Fooling with Words: A Celebration of Poets and Their Craft - Hardcover

Moyers, Bill

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0688173462 ISBN 13: 9780688173463

Publisher: William Morrow, 1999

Synopsis

Fooling with Words is an intimate, inspirational celebration of language in its most exalted form and of the importance of poetry in our lives today. In dozens of poems and a series of fascinating conversations with poets of all stripes gathered for the acclaimed Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, Fooling with Words brings poetry to life for the reader.

Bill Moyers has been covering the poetry beat for more than a decade, and in the fall of 1998 he returned to the Dodge Festival with his public television cameras, capturing the performances of the poets, and, in interviews with them, their dazzling array of images, metaphors, and emotions. 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, including three years in a monastery when she didn't write at all.

Moyers listens to these and other poets including Lorna Dee Cervantes, Deborah Garrison, Paul Muldoon, Marge Piercy, Kurtis Lamkin, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Stanley Kunitz, and Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, and weaves another invaluable and enjoyable tapestry of poems with the memorable voices of the poets themselves. Anyone who loves poetry or is seeking a special gift will cherish Fooling with Words.

About this title

About the Author

Bill Moyers's career as a television journalist has earned him more than thirty Emmy Awards. His reporting and interviews have been the basis for seven bestsellers. He is author of Genesis (Doubleday), The Language of Life (Main Street Books), and Healing and the Mind (Doubleday). He lives in New Jersey with his wife and creative collaborator, Judith Davidson Moyers.

Bill Moyers has been covering the poetry beat for more than a decade, and in the fall of 1998 he returned to the Dodge Festival with his public television cameras, capturing the performances of the poets, and, in interviews with them, their dazzling array of images, metaphors, and emotions. 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, including three years in a monastery when she didn't write at all.

Moyers listens to these and other poets including Lorna Dee Cervantes, Deborah Garrison, Paul Muldoon, Marge Piercy, Kurtis Lamkin, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Stanley Kunitz, and Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, and weaves another invaluable and enjoyable tapestry of poems with the memorable voices of the poets themselves. Anyone who loves poetry or is seeking a special gift will cherish Fooling with Words.

Reviews

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.

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

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

The applause begins as Stanley Kunitz rises from the front row, makes his way up the steps, and strides across the stage toward the lectern, his arms swinging gaily at his sides. In his right hand he carries a collection of poems, which he places on the small podium while reaching with his other hand for the inside pocket of his lime green coat, fishing for his glasses. The applause has turned to cheers. He is a familiar and revered figure here. Now people are on their feet. Their hurrahs ricochet around the tent, and the noise of four thousand clapping hands sounds like rain on the canvas roof Kunitz stands motionless at the microphone, his slight figure no more imposing than a sparrow. He is a shy man, and modest, and he isn't sure how to respond. Then a small smile creases his white mustache, he lifts a hand toacknowledge the reception, and opens the book of poems. Once again, the applause soars before the audience settles hack to listen.

Out beyond the tent America is trapped in a media warp of Monicamania, where words are tipped in toxin and hurled like red-hot missiles in a rhetorical nuclear war. Here, inside this hushed sanctuary, Stanley Kunitz, acknowledging "the dark news emanating from the capital, "reads a poem he had been moved to write during "the even darker days of Watergate." The poem--"The Lincoln Relics"--recalls an exhibit he once saw in Washington of the contents found in the pocket of the sixteenth president on the night of his assassination. The "watchfob and ivory pocket knife, a handkerchief of Irish linen, a button severed from his sleeve, " a five-dollar Confederate note, and the gold-rimmed spectacles "mended with a loop of string" made, for the poet, "a noble, dissolving music out of homely fife and drum. "Addressing the slain president, whose innocence "was to trust/ the better angels of our nature,/ even when the Union cracked/ and furious blood/ ran north and south/ along the lines of pillage," Kunitz asks, "In this Imperial City/ awash in gossip and power,/... Has no one told you/ how the slow blood leaks/from your secret wound?"

There is not a sound in the tent, except for the quiet intensity of the poet's voice. He tells of taking a night walk along the Potomac, "searching for the prairie star,/ westward scanning the horizon/ for its eloquent and magnanimous light,/ yearning to be touched by its fire:" The longing in the poem is palpable in the tent, and as this very young old man, age ninety-three, descends from the stage, the audience stands in a tumult of applause. In a rational world, I tell myself Stanley Kunitz would be Time magazine's Man of the Century-- not for armies commanded, cures discovered, or nations saved but because, through a discordant century of furious change, his voice--the poet's voice--speaks to what Lincoln himself called "the mystic chords of memory.

Let's begin with a remembrance of long ago.

I was five years old when Halley's Comet visited Worcester, Massachusetts, the city of my birth, in 1910. When I was near ninety, the memory of that encounter, which had been simmering so long, finally emerged in the shape of a poem.

Edition details

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0688173462
• ISBN 13: 9780688173463
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304