Fooling with Words
- Transcript
Funding for this program is provided by the Herb Albert Foundation, and by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Corporate funding is provided by Mutual of America, building America's future through pension and retirement plans, encouraging dialogue and discussion. The Spirit of America, Mutual of America. Running, and time is clocking us from the edge, like an only daughter. Our mother's stream before us cradling their breasts in their hands, oh, pray that what we want is worth this running. Pray that what we're running toward is what we want.
After making love, we hear footsteps. Well, maybe I don't have to read that. This is called Monday in B flat. I can pray all day and God won't come, but if I call 9-1-1, the devil be here in a minute. I'm never going to sleep with Martin Amos or anyone famous. There was a time when a man said poems and friendship grew visible. We have fallen into the place where everything is music, and that's what this place feels like. We feel this vast interconnectedness. It's amazing that this many people can be really genuinely excited about fooling with words.
It's the largest poetry festival in North America. 12,000 people mixing and mingling with scores of poets. Everywhere you turn, there are words. Music, movement. For four days during the Gerlinard Dodge poetry festival, the restored 19th-century village of Waterloo, New Jersey, beats to the pounding heart of poetry. That's a beautiful thing about being here. They call it a festival. It's like a carnival, you know, and you to ride. You can be a rollercoaster if you want or whatever. Pretty some a day. Grandmama sitting on a porch easy rocking a grand baby in her wide lap. Old men sitting in the Lincoln, tasting and talking and talking and tasting. Young boys on the corner, milking a yak yak, wild hands, baggy pants.
Young girls halfway up the block playing, jumping that double dutch, singing this song. They say, can you kind of fall up, be your tiger, school begins at a quality night. A jump one, two, three and a... Round the corner comes this young woman, dragging herself heavy home from work. She sees the young boys, she sees the old men, but when she sees those girls, she just starts smiling. She says, let me get a little bit of that. They say, you can't jump, you two, oh! Why did I say that? Why did I say that? She said, Tanya, you hold my work bag. She said, Nika, come over here girl, I want you to hold my handbag. Josie, hold my grocery bags please. Cabet, take my purse.
Then she starts bobbing her head, jacking arms, trying to catch the rhythm of the ropes. And then she jumps inside those turning loops. The girls cry out, sing this song. They say, can you kind of fall up, be your tiger, school begins at a quality night. A jump one, two, three and a... She's jumping around on one leg, they say, ah! She dances and says, she says, ah! Jump for the girls, mama! Jump for the stars, mama! Jump for the young boys saying, jump mama! Jump mama! Jump for the old men saying, jump mama! Jump for the old woman saying, ah! Go ahead baby! And what the young girls say? What the young girls say?
Ah! The poem is on its way in search of people for its complete fulfillment. It has to have an audience, it has to be in touch with other human beings. The poet, she is working now in a room not unlike this one, the one where I write or you read. Her table is covered with paper. The light of the lamp would be tempered by a shade where the bulb's single harshness might dissolve. But it is not, she has taken it off.
Her poems, I will never know them, though they are the ones I most need. Even the alphabet she writes in, I cannot decipher. Her chair, let us imagine whether it is leather or canvas, vinyl or wicker. Let her have a chair, her shadeless lamp, the table. Let one or two she loves be in the next room. Let the door be closed, the sleeping ones healthy. Let her have time and silence, enough paper to make mistakes and go on. Thank you. Do you remember when you first started writing poetry, what you were doing? I took to writing as soon as I was taught to write. I wrote all through my childhood.
I wrote for school. I wrote secretly in the middle of the night and hid it under my mattress. It was the field in which I developed the self that I became. I've always done it. And so I have no recollection of how it started. You're not the first poet to tell me that he or she started writing very early and wrote secretly. Kid the poems away, put them up in the closet or under the mattress. Why do you suppose that is? Because it is such a private exploration. Because it is so intimate. We write in order to find out who and what we are. And how can you do that if you feel exposed? How can you do that if you feel like you're performing? So it then becomes very strange that this activity which begins in solitude and privacy and that is still essential to me as a writer. I can't write in public. I need undisturbed private time in order to sit down to make the poems. And yet I end up here saying them in public in front of all of these people.
