Amazon.com (ISBN 0688173462, Hardcover)

The biennial Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in Waterloo, New Jersey, has been called the Woodstock of poetry. Taking place over the course of several (often hot and sticky) summer days, the festival comprises readings and workshops and performances. Audiences under the big top can reach a couple thousand. It is stunning to see so many lovers of poetry gathered in one place.

For Fooling with Words, Moyers interviews 11 of the poets on the festival's 1998 roster. "Talking to poets about their lives," he says, "makes their poetry more accessible to me." And what a variety of poets and lives he has come up with! The youngest is New Yorker senior editor Deborah Garrison (A Working Girl Can't Win), then 32; the eldest, Stanley Kunitz, 93 years old and wearing a lime-green jacket. In between are Coleman Barks, Robert Pinsky, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Paul Muldoon, Marge Piercy, Mark Doty, Jane Hirshfield, Kurtis Lamkin, and Shirley Geok-Lin Lim. These conversations are dotted with poems. "I like to know about the experiences that produced the poet," says Moyers, and the intermingling of conversation and poetry is a wonderful, casual way to be introduced to a poet's sensibility. Doty discusses the pain of "writing about the hardest things in the world." Hirshfield talks about her Zen practice and the notion that ideas "can graze inside us like animals who reshape the landscape with their grazing." Throughout, there is the sense of lives that would not be bearable without poetry. "Poetry is what has saved me," says one poet here; "You never know when your poem will come to someone's rescue," chimes another. --Jane Steinberg