The Sunken Garden Poetry Festival draws people out on the grass, en masse, at the Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, Connecticut.
Everyone thought poet/teacher Rennie McQuilkin was quixotic when he and then-Hill-Stead Museum Director Sarah Lytle decided to create an outdoor poetry festival — especially since they toured the proposed garden area on the museum’s Farmington, Connecticut, grounds during a snowstorm in February.
But McQuilkin, who served as director of the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival for nine years, was undaunted. “I believed from my own experience that poetry only came into its full being through performance,” he says. Lytle, fresh from the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina where poetry factored large, knew she needed to come up with some draws to a museum whose will dictates that nothing change. (The Hill-Stead Museum is the former estate of noted architect Theodate Pope Riddle.)
“So we walked into the sunken garden in a blizzard on a morning in February,” McQuilkin says of that day in 1992. “It didn’t take us long to see this was a natural amphitheater. We realized we had a perfect place and idea but no publicity.”
Working with Lary Bloom, then editor of the now-defunct Northeast Magazine, they did a little test. They created something McQuilkin calls a poetry party, scheduled for the Joseloff Gallery at the University of Hartford. The space holds 125. McQuilkin says 300 people showed up. “We realized this was something people had a thirst for.”
Founders Rennie McQuilkin and Sarah Lytle | Photo courtesy of Hill-Stead Museum
McQuilkin was not surprised, then, (although he may have been one of only a few) when 800 people showed up to hear poet Hugh Ogden read at the festival’s opening night in 1992. “Everybody’s mouths dropped,” he says, “but not ours due to the poetry parties.”
The festival’s popularity has not waned over the years, even when it moved from being free to having a charge. Having 1,000 people attend is not unusual.
Nor are poetry fans the only ones to appreciate this picturesque poetry space. The list of poetry Who’s Who over the festival’s 23 years includes everyone from Galway Kinnell to Sharon Olds and Mark Doty. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins has called the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival “a cultural phenomenon.” Among those scheduled to speak this year are Marie Howe, the 2012-2014 Poet Laureate of New York State, and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Vijay Seshadri.
When it started, Sunken Garden was one of a very few poetry festivals. “Now there are a number of festivals like this,” says McQuilkin, a published poet who runs the Simsbury, Connecticut-based publishing company Antrim House. “But this was quite unique. People came from California to look at it [to possibly duplicate.] It has given courage to those who have founded similar festivals.”
