You won't find any volumes of poetry in Don Scheidt's house.
A retired tax collector who is quick to point out that the IRS is not a very poetic organization, Scheidt does not enjoy reading haiku, iambic pentameter or free verse.
But every other year, he spends a long autumn weekend listening to the stuff read aloud at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, which bills itself as the largest gathering of its type in North America.
If you think that a non-poet would be disinterested in questions of the day such as "How often does the spirit come?" you're wrong.
"People here are so creative and insightful," explained Scheidt, 60, an Andover resident who shelled out $78 for a four-day pass to the festival, a veritable versapalooza whose 11th edition opened Thursday and runs through Sunday. It's being held in Waterloo Village, Stanhope, N.J., which is about 50 miles from New York City.
Organizers were expecting 20,000 people to come to this year's festival at a site that has hosted events from beer festivals to, well, Lollapalooza, the 1990s traveling music festival.
It was the first time there for Linda Gregg, who has written eight volumes of poetry and won a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Walking through the festival Thursday after talking with a group consisting mostly of high school students, Gregg stepped aside for a strolling mariachi band.
It reminded her a bit, she acknowledged, of San Francisco's Haight-Asbury neighborhood, where she lived in the 1960s.
"It has a very democratic feel," she said.
Not far away, high school students were taking turns improvising raps and some adults were reading aloud the works of Walt Whitman.
In a dozen tents _ the kind you'd see at a fancy wedding, not a campground _ poets were reading, pontificating and fielding questions.
And in moments that poets might find inspiring, leaves were falling and the aroma of pulled pork filled the air.
Many of the people attending are poets. It's been said, after all, that more people are writing poetry that reading it.
Salesman/poet Kevin Burris and his fiancee, office manager/poet Katie Phillips, drove from the Chicago suburbs for the festival.
Burris said when he's been there in the past, highlights have come when poets on panels have debated the meaning of their art. "Watching geeks argue about some obscure matter of poetry is fun," he said, "to other geeks."
For 15-year-old Nick Davis, who might be the laureate of the sophomore class at Morristown High School, it was thrilling to see big names such as Andrew Motion, who definitely is the poet laureate of England.
"I think it's a good opportunity for me to hear other peoples' work," said Davis, who keeps his poems in a Green Day notebook and aspires to making sure people don't think poetry is only for "sissies."
The festival's organizers were expecting a big response from a program scheduled for Saturday night in which several nearly two dozen renowned poets were to answer Gwendolyn Brooks' poetic question, "How is the truth to be said?"
When Gregg talked, she answered the question about when her spirit _ her muse _ is there to inspire her to produce.
"It feels like the spirit is always there, always, always, always," she said. "The thing that's confusing to me is: Why, if that's true, am I sometimes inspired but sometimes not?"
Poetry, indeed.
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On the Net:
Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival: http://www.dodgepoetryfestival.org