The Envoy. One day in that room, a small rat. Two days later, a snake. Who, seeing me enter, whipped the long stripe of his body under the bed, then curled like a docile house pet. I don't know how either came or left. Later, the flashlight found nothing. For a year I've watched as something terror, grief, entered and then left my body. Not knowing how it came in, not knowing how it went out. It hung where words could not reach it. It slept where light could not go. Its scent was neither snake nor rat, neither sensualist nor ascetic. There are openings in our lives of which we know nothing.
Through them the belled herds travel at will, long-legged and thirsty, covered with foreign dust. Poetry is utterly metaphor. The speaking of everything through each other, all things speak together in metaphor so that when a person writes a poem in which they even mention a fence, the mind of the writer and the mind of the reader actually inhabit fence life for an instant when that word comes in the poem. And so we get a much broader existence because we get to exist with the stones and the weather and the houses. And the ideas as well, the abstract language too, the poetry moves the mind and heart through so many different realms. A few years ago, our local choral society decided to mount a performance of Handel's Messiah. This was very ambitious and a number of us felt some trepidation about the possible results.
The day of the performance, I arrived just about sunset at the church where the concert was taking place. And there was the most extraordinarily beautiful sunset overhead. And it seemed ironic to leave the perfectly accomplished sunset behind and enter the chapel for a doubtful human achievement. There's a word in the poem which might not be familiar, the word is melisma. And melisma is when you're singing and you hold a syllable over many notes as in glory. Right, that orbit is a melisma. This is called Messiah Christmas portions. A little heat caught in gleaming rags, in shrouds of veil, torn and sunshot swaddlings.
Over the Methodist roof, two clouds propose a Zion of their own, blazing colors of tarnish on copper against the steely clothes of a coastal afternoon, December. And under the steeple, the choral society prepares to perform Messiah, pouring in their best blacks and whites onto the raked stage. Not steep, really. But from here, the first pew, they're a looming cloud bank of familiar angels. That neighbor who fights operatically with her girlfriend for one, and the friendly bearded clerk from the post office, tenor trapped in the body of a baritone. Altos from the A&P, soprano from the t-shirt shop. Today, they're all poise, costume and purpose, conveying the right note of distance and formality.
Silence in the hall, anticipatory, as if we're all about to open a gift we're not sure will like. How could they compete with sunsets burnished oratorio? Thoughts which vanish when the violins begin, who'd have thought they'd be so good? Every valley proclaims the solo tenor, a sleek blonde I've seen somewhere before, the liquor store, shall be exalted. And in his handsome mouth, the word is lifted and opened into more syllables than we could count. Central are dilated in a baroque melisma, liquefied. The poor voice seems to make the unplanned landscape, the text predicts, the Lord will heighten and tame.
This music demonstrates what it claims, glory shall be revealed. If arts acceptable evidence, mustn't what lies behind the world be at least as beautiful as the human voice? The tenors lack confidence, and the soloists half of them anyway don't have the strength to found the mighty kingdoms these passages propose. But the chorus altogether equals my burning clouds, and seems itself to burn, commingled powers deeded to a larger centering claim. There aren't anyone we know, acquiring dissolves familiarity in an uppouring rush which will not rest, will not for a moment be still. Aren't we enlarged by the scale of what we're able to desire? Everything, the choir insists, might flame. Inside these wrappings burns another brighter life, quickened now by song.
Hear how it cascades in overlapping, lapidary waves of praise, still time, still time to change. I'd like to read some poem sequences, we are in church, and so they are mostly in the Judeo-Christian tradition. I grew up in the Baptist church, and my grandmother was sanctified, it has something to do with when your grandmother is getting happy, and dancing down the aisle and speaking in tongues, it's very embarrassing when you're 12. And so I spent a lot of my younger years poking her, poking my mother and saying, don't you shout, because my brother and I had to live in that town, and we didn't really think that was good idea. Adam thinking.
