The biennial Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in Waterloo, New Jersey, has been called the Woodstock of poetry. Taking place over the course of several (often hot and sticky) summer days, the festival comprises readings and workshops and performances. Audiences under the big top can reach a couple thousand. It is stunning to see so many lovers of poetry gathered in one place.

For Fooling with Words, Moyers interviews 11 of the poets on the festival's 1998 roster. "Talking to poets about their lives," he says, "makes their poetry more accessible to me." And what a variety of poets and lives he has come up with! The youngest is New Yorker senior editor Deborah Garrison (A Working Girl Can't Win), then 32; the eldest, Stanley Kunitz, 93 years old and wearing a lime-green jacket. In between are Coleman Barks, Robert Pinsky, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Paul Muldoon, Marge Piercy, Mark Doty, Jane Hirshfield, Kurtis Lamkin, and Shirley Geok-Lin Lim. These conversations are dotted with poems. "I like to know about the experiences that produced the poet," says Moyers, and the intermingling of conversation and poetry is a wonderful, casual way to be introduced to a poet's sensibility. Doty discusses the pain of "writing about the hardest things in the world." Hirshfield talks about her Zen practice and the notion that ideas "can graze inside us like animals who reshape the landscape with their grazing." Throughout, there is the sense of lives that would not be bearable without poetry. "Poetry is what has saved me," says one poet here; "You never know when your poem will come to someone's rescue," chimes another. --Jane Steinberg


From School Library Journal
YA-Moyers's fascination with poets in performance hasn't waned since he first visited the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in Waterloo, NJ, and documented what he found in the PBS series The Language of Life and its accompanying book (Doubleday, 1996). In this new volume-smaller in size but just as rich-he returns to the festival, offering the work of 11 poets, from established writers like Marge Piercy and Robert Pinsky to newcomer Deborah Garrison. Again Moyers interweaves his own voice with the voices of the poets as they read their work and discuss their lives. His perceptive questions and comments, and the poets' responses, place each poem in the context of the writer's life and illuminate the whole experience of writing. Both the art and the artists become more accessible. Teens open to the genre will find reflections of their own lives that will help them appreciate the work and the experience of others, and perhaps even move them to join in the creative process.Jan Tarasovic, West Springfield High School, Fairfax County, VA Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Moyers here interviews 11 American poets (e.g., Robert Pinsky, Mark Doty, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, and Paul Muldoon) whose voices echo the diversity of the United StatesAa wonderful jumble of genders, ethnic groups, and religions. This book is not a how-to; interviews (accompanied by the interviewee's poetry) focus on the poet as an individual, the creative process, and enjoying poetry and reveling in its sound. The interviews reveal the passion and focus the poets bring to their writing and how they transmute mundane occurrences into vital, meaningful life experiences. Based on a two-hour PBS documentary airing this fall and ten half-hour programs Moyer did at the Dodge Poetry Festival in fall 1998, this delightful book is highly recommended for all libraries. [BOMC featured selection.]AShana C. Fair, Ohio Univ. at Zanesville Lib.-AShana C. Fair, Ohio Univ. at Zanesville Lib. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
PBS crown jewel Bill Moyers took the 1998 Dodge Poetry Festival in Waterloo, New Jersey, as the occasion for a broadcast documentary, a video series, and a book of interviews smaller than but as engaging as his Language of Life (1995). He talks with 11 poets this time, one of them Irishman Paul Muldoon. They are a multicultural band, including Jewish nonagenarian Stanley Kunitz, Jewish radical feminist Marge Piercy, self-designated "ChicanIndian" Lorna Dee Cervantes, Malaysian Chinese immigrant Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, gay "AIDS widow" Mark Doty, former office-working girl Deborah Garrison, Zen Buddhist Jane Hirschfield, African American oral poet-musician Kurtis Lamkin, and a couple of straight but not conventional white males. And multiculturalism is not the best thing about them, taking a back seat to their articulateness about how and why they write poetry and about particular influences on it, such as Zen on Hirschfield's work and the religious ecstasy of Rumi on Coleman Barks, who has popularized the classic Persian poet more than any other English translator. Ray Olson

FROM OUR EDITORS

Poetic joy. That's what award-winning journalist Bill Moyers's beautiful new book of interviews with 11 of America's poetry-makers (Stanley Kunitz, Coleman Barks, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Paul Muldoon, Jane Hirshfield, Mark Doty, Robert Pinsky, Deborah Garrison, Marge Piercy, Kurtis Lamkin) captures as it probes how and why poets do what they do.

