The Power of the Word

Because i am trying to learn and unlearn ways of reading poetry aloud, i've been looking for footage of poets reading their work. This led me to the 6-volume 1994 PBS documentary Bill Moyers: The Power of the Word, which i borrowed from the library. It combines hours of footage of readings, commentary and interviews from poets of many backgrounds and styles--Joy Harjo, Lucille Clifton, W.S. Merwin, lots of others.

The titles of the six parts are:

Dancing on the Edge of the Road
Ancestral Voices
The Simple Acts of Life
The Living Language
Voices of Memory
Where the Soul Lives

Needless to say, it blissed me out. Some of the best parts...

"There's a place in Chicago--great place where you can get noodles and barbecued meat. It's a Chinese deli. It's wonderful, it's greasy...On a good day, you go in there and there are Cambodians and Vietnamese and Africans and Black Americans and--it's like heaven.
I was in there one day, and I thought: Heaven would be like this. Jesus or Joshua or Lao-Tzu, whoever it is, would walk through and Hello, hello, excuse the grease (because it's very greasy) Excuse the grease, excuse the construction.
It would be like a Presbyterian nightmare.
I just defined heaven: a Presbyterian's nightmare.
I'm kidding. My father was a Presbyterian minister. You don't know this, but i'm arguing with him up here. I have nothing against Presbyterians.
Poets are endlessly arguing with the dead."

--Li-Young Lee

"Musicians are very lucky in a way because they can go directly into the heart. But when you use words, you're dealing with the whole history of the human race. Every word has hanging onto it thousands of dead bodies and old wagons and battlefields and--do you understand how it's hard to enter the heart with a word?"

--Robert Bly

"The more personal the poem is, the more truly personal it is, the deeper you go into yourself, the more likely it is that it will be universal, that if you touch deeply enough in yourself, you touch a level in the psyche at which we're all the same."

--Galway Kinnell

"What I'm conscious of is not that remarkable in relation to what the poem is conscious of."

--Sharon Olds