He blamed the woman, they often do. Adam thinking, she stolen from my bone. Is it any wonder I hunger to tunnel back inside, desperate to reconnect the rib and clay and to be whole again? Some need is in me, struggling to roar through my mouth into a name. This creation is so fierce, I would rather have been born. Eve thinking. It is wild country here. Brothers and sisters coupling, claw and wing, groping one another. I wait while the clay, two foot, rumbles in his chest, searching for language to call me, but he is slow.
Tonight, as he sleeps, I will whisper into his mouth our names. Thank you very much. People sometimes claim, you know, I write for myself, and there's a level upon which that's true, but if you really wrote for yourself, you just write it in a notebook and put it away. There's no reason in the world to make sure that that language is beautiful and compelling, memorable, moving. If it's only for you, the act of making palm implies that somebody's listening. So we're reaching towards imaginatively another consciousness, another listener. I want to read you two poems which emerge from the illness and death of my partner if it does in years. His name was Wally Roberts, died in January of 1994.
New Dog. Jimmy and Tony can't keep Dino, their cocker Spaniel. Tony's too sick. The daily walks more pressure than pleasure. One more obligation that can't be met. And though we already have a dog, Wally wants to adopt, wants something small and golden to sleep next to him and lick his face. He's paralyzed now from the waist down, whatever's ruining him, moving upward, and we don't know how much longer he'll be able to pet a dog. How many men want another attachment just as they're leaving the world? Wally sits up nights and says, I'd like some lizards, a talking bird, some fish, a little rat. So after I drive to Jimmy and Tony's in the village and they meet me at the door and say, we can't go through with it. We can't give up our dog. I drive to the shelter just to look, and there is bow, bounding, and practically boundless.
One brass concatenation of tongue and tail, unmediated energy, too big, wild, perfect. He not only licks Wally's face, but bathes every irreplaceable inch of his head. And though Wally can no longer feed himself, he can lift his hand and bring it to rest on the rough gilt flanks when they are for a moment still. I have never seen a touch so deliberate. It isn't about grasping. The hand itself seems almost blurred now, softened, though tentative only because so much will must be summoned. Such attention brought to the work, which is all he is now, this gesture toward the restless splendor, the unruly, the golden, the animal, the new.
How do you take something so deeply felt, so inaudible, as grief and work it, find the language that conveys it, that transmits it, that communicates it? This is the place where the poet's craft, our love of the sheer physical pleasures of language, its sonics, its textures, its rhythms, is an enormous ally, because I might write a poem which begins in raw and in co-ate feeling. Most of my poems do begin that way, they come tumbling out of me. And then that's not a poem, that's a cry, that's an utterance that is unshaped, and it feels completely for me.
I let them fall, let them come out wherever they will. When I come back to those words, it's easy to see that they're not capable of giving my feelings, a version of my experience to someone else. It's that act of standing back from them and beginning to shape the language that makes the poem start to be available to another person. This is a poem which came about when I had been invited to contribute a poem to an anthology called Unleashed, and the rubric, the rule of this book, was that all the poems had to be in the voice of the writer's dog. And I thought, no, no, that's not a poem I would ever write. And about a week later, Bowen and I were out for a walk in the woods, and I started to feel like I was picking up these signals. There's a kind of subtle atmospheric transmission taking place, and he wrote a sonnet, what can I say? He's very fond of puns as you will hear, and his poem is called Golden Retrievals.
Fetch, balls and sticks capture my attention seconds at a time. Catch? I don't think so. Bunny, tumbling leaf, a squirrel who's, oh, joy actually scared. Sniff the wind, then I'm off again, muck, pond, ditch, residue of any thrillingly dead thing. And you, either your sunk in the past half-hour walk, thinking of what you never can bring back, or else your off in some fog concerning tomorrow, is that what you call it? My work, to unsnare times warp and woof, retrieving my haze-headed friend, you. The shining bark, a zen-master's bronzy gong calls you here entirely. Now, bow-wow, bow-wow.