The deep happiness that comes from reading, writing, and hearing poetry, Moyers insists, is part of its power through the centuries. It's what made his high school teachers who were "married to the English language" so passionate about transmitting it to their students. It's also behind poetry's rising popularity in the United States, seen in everything from Manhattan subway billboards to the books of poems that pop up in hotel rooms right next to the usual Bibles.

That visible joy is what impressed Moyers when he started recording the lives of poets at the Geraldine Dodge Poetry Festival, an event that has attracted 50,000 attendees since 1986. The veteran broadcaster -- a man who's practically seen it all -- noticed something overwhelming in that gathering of young and old people listening to poems read aloud. "I cannot recall seeing anywhere else so many happy people in one place," he writes.

But right off the bat, Moyers acknowledges a basic fact -- poetry isn't easy stuff. It can baffle, and the people who write it can seem like otherworldly creatures. Characteristically, though, Moyers doesn't let these difficulties stop him. In fact, a key strength of Moyers's book is his explanation of what his book is not, which comes on the very first page:

This is not a book for the experts. I am a journalist, not a literary critic; the only sure thing I can tell you about poetry is that I like it. The sounds of poems are pleasing to me, and I enjoy a poem read aloud even when I do not wholly understand it.

One thing that helps Moyers understand a poem is talking to its maker, and that's his motivation for interviewing poets, of all ages, genders, races, and styles:

Talking to poets about their lives also makes their poetry more accessible to me. Once I know how a poet feels about a granddaughter or a father's death or about hiding under the steps to read while other kids were playing soccer, I am more likely to hear the poet's voice in the poem.

This is how Moyers approaches many of his subjects, and his deep desire to understand helps him make difficult topics accessible. He takes pains to approach poets as people:

Just as I read biographies of political leaders to see their lives in context, I like to know about the experiences that produced the poet. Perhaps this desire to see the human side of the art is the reason I am a journalist and not a critic.

In a refreshing change, Moyers does not present poets as depressed, womanizing, drunk, or destitute creatures -- just a few of the more common stereotypes. Instead, this consummate asker of excellent questions paints portraits of a grandfather, an immigrant girl, a young boy in New Jersey who falls in love with the sound of stops said in a train conductor's voice. He focuses on trying to understand how lines like these happen:

          I have walked through many lives,
          some of them my own,
          and I am not who I was,
          though some principle of being
          abides, from which I struggle
          not to stray

This excerpt, from Stanley Kunitz's "The Layers," is preceded by Moyers's account of Kunitz's performance at the Dodge Poetry Festival, in which Moyers details the magic in the tent, the riveted attention of the listeners to this man who has helped so many young poets and has founded several key arts institutions. Moyers movingly calls Kunitz, at age 93, "a very young old man."

Moyers also begins to chronicle something else in that first interview with Kunitz, when he remarks on the poet's youthfulness. Again and again, in each interview, Moyers explains why poets live off poetry, and how the art keeps them alive.

So when Lorna Dee Cervantes says that "poetry really changed my life, saved it. I mean that literally," Moyers gets Cervantes to elaborate, to explain the connection between the act of writing poems and staying alive:

Right after my first book was accepted by the publisher, I moved to Provincetown, and I was unpacking all my things and I found this foldout from my middle school class. Pictures of all the kids in that class. It hadn't been that long -- I was about twenty-three or twenty-four -- and I looked at those pictures and I thought: Wow! He's dead, died driving drunk. She's dead, her boyfriend killed her. This couple's dead, overdosed on barbiturates. He's dead, killed in prison; And on and on. I realized that almost fifty percent of my junior high school class was dead. I could have been one of them.

