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Every two years, since 1986, approximately 12,000 people converge on The Village of Waterloo, New Jersey, to bask in words. At the biennial Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, the largest poetry event in North America, people listen to poetry, read poetry, talk about poetry, ask questions about poetry, dance to poetry, and write poetry.
Moyers interviewed other festival poets for a two-hour documentary and ten half-hour programs featuring individual poets as well as a companion book called Fooling with Words. With his comment, Barks named the book. The book includes Moyers' conversations with 11 poets: Coleman Barks, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Mark Doty, Deborah Garrison, Jane Hirshfield, Stanley Kunitz, Kurtis Lamkin, Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, Paul Muldoon, Marge Piercy, and Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky Stanley Kunitz talks about his poem, "Halley's Comet." Kunitz saw the comet when he was five in 1910 and this childhood memory burst forth as a poem when he was almost 90 years old. Coleman Barks began collecting words in a notebook at the age of 12. In addition to writing his own poetry, Barks translates the works of Jelaluddin Rumi, the 13th century Persian mystic poet. He mentions a line from one of Rumi's poems that "I wish everyone could say to someone in their life, 'I see my beauty in you.'" Lorna Dee Cervantes talks about her belief that poetry saved her life and Mark Doty states that "Perhaps my impulse to write has to do with that desire to meet, to make a space, if you will, where the interiority of the writer and the inner life of the reader might have a sort of conversation." Deborah Garrison's poems recorded in the book are "The Boss," "Please Fire Me," "A Kiss," "An Idle Thought," and "Father, R.I.P. Sums Me Up at Twenty-Three." Jane Hirshfield discusses the connection between her poetry and her study of Zen. Kurt Lamkin discusses the festival experience. "They call it a festival, but it's like a carnival -and you're the ride." "Poetry is what saved me through the years. I started writing when I was about nine. I discovered that I could go into a space where there is language - language that is mine, which is completely private and where I can do anything with it," Shirley Geok-lin Lim said. Go To Page: 1 2
The copyright of the article Fooling with Words in Word Play is owned by Sandra Linville. Permission to republish Fooling with Words in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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