Thank you. Do you feel that being called a black poet or a black woman poet is, does that put you off in a subset in a way that you resent? Are there also good things about that? Well, the thing about it is that that's somebody else calling me. Someone said what they call you is one thing. What you answered to is something else. I know people often say I'm a poet who happens to be black. I didn't happen to be black. My mother's black, my child. Would you celebrate with me what I have shaped into a kind of life? I had no model. Born in Babylon, both non-white and woman, what did I see to be except myself?
I made it up here on this bridge between star shine and clay. My one hand holding tight, my other hand, come celebrate with me that every day something has tried to kill me and has failed. The poetry is the art of one human voice. Without denigrating, arts are on a mass scale. I love my TV, I love my computer, my BCR. There's a craving and a satisfaction available in an art that in its nature is on an individual scale. How did you find your voice?
I studied like a musician listening to older musicians. I never felt I was going to be invaded by Yates or Alan Ginsburg or Emily Dickinson. I felt that if I could with my physical voice say further in summer than the birds, pathetic from the grass and minor nations celebrates, I could say that in my New Jersey baritone and have it sound good to me. She wasn't invading me, she was showing me how I could find that my little noise that I make with my breath can be beautiful or elegant because it's saying her words and that's a step toward being able to say my own words. If it is physical, if it is sound, and what am I to do as the listener? Three words, read it aloud. Read it aloud and don't worry about interpreting it or emulating deal good or just read it aloud to relish the consonants and vowels in the way the verbs and adjectives and nouns are set up.
Two television, pierced chamber, not a window on the world but as we call you a box, a tube, terrarium of dreams and wonders, copper of shades, ordained cotillion of phosphors or liquid crystal, homey miracle, tub of acquiescence, vein of defiance. Your patron in the pantheon would be Hermes, raster dance, quick one, little thief, escort of the dying and comfort of the sick.
In the blue glow, my father and little sister sat snuggled in one chair watching you. Their wife and mother was sick in the head. I scorned you and them as I scorned so much. Now, I like you best in a hotel room, maybe minutes before I have to face an audience, behind the doors of the arm-war, box inside a box, Tom and Jerry, or also brilliant and reassuring Oprah Winfrey. Thank you. Thank you for I watched. I watched Sid Caesar speaking French and Japanese not through knowledge, but imagination, his quickness, and thank you. I watched live Jackie Robinson stealing home. That image, oh strong shell, enduring,
flitter than light, like these words we remember in. They too are winged at the helmet and ankles. The challenge for the artist is to find something that isn't already about the culture poetic. I believe that before Baudelaire made the city poetic and Dickens made the city poetic, it wasn't as poetic, the smoke, the dust, the scene, the room of winding streets. That's a process of human imagination taking in its surroundings and discovering how to make art that's related to those surroundings. If there's something in your experience that you think about a lot, that is present in your world a lot, and it moves you, or it has power for you,
and you think, well, but it's not poetic, it's not offensive. That's your jaw, that's your challenge. I wanted to ask about the difficulty of the poems that you write. A lot of people find them very, very difficult to comprehend and understand. And I wanted to ask, do you intend for a specific audience and has your audience changed since you have become the poet laureate? The question is a very cool question about the tremendous difficulty of some of my poems. I think the emphasis on comprehension and analysis should be tempered by realization of what's primary in the art of poetry. What's primary in the art of poetry is the physical encounter with the poem. You must write it with your... The festival is a chance for students, teachers, and the public to meet and hear the poets, to inquire about inspiration, techniques, the discipline of craft that produces the play of sound and spirit. There is time to reflect, to nurture the poet that hides in each of us.
In my odyssey of dead-end jobs, cursed by whatever gods do not console, I end up at a place that makes fake Christmas trees. Thousands, some pink, some blue, one that revolves ever so slowly to the strains of silent night. Sometimes at a sheer despair, I revel up its RPMs and send it spinning wildly through space, door the hammer disguised as a borsum fur. We are all poets ourselves. Almost everybody has sometimes been afflicted with language, which feels absolutely genuine. And most of us have scribbled it down. Sometimes we've actually put down something that we think might be a poem, and then often we've hidden it away out of fear or shame or the possibility that it might really be divine. And then what would we do?
