Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 18, 1995 TAG: 9506210007
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CAROL MUSKE THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
He was recovering from bypass surgery and feeling eminently fragile. Because of insufficient financing, he had pretty much abandoned a plan to film a new series about American poetry. Ms. Nye's words changed that in a heartbeat.
``The truth that Naomi Shihab Nye wrote touched the truth of my life,'' he said recently from his office in New York. ``The words struck me - recovering, afraid, off balance - as precisely my experience.''
Thus, ``The Language of Life With Bill Moyers,'' an eight-part series beginning Friday night at 9 on PBS (WBRA, Channel 15) was resurrected. It was, Moyers said, this sudden understanding of the ``experience'' of poetry, the discovery of an individual insight or sensation as universal, the soul-to-soul crackling telegraph from poet to audience - that he hoped to document.
He has certainly documented an electrifying phenomenon. By focusing on the Geraldine R. Dodge festival (a three-day biannual poetry conference in Waterloo, N.J., during which 90 or so poets read to an audience of 5,000), he records dramatic evidence of the current poetry scene's astonishing variety and fierce intensity.
Moyers uses the word ``renaissance.'' He's not talking about a contemporary revival of classicism or a great flowering of activity in the style or substance of verse; the word embodies for him a rebirth specific to America of the '90s.
His subject is the recent seismic shift in the public's attitude toward poetry, a re-embrace by popular culture of a long-exiled art. At the festival, the camera sweeps the crowd, checking out the reverent faces: a mix of old, young, men, women, straight, gay and different ethnicities, all staring at the podium with awe and obvious feelings of identification.
``I'm not a critic,'' Moyers says. ``I'm a journalist. I'm not interested in whether this is good poetry or not. I'm interested in why poetry is suddenly touching so many people.''
Why indeed? Look up from a seat on the subway or bus: poems pop up between ads for cellular phones and breast reductions. Check out the night-table drawer in a hotel room - Joseph Brodsky may have popped a volume of verse inside, next to the Gideon Bible. Poetry fuels rap, slams, blue-jean ads.
Not that long ago, the word poet called up on the screen of popular consciousness a combined image of a spinster in an attic and a Maynard G. Krebs type mouthing cosmic absurdities in a '50s coffeehouse. And a poetry reading meant audiences so small they helped redefine particle theory.
But if it was far removed from public consciousness, poetry - the most solitary and dream-charged of the arts, ideally the most anarchical and unfettered by convention - was also a refuge from public consciousness as the imagination roamed, like a spy, over the indifferent world.
The act of writing a poem would never be understood as simply an expression of fellow feeling, though that was on the list. Poetry blew sparks of uncommon insight and imagery over the landscape: making the reader's familiar terrain startlingly unfamiliar, brushing it with the fire of unlikeness as well as mirroring likeness.
``I heard a fly buzz - when I died - '' Emily Dickinson begins a poem, making that point in eight words.
Since the invention of movable type, poets have been able to write and publish what used to be sung after dinner. Thus the debate arose: Should communication to an audience, the poet's social obligation to other men and women, inform the poem's conception - or the mind's passion for the unsayable?
These two impulses should be able to co-exist, even wed, but they became separated as poetry grew, at least to the public, obscure. Whether this judgment had more to do with a reading public no longer able to process complexity of thought and challenging figures of speech or a willful turning-away on the part of poets is always a good late-night argument.
Now if poetry is being thrust back into a public spotlight, a social realm, how will it be perceived? Will poets dance the ancient choral dance of the Greeks from which drama and poetry derived? Will they be Shelley's ``prophets'' or ``legislators'' or Whitman's ``priests''? Will this new energy send the public back to reading again?
``Poets love an audience,'' said Moyers. And because these poetry gatherings are so audience-oriented, they dissolve conventional social distance.
``People arrive as strangers,'' he observed. ``They leave as a community.'' His optimism is boundless, Whitmanesque: ``From such a wide variety of racial, ethnic and religious threads, we might yet weave a new American fabric.'' In the meantime, he said, ``this kind of poetry was meant for the camera.''
Thus 18 of the poets participating in the Dodge festival are filmed before huge crowds gathered under tents, intoning, shouting, whispering or singing their poems. The readings are interwoven with snippets of poet-conducted workshops and head-to-head interviews with Moyers.
The theme of poetry as ``salvation'' emerges throughout. From Jimmy Santiago Baca, who discovered poetry and began writing it while in prison, passionately declaring that ``words can save your life,'' to Carolyn Forche, who maintains that ``poetry is the voice of the soul,'' the series shows a public reperception in progress.
In this reincarnation, poetry has both real and divine powers, and the poet is restored to an ancient manifestation: shaman-healer of the tribe.
Poetry as salvation is an appealing notion at a time when we lack saviors and divine language, and a mindless talk-show mentality threatens to suck the life out of words.
Adrienne Rich, who has been a distinguished and compelling voice of conscience for decades in American poetry, wonders whether poetry's real value and significance will emerge on television.
How, she asks Moyers, will ``The Language of Life'' situate itself in the ``barrage of brute violence, numbing indifference, triviality and shallowness that we endure''?
Her fears about the camera's ability to convey seriousness turn out to be unfounded. The words the poets speak are riveting, the dramatic opposite of the sound bite.
Still, despite the magic of the poet-audience encounter, there are those who object to the phenomenon. The poet and critic J.D. McClatchy reaffirmed recently in The Los Angeles Times (with markedly less enthusiasm) that ``Americans have always wanted to `witness.' There is a widespread need to validate one's self. Poetry is a convenient way to do that.''
It's true that Emily Dickinson's withdrawal into meditative isolation (``I'm nobody, who are you?'') or Keats's view of the poet as essentially selfless or Wordsworth's definition of poetry as ``emotion recollected in tranquillity'' might end up getting them seated in the wallflower corner at the ``Language of Life'' dance, as the televised bards lock hands with their audiences, as poetry makes ``nobodies'' into ``somebodies.''
But Moyers' camera has picked up on the meditative aspect of poetry as well. It is particularly edifying to watch the new Poet Laureate, Robert Hass, deliver the poems of the great haiku master, Kobayashi Issa (as well as his own work) in a luminously personable, carefully considered manner.
We watch Hass gently turn fledgling writers away from self-preoccupation (in one of the filmed workshops), urging them toward the ego-less visions of haiku.
And watching and listening to audiences watch and listen to Ms. Rich, Marilyn Chin, Michael Harper, Daisy Zamora, Sandra McPherson and others read their engaging poems is to be reminded of Yeats' assessment: ``Does not the greatest poetry always require a people to listen to it?''
Though what she says may seem in direct contradiction to her solitary spirit, Emily Dickinson clearly deserves the final word here:
A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live that day.
Carol Muske is a professor of English at the University of Southern California. Her most recent volume of poetry is ``Red Trousseau.''
by CNB