Moyers not only shows why poetry is essential for poets but also why hearing poetry read aloud can be so powerful. He gets poets to talk about why the seemingly solitary act of writing poems becomes a very public affair. Here, for example, Kunitz tries to explain the "curious relationship between a poet and his audience":

Paul Celan, the great poet of the Holocaust, wrote cryptically that "a poem is solitary and on its way." In my interpretation, the poem is on its way in search of people. For its complete fulfillment it has to find an audience; it has to be invited into some other person's mind and heart. Once the poet lets go of his poems, it is no longer his. It belongs to anyone who wants it. It's a gift.

Moyers's book offers many gifts. It presents some of America's most interesting minds in detail, and it doesn't shy from the tough questions of how poets work and why they work so hard at something so difficult. It offers a treasure trove of pointers on how to read a poem. And it presents a beautiful palette of definitions on what poetry is. To avoid giving it all away, here's just one take, from Coleman Barks, who started collecting words and images at age 12, words that he "loved the taste of, words such as azalea."

Poetry, Barks tells Moyers, is "a fascination or obsession with images and with the taste of words, language that is delicious to the mouth." With his careful and insightful questions, Moyers provides an invaluable guide to that baffling but addictive deliciousness.

—Aviya Kushner

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Fooling with Words is an intimate and inspirational celebration of the power and pleasure of poetry. Bill Moyers brings to life for the reader one of the most vibrant cultural events in the country - the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, the "Woodstock of poetry." Every two years established and emerging poets gather in Waterloo, New Jersey, to share their craft with poetry fans from all over the country. This "demonstration of the democratic spirit," says the dean of American poets, Stanley Kunitz, "is one of the most important revolutions in the whole history of modern poetry in this country.

Bill Moyers has covered that revolution for a decade in a series of public television specials. In the fall of 1998 he returned to the Dodge Festival to record the performances of the poets and, in interviews with them, a dazzling array of sounds insights images, metaphors and emotions. His conversations with the poets take us behind the performance to explore the sources of creativity and imagination. Stanley Kunitz, now ninety-five years old, quietly captivates with his poems "Halley's Comet" and "Touch Me." Coleman Barks not only reads from his translations of Rumi but also shares the poems that he wrote in tribute to his "most beautiful granddaughter." Mark Doty talks with Moyers about "poetry's great power to preserve, its ability to take a moment in time and hold it forever." Jane Hirshfield talks about the influence on her poetry of the eight years she studied Zen.

SYNOPSIS

In the tradition of "The Language of Life" comes the companion volume to a thrilling new public television special--an intimate, inspirational celebration of language in its most exalted form--poetry--and its importance in our lives today.

FROM THE CRITICS

Moyers turns his folksy interview style to poets gathered for the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in Waterloo, New Jersey, showing how and why the poets he interviews began creating and continue creating. One poet writes only while singing, one only in her head and another handwrites complete new drafts each time. But all of them￯﾿ﾽmen, women, old, young, Jewish, African-American, Filipino immigrant￯﾿ﾽwork hard at crafting the words they love so much, as evidenced by the poems reprinted with each interview. Moyers￯﾿ﾽ style dovetails neatly with poetry￯﾿ﾽs recent surge in popularity, from small-town poetry slams to Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky￯﾿ﾽs project of cataloging and videotaping people reciting their favorite poems. But by introducing many poets in brief, Moyers ends up not portraying any with much depth.

People

A clear window into truly poetic souls.

Wall Street Journal

This poetry tasting left me hungry for more. .

Library Journal

Moyers here interviews 11 American poets (e.g., Robert Pinsky, Mark Doty, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, and Paul Muldoon) whose voices echo the diversity of the United States--a wonderful jumble of genders, ethnic groups, and religions. This book is not a how-to; interviews (accompanied by the interviewee's poetry) focus on the poet as an individual, the creative process, and enjoying poetry and reveling in its sound. The interviews reveal the passion and focus the poets bring to their writing and how they transmute mundane occurrences into vital, meaningful life experiences. Based on a two-hour PBS documentary airing this fall and ten half-hour programs Moyer did at the Dodge Poetry Festival in fall 1998, this delightful book is highly recommended for all libraries. [BOMC featured selection.]--Shana C. Fair, Ohio Univ. at Zanesville Lib. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

School Library Journal