Bronx homies are the craziest. It's true. Lined up at the fences looking down to the traffic crossing town, out past Brooklyn to 95 North, from the house that Ruth built, baby. To the Yankee world of white clapboard and black shutters and they do shut tight. On the sights and the sounds from West Farms and Hunts Point, let me tell you that they do shut tight on the sights and sounds. From West Farms, the Bronx River Projects, the George Washington Bridge to America is all tied up. It's corrupt and the toll is too high for too many. So they stay with El Bronx, El Bronx tattooed onto their arms. They stay with El Bronx tattooed onto their arms. And the shadow canyon cross Bronx, cleaves, leaves, lungs scarred by exhaust, and itchy burning eyes that water for freedom. But this is no land of the free. This is the Bronx. And the homies and Hebrews be lined up at the fences looking down, thinking, to what worlds are they bound?
To what worlds are they bound? The poets out of the black arts movement in the 60s, this is where the rap comes from. Rapist comes from. We are the old men at the rap age. When we started bringing the music and the poetry and stuff together, it was considered, wow, we said, we want poetry that you can take out of these classrooms, that you can read in bars and taverns, that you can read in playgrounds, that you can read on the street. So we did in the 60s. That's what I used to tell my students. You think your stuff is good. See those guys digging a hole in the street there, when they get a minute off to eat a sandwich, go read them a poem. If you don't get hit in the head, if you don't get hit in the head, you've got a future. If you go back black, see yourself, world, world, world, world, world, world, world, go back black, mighty ancient Africa. Creator of the human being, of speech, of music, of the city Africa.
Africa, go back black, see yourself, touch yourself, know yourself, mighty ancient, beautiful Africa. But when you put your hand on your sister, made a slave. When you put your hand on your brother, made him a slave, watch out Africa, watch out Africa, the ghost won't get you. When you put your hand on your sister, made him a slave. Watch out Africa, the ghost won't get you. Watch out for the ghosts. How did I get here on my back in the dark with the wind and water blowing through my ears? How did I get here on my back in the dark with the wind and water blowing through my ears?
Shango, Obatala, Issa, save me, Allah save me, save me, save me, save me. How did I get here on my back in the dark with the wind and water blowing through my ears? My brother, the king, my brother, the king, my brother, the king, sew me to the ghost, my brother, the king, sew me to the ghost. You know, my brother, the king, he worked for Budweiser now, my brother, the king, sew me to the ghost. I believe that you have to read to people, you know what I mean? You have to be writing something that people understand, but at the same time that's profound enough to have some kind of meaning past say to six o'clock news. You know, I think that was Williams that said that. That, you know, the news ain't in the poems, but there's people dying every day for lack of what is found in poems. You know, so that's what I think poetry is as necessary as breath. Ghost, the nigger computers, a bluely reporting, ghost ahead, ghost ahead, the chains and dark, dark, and dark.
If there was light at men, ghost, rotting family, we, ghost eight, three of people flattened and chained and bathed and degraded in their own hysterical ways below, beneath underneath deep down upon the watch out for the ghost, watch out for the ghost grave, cave pit, lower and deeper watch out for the ghost, weeping miles below sky, scraper, gutters watch out for the ghost, blue blood hole into which blueness is the terror massacre, torture and original western holocaust, blue blood hole into which blueness is the terror massacre, torture and original western holocaust slavery. We were slaves. We were slaves, swipe we were slaves, we were slaves. We were slave we were slaves. We ever slave. We were slaves they, slave they do our lives away.
Beneath the violent philosophy of primitive cannibals, primitive, violent? violent, steam-driven, cannibals. It's my brother, my sister. At the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, a deseret road made of human bones. Black ivory. Black ivory. D-D-di, D data, D-D-di, D-D-di, D-D-D-di, D-D-di, Idonak promised him to return his invites! Think of slavery as educational. All readings where you give readings is the way that poetry being a performance art. It's the way you get the feedback.
