Beloved journalist Bill Moyers trains his inquisitive eye on poetry in this series of documentary programs produced for public television. Fooling with Words was filmed on location at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, a four-day event held every other year in rural New Jersey, during which over twenty featured poets participate in readings and discussions before an audience of over 18,000 people.

The documentary features conversations with and performances by many of contemporary poetry’s most notable figures, including Amiri Baraka, Coleman Barks, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Lucille Clifton, Mark Doty, Deborah Garrison, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Jane Hirshfield, Bob Holman, Galway Kinnell, Stanley Kunitz, Kurtis Lamkin, W. S. Merwin, Paul Muldoon, Sharon Olds, Marge Piercy, and Robert Pinsky.

Viewers of Fooling with Words may also want to see Moyers’s other explorations of the Dodge Festival, The Language of Life (1994) and The Sounds of Poetry (1999).

Produced by Public Affairs Television, Inc. (1999). Not Rated.