Not Just the Ojai Poetry Fest: the Dodge cancels plus news on other nat’l arts cutbacks

Last November, the Southern California poetry scene learned the Ojai Poetry Festival with headliner Robert Bly would not arrive as scheduled in May 2009. We’re not alone in losing arts programming. Arts organizations around the country (and the globe) are cutting down and cutting back. According to an article in USA Today,

The biennial Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, the largest poetry event in North America, drawing as many as 20,000 people to its four-day event, will not be held in 2010 and may not return in its previous form, said David Grant, president and CEO of the Morristown, N.J.-based Dodge Foundation.

The foundation saw its endowment drop by 32% in one year, falling to $205 million from $300 million, Grant said. In order to preserve its grants to other arts organizations, Dodge decided to take one cycle off from the festival, Grant said.

“It’s an extremely painful decision,” Grant said.

The festival, which costs Dodge about $800,000, was held 12 times between 1986 and 2008. During each festival, about 5,000 students and 2,000 teachers attended for free, experiencing the festival’s nearly five dozen internationally acclaimed poets in readings, discussions and conversations focusing on poetry. World-renowned poets the likes of former U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass, Pulitzer Prize-winning poets Paul Muldoon and Franz Wright, Allen Ginsberg and Derek Walcott have all attended past festivals.

“The Dodge Poetry Festival is the single most successful gathering about poetry in my lifetime,” said American poet Edward Hirsch. “There is nothing else like it … without it there will be a gaping hole.”

To read about other cutbacks around the country, go here. These include:

Alabama The economic downtown is being felt at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival (ASF) in Montgomery, where this season’s major production has been cut and personnel cutbacks have been made

Delaware Since its founding in 1945, Opera Delaware, a regional opera company in Wilmington, could count on the successful DuPont company and du Pont family members for survival. When DuPont began pulling back in the 1990s, the state’s high-growth credit card bank, MBNA, stepped up as a major patron of the arts.

Florida Not quite three months into its 11th season, Florida Repertory Theatre in Fort Myers, Fla., was “falling off the precipice,” said Bob Cacioppo, founder and producing artistic director for the non-profit company.

Indiana The Indianapolis Museum of Art derives about 70% of its operating budget from the museum’s endowment, which has been hammered by the economic downturn. The endowment’s value has fallen by more than 26% from $381 million in January 2008 to $280 million this January.

Louisiana The Strand Theatre in Shreveport LA must receive $175,000 in emergency donations from its supporters by March 31 or the performing arts venue will close at the end of this season, according to Executive Director Danny Fogger.

Michigan In her State of the State address, Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm proposed eliminating the state Department of History, Arts and Libraries, which funnels state support to arts and cultural organizations and libraries. Meanwhile, the GM Foundation, the charitable arm of General Motors, told about a dozen arts and cultural organizations last month that they won’t be getting their annual stipends this year.

North Carolina Staff at the Temple Theatre in Sanford, N.C., announced at the beginning of the year that plummeting sales and grants had left the playhouse in danger of closing its doors: “If the Temple Theatre closes, the whole county goes dark.”

South Dakota arts patrons are using a Facebook page to protest proposed state budget cuts that would eliminate the South Dakota Arts Council. Ivan Fuller, interim chairman of Augustana College’s Performing & Visual Arts Department, created the Facebook page to help people reach their state lawmakers. “I sent an invitation to 150 of my friends, and there are now over 6,000 people who have received the invitation, 1,000 of whom have already responded and are writing letters to their legislators,” Fuller said. “This is the new kind of grass-roots movement that we hope will make a difference.”

WISCONSIN As the economy sank last year, the gleaming, glass performing arts center that helps anchor Madison, Wis., cut back on programming and cut staff. But the big challenge for the Overture Center for the Arts, remained despite the cuts. The center, which includes a 2,251-seat concert hall and the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art must come up with $28 million to pay off a construction loan due in 2011.