And the bigger the audience is, the more feedback you get. And the more other poets are there, the more cross fertilization there is. You take a time in which poetry is alive and touching people and exciting people and you bring people to hear it. It's a marvelous occurrence. It's marvelous for the people and it's marvelous for poetry and it's marvelous for the poets. The Hoppa. A Hoppa is the canopy. It's the wedding canopy and a Jewish wedding under which the bride and the groom or two brides or two grooms as a case may be stand. The Hoppa stands on its four poles, the home has its four corners. The Hoppa stands on four poles, the marriage stands on four legs. Four points loose the winds that blow on the walls of the house. The south wind that brings the warm rain, the east wind that brings the cold rain, the north wind that brings the cold sun and the snow, the long west wind bringing the weather off the far plains.
We have made a home together open to the weather of our time. We are a mills that turn in the winds of struggle, converting fierce energy into bread. The canopy is the cloth of our table, where we share fruit and vegetables of our labor, where our care for the earth comes back and we take its body into ours. The canopy is the cover of our bed where our bodies open their portals wide, where we eat and drink the blood of our love, where the skin shines red as a swallowed sunrise and we burn in one furnace of joy, molten of steel and the dream is flesh and flower. Oh my love, oh my love, we dance under the Hoppa standing over us like an animal on its four legs, like a table on which we set our love as a feast, like a tent under which we work, not safe, but no longer solitary in the searing heat of our time. Many Kunits is a poet who has lived through most of the 20th century and has won many of
the prizes and distinctions that our nation is able to give to a poet. He recently became the first poet in the history of the English language to publish a new book of poems at the age of 90, Stanley Kunits. This is a poem that celebrates among other things my garden on Cape Cod. It's called The Round. Light splashed this morning on the shell-pinked anemones swaying on their tall stems, down blue spiked Veronica, light flowed in rivulets over the humps of the honeybees.
This morning I saw light kiss the silk of the roses in their second flowering, my late bloomers flushed with their brandy, a curious gladness shook me. So I have shut the doors of my house, so I have trudged downstairs to myself, so I am sitting in semi-dark, hunched over my desk with nothing for a view to tempt me but a bloated compost heap, steamy old stink pile under my window. And I picked my notebook up and I start to read aloud the still wet words I scribbled on the blotted page, light splashed.
I can scarcely wait till tomorrow when a new life begins for me as it does each day, as it does each day. The remarkable thing that I feel is that despite the aging of the body, despite those aches and pains and all the rest of what happens to one at the stage of a life, the spirit remains young, it's the same spirit I remember living with during my childhood.
Halle's comet visited Worcester, Massachusetts in 1910 when I was five years old but I'll never forget it. It's called Halle's comet. Miss Murphy, in first grade, wrote its name in chalk across the board and told us it was roaring down the storm tracks of the Milky Way at frightful speed and if it wandered off its course and smashed into the earth, there'd be no school tomorrow. A red-bearded preacher from the hills with a wild look in his eyes stood in the public
square at the playground's edge proclaiming he was sent by God to save every one of us, even the little children, repent ye sinners, he shouted, waving his hand-lettered summon. At supper I felt sad to think that it was probably the last meal I'd share with my mother and my sisters, but I felt excited too and scarcely touched by plate so mother scolded me and sent me early to my room. The whole family's asleep except for me, they never heard me steal into the stairwell hall and climbed the ladder to the fresh night air. Look for me father on the roof of the red brick building at the foot of Green Street, that's
where we live you know on the top floor, I'm the boy in the white flannel gown, sprawled on this coarse gravel bed searching the starry sky waking for the world to end. Touch me, summer is late my heart, words plucked out of the air some forty years ago when I was wild with love and torn almost into scatter like leaves this night of whistling
wind and rain. It is my heart that's late, it is my song that's flown out doors all afternoon under a gun metal sky staking my garden down I kneel to the crickets trilling under foot as if about to burst from their crusty shells and like a child again marveled to hear so clear and brave of music pour from such a small machine. That makes the engine go desire desire desire the longing for the dance stirs in the buried
