladeshi diaspora Ashna Ali; “In the Tradition” with local poet-actors Reenah Golden, Anderson Allen and David Shakes; Hobart and William Smith Colleges professor Kathryn Cowles; writer, educator and cultural worker Kathy Engel; and SUNY Brockport professor emeritus Ralph Black, who said the festival’s intergenerational focus is essential — something that has connected communities of poets since Homer.
While he stands with 20th century poet W.H. Auden in grappling with the usefulness of political positions in poetry — can art truly affect change? — Black said lately, he’s found himself writing about ecological collapse.
“You know, the fires are burning pretty fiercely, and goddamn it, you need to sort of stand up there and say your piece, because it’s a lot better than keeping silent,” he said.
Black will share a range of work that may touch on politics but will center on family, nature and food — a defiant celebration of the deep joys of human life and connection amid the horrors. Modern poetry, he said, has a direct line to humanity’s earliest traditions of storytelling, when people were singing songs to each other around the fire.
“Done well, there’s a real intimacy to it.”
Poetry in the (Highland Park) Bowl takes place Wednesday, June 11 through Friday, June 13. The festival aims to be accessible to everyone, on all fronts, with considerations for mobility, provided ASL interpretation, support-how-you’re-able ticketing (free to $50) and live-streaming for those who can’t make it to the park.
Rebecca Rafferty is a contributor to CITY.
This article appears in Dec 1-31, 2024.
