We hope you'll join us this October 20 to 23, as we present our annual Poets Forum in partnership with the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, featuring a reading by the Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets and a series of conversations among the distinguished poets.
In the meantime, take a look at an excerpt from the Dodge Blog’s Q&A series Ask a Poet, in which they interviewed Linda Gregerson, one of the Chancellors who will participate in the festival.
Dodge Blog: What is something you have recently discovered about poetry?
Linda Gregerson: What I discover again and again, and what is always stirring to discover, is how poetry demands, and helps us to imagine, the best of us. If we come to it complacently, as readers or writers, it will call our bluff. If we come to it with inflexible opinions or jaded hearts, it will turn its back on us. If we come to it distractedly, it will either shake us to attention or turn to gibberish. You cannot con a poem.