life one season only and it's done so let the battered old willow trash against the window paint and the house timbers creak darling do you remember the man you married touch me we mind me who I am so they call my daughter and her girlfriends the crazy beach girls because when they come down to beach anything is possible little girl goes out in the water
and says daddy I'm a mermaid okay you're a mermaid and she starts to say I'm going home okay you're going home and next thing you know she's actually going off into the horizon she's swimming away so these crazy beach girls they leave orders for the sea fool moon comes up you see this path of silver light on the water and it's not your regular water it's swollen it has make skin skin on top of skin without waves and move me on the water it's like it's dancing all the sea is getting fresh with you she's stepping up stepping up stepping up and you're stepping back and she ease on back and you step up she said how come you're not moving shake something go ahead shake something you say okay shake your head everybody shake your head like that I'm not going to behave so you might as well get into a toy since shake your shoulder everybody shake your shoulder like
that so shake your arms can you shake your arms without knocking anybody out there all right now want to put your hands high up with your head and wiggle them to lay a blur don't it feel good now you're doing it with the ocean the ocean dance with you just like that and you move in your legs you're done around your legs okay you put it down that's pretty oh that's so pretty okay but the ocean said that's the ocean told me oh she said oh that's so pretty what you're doing with yourself and your shake but the ocean you ain't really shook until you shake one more thing so I'm out there under the full moon water rolling up on me people up on the pier looking out now I got my core in my hand playing for the ocean oh she's saying shake your high any go ahead shake your high any all right so one three don't break nothing now one two three everybody shake your head oh y'all
ain't get it I tried see nothing roll off the seat yet so what happened to me is I swore I felt so good I was shaking my hand you like that but I felt so good that I swore that when I got to be old old man oldest man in my neighborhood I invite the mortuary the actuary coming to my sanctuary everybody come on down I'm like almost a hundred years old and miss Sally over there look at it with that old man going do but I'm gonna do it I'm gonna shake my hand shake shake shake shake shake shake shake shake shake shake so this is for you anytime you in trouble go into the bathroom go into a foam booth and y'all know what to do right okay all right poetry is very diverse different poets speak to different people different poets strike different
chords we all belong to us to a great endeavor and the more good poets there are the more people will read poetry what are big girls made of the construction of a woman woman is not made of flesh of bone and sinew belly and breasts elbows and liver and toe she is manufactured like a sports sedan she is retooled refitted and redesigned every decade look at pictures in French fashion magazines of the 18th century century of the ultimate lady fantasy rocks of silk and corseting paniers bring your hips out three feet each way or the waist is pinched under wood and the belly flattened the breasts are stuffed up and out offered like apples in a bowl the tiny foot is encased in a slipper never meant
for walking on top is a grandiose headache hair like a museum piece daily ornamented with ribbons vases grattles mountains frigates and full sail balloons baboons the fancy of a hairdresser turned loose that's where Rococo wedding cakes that would dim the Las Vegas strip here is a woman forced into shape rigid exoskeleton torturing flesh a woman made of pain when I first found poetry that spoke to me a street kid from Detroit from a poor family if it was validation that what I felt wasn't crazy wasn't bizarre that I wasn't totally nutty there were other people who felt the way I felt there was validation for who I was it was about and I think
that has to go on all of the time the society tells you if you are not if for instance if you're female if you're not 22 blonde and way about 92 pounds you've had it first of all even and even if you are blonde 22 and way 92 pounds you're still going to fail because you're going to get older and women are allowed to get older see the modern woman thin is a blade of scissors she runs on a treadmill every morning fits herself into machines of weights and pulleys to heave and grunt in the image in her mind she can never approximate a body of rosy glass that never wrinkles never grows never fades she sits at the table closing her eyes to food hungry always hungry a woman made of pain if only we could like each other raw if only we could love ourselves like healthy babies burbling in our arms if
