The Language of Life Author:Bill Moyers "Poets live the lives all of us live," says Bill Moyers, "with one big difference. They have the power--the power of the word--to create a world of thoughts and emotions other can share. We only have to learn to listen." — In a series of fascinating conversations with thirty-four American poets, The Language Of Life celebrates language in ... more »its "most exalted, wrenching, delighted, and concentrated form," and its unique power to re-create the human experience: falling in love, facing death, leaving home, playing basketball, losing faith, finding God. Listening to Linda McCarriston's award-winning poems about a child trapped in a violent home, or to Jimmy Santiago Baca explaining how words changed his life in prison, or to David Mura describing his Japanese American grandfather's experience in relocation camps, or to Sekou Sundiata stitching the magic of his childhood church in Harlem to the African tradition of storytelling, or to Gary Snyder invoking the natural wonder of mountains and rivers, or to Adrienne Rich calling for honesty in human relations, all testify to the necessity and clarity of the poet's voice, and all give hope that from such a wide variety of racial, ethnic, and religious threads we might yet weave a new American fabric.
"'Listen,' said the storytellers of old, 'listen and you shall hear,'" explains Bill Moyers. The Language Of Life is a joyous, life-affirming invitation to listen, learn, and experience the exhilarating power of the spoken word.
Bill Moyers interviews 34 poets from all over the world and brings them together to create a group of voices that reminds us of who we are, where we've come from, and where we're going. Moyers isn't shy about asking questions, and the result is a "festival" of words that truly becomes The Language of Life. It's an inspiration to glimpse into the minds of these poets (through Moyers' eyes), and then read a sample of each one's work.
This is an excellent introduction to modern poetry and the many styles it has evolved into. The poems can sometimes seem raw and unstructured but there are palpable messages that, for this listener, resonate within me. I find that listening to these poets describe their craft and then perform a work or two really brings to life what the poem itself is trying to convey. At times, the poems can seem far removed from the lives of the poet.
An example is the whimsical poem "Valentine for Ernest Mann," by Naomi Shihab Nye, a poet and songwriter born in 1952 to a Palestinian father and American mother. She grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas. Both roots and sense of place are major themes in her body of work. Her first collection of poems, "Different Ways to Pray," explored the theme of similarities and differences between cultures, which would become one of her lifelong areas of focus. However, in "Valentine for Ernest Mann," she takes another path beginning her piece by saying, "You can't order a poem like you order a taco." Then, there is the marvelous imagery of poems "hiding in the bottoms of our shoes," and "shadows drifting across our ceilings the moment before we wake up." The poem goes on to tell of a man who gave two skunks to his wife on Valentine's Day. He couldn't understand why he was crying because "I thought they had such beautiful eyes." He re-invented the skunks as valentines and to him they became beautiful. Then in an amazing turn back to the original idea of poem hiding from us, Ms Nye writes this line: "And the poems that had been hiding in the eyes of the skunks for centuries crawled out and curled up at his feet." A profound statement of seeing beyond how one would normally react to skunks and seeing them in a beautiful light.
If you love poetry and are open to new expressions of this ageless art, then you will find much to like in this collection!