we were not programmed and reprogrammed to need what is sold us why should we want to live inside ads why should we want to scourge our softness just straight lines like a moondrian painting why should we punish each other with scorn as if to have a large ass were worse than being greedy or mean when well women not be compelled to view their bodies as science projects gardens to be weeded dogs to be trained when well a woman cease to be made of pain you've credited your mother with making you a poet she made me very observant for her it was absolutely important that you notice things that you pay
attention to things that you're not walk around as you said you've read in the clouds can't work around your head in the clouds you have to pay attention and she taught me to do that as a child what kind of woman was she my mother was a woman who was not allowed to finish the 10th grade she was sent to work my mother had no skills my mother could not leave a bad marriage my mother could not support herself she'd never done anything but be a chambermaid she she was strong in some ways and completely helpless in others it was observing that contradiction that taught me a whole lot about women's lives a strong woman is a woman who craves love like oxygen or she turns blue choking a strong woman is a woman who loves strongly and weak strongly and is strongly terrified and has strong needs a strong woman is strong in words in action in connection in feeling she's not
strong as a stone but like a wolf suckling her young strength is not in her but she an accent as a wind fills a sail what comforts her is others loving her equally for the strength and for the weakness from which it issues lightning from a cloud lightning stuns in rains the clouds disperse only water of connection remains flowing through us strong is what we make each other until we are all strong together a strong woman is a woman and strongly afraid
- Program
- Fooling with Words
- Contributing Organization
- Public Affairs Television & Doctoroff Media Group (New York, New York)
- AAPB ID
- cpb-aacip-7ed103c23e5
If you have more information about this item than what is given here, or if you have concerns about this record, we want to know! Contact us, indicating the AAPB ID (cpb-aacip-7ed103c23e5).
- Description
- Program Description
- For four days the Geraldine R Dodge Poetry Festival brings together twelve thousand guests and world-renowned poets who share their poetry in performance. Bill Moyers speaks with several poets about their work: Kurtis Lamkin, Lucille Clifton, Galway Kinnell, Amiri Baraka, Deborah Garrison, Coleman Barks, Stanley Kunitz, Jane Hirshfield, Mark Doty, Robert Pinsky, Joe Weil, Jim Haba, David Gonzalez, Marge Piercy, Bob Holman, Denise Duhamel, Samuel Menashe, Paul Muldoon, W.S. Merwin, Sharon Olds, Lorna Dee Cervantes, and Shirley Geok-Lin Lim.
- Program Description
- For FOOLING WITH WORDS, Moyers attends the 1998 Dodge Poetry Festival where established and emerging poets delight large audiences with the rich variety of poetry as a public art.
- Program Description
- Award(s) won: Finalist, PBS Communications Award for Best Web Site for a PBS Program
- Broadcast Date
- 1999-09-26
- Asset type
- Program
- Genres
- Documentary
- Rights
- Copyright holder: Doctoroff Media Group, LLC
- Media type
- Moving Image
- Duration
- 01:01:40;22
- Credits
-
-
: Rubenstein, Deborah
: Firestone, Felice
: Haba, James
Director: Tatge, Catherine
Director of Photographer: Shapiro, Joel
Editor: Moyers, Judith Davidson
Editor: Moyers, Bill
Editor: Katz, Joel
Executive Producer: Doctoroff O'Neill, Judy
Executive Producer: Moyers, Judith Davidson
Producer: Lasseur, Dominique
- AAPB Contributor Holdings
-
Public Affairs Television & Doctoroff Media Group
Identifier: cpb-aacip-3a8273f8f91 (Filename)
Format: LTO-5
If you have a copy of this asset and would like us to add it to our catalog, please contact us.
- Citations
- Chicago: “Fooling with Words,” 1999-09-26, Public Affairs Television & Doctoroff Media Group, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed January 30, 2025, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-7ed103c23e5.
- MLA: “Fooling with Words.” 1999-09-26. Public Affairs Television & Doctoroff Media Group, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Web. January 30, 2025. <http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-7ed103c23e5>.
- APA: Fooling with Words. Boston, MA: Public Affairs Television & Doctoroff Media Group, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-7ed103c23e5
- Supplemental Materials