act of making a poem requires that somebody's listening," says poet Mark Doty. And listen they do. More than 12,000 people turned up to listen and laugh, to sigh and weep, to cheer and exalt in the pure pleasure of the spoken word at the 1998 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, where Bill Moyers returned to cover the poetry beat. The two-hour special FOOLING WITH WORDS WITH BILL MOYERS, produced by Dominique Lasseur and directed by Catherine Tatge, premieres Sunday, September 26 at 9 p.m. (ET) on PBS. (Check local listings.) "Under the trees in Waterloo, New Jersey, in this picturesque corner of America, the sound and taste and texture of words tumble off the stage. It's a celebration of the spirit that I find irresistible," says Moyers.

"They call it a festival, but it's more like a carnival . . . and you're the ride," says poet Kurtis Lamkin, who captivates the crowd with his tapestry of joyful sights and sounds of African-American urban street life. From big tents to small workshops, people throng to hear some of the best poets in America and share their thoughts on the craft of poetry. Surveying the sunny atmosphere of young and old reading and speaking poetry together, Georgia poet Coleman Barks remarks, "It's amazing that so many people can be genuinely excited about fooling with words."

Doty, Lamkin, and Barks, along with Amiri Baraka, Stanley Kunitz, Jane Hirshfield, Deborah Garrison, Lucille Clifton, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Galway Kinnell, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, and Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky are among the two dozen poets who share the rhythm, spirit and passion of their work on stage and off in conversations with Bill Moyers.

Leaning against a wooden bridge over a brook, or sitting in one of the small stone houses scattered across Waterloo Village, Moyers probes the poets about the intimate process of making their experiences into art. How did you find your voice? How did you start? How did you translate your emotions into poetry; what is a good poem?

"A good poem," says Jane Hirshfield, "takes something you already know as a human being and raises your ability to feel that to a higher degree so you can know your own life more intensely. When you meet your own life in a great poem, your life becomes expanded, extended, clarified, magnified, deeper in color, deeper in feeling. I feel like almost all I know about being a human being has been deepened by the poems I've read. They have taught me how to be a human being."

For Lorna Dee Cervantes, the idea that "I can write" offered freedom she had never known. "When you grow up as I did, a Chican-India in a barrio in a Mexican neighborhood in California," says Cervantes, "you're not expected to speak. You're ignored. You're something in the periphery, emptying garbage cans or washing plates. And you're not expected to speak, much less write."

In an electrically charged moment, poet Amiri Baraka incants phrases from a long poem on slavery and its charring legacy: "We were slaves," he repeats in the voices of so many no longer here to represent themselves. "We were slaves. We were slaves . . . At the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean is a railroad made of human bones."

Moyers asks poet Mark Doty, whose subject matter confronts the harsh reality of suffering, if he feels fortunate to be a poet, "to be able to take almost inexpressible emotion and turn it into something that lasts." Doty replies: "You can't do anything to stop a terminal illness. You can't stop the course of time. But . . . I could make something to serve as a kind of vessel for what I felt, a representation in that moment in time. And there I had some authority . . . It is a small gesture against loss. And yet, over time, that gesture becomes a larger one because that work of making something for yourself becomes translated into a gift for other people."

Is it enough for a poem to sound beautiful? Moyers asks Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. "It may not be enough, but it's primary. The first thing is the physical encounter. This is true about any human interest. If you fall in love with a person, kind of cuisine, an animal or a sport -- eventually, you analyze it, you'll want to know its history, you'll want to know what the most intelligent people have said about it. But the first thing is -- you like to touch the animal, want to eat the food, want to look at the person. Then comes intelligence."

From these profoundly different life experiences, a new American voice emerges like a chorus from the Festival. "The great feature of the Dodge Festival is its generosity of spirit, its pursuit of different ethnic groups, its welcome to different factions in poetry," says Stanley Kunitz, one of America's best-loved poets. Kunitz, who holds the distinction of being the only poet in the English language to publish a new collection of his work at age 90, proves he can still transfix a crowd with the simplest of memories, artfully composed.

Later in the year, Moyers will bring more poetry to public television with SOUNDS OF POETRY, a series of nine half-hour programs featuring additional readings and conversation with poets at the Dodge Festival. Poets featured in performance, and in dialogues with their audience, with each other, and with Moyers are Amiri Baraka, Robert Pinsky, Mark Doty, Lucille Clifton, Coleman Barks, Stanley Kunitz, Deborah Garrison, Jane Hirshfield, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, and Marge Piercy.

A Teacher's Guide for FOOLING WITH WORDS WITH BILL MOYERS, also produced by Thirteen/WNET, is available by writing to: Fooling With Words, P.O. Box 245, Little Falls, NJ 07424-0245 or by e-mail at reisman@wnet.org.

FOOLING WITH WORDS, a companion book to the PBS series, is to be published on September 26, 1999, by William Morrow and Company, available for $20 wherever books are sold. Videocassettes of FOOLING WITH WORDS and SOUNDS OF POETRY for home, school, college, and library use are available through Films for the Humanities and Sciences by calling 1-800-257-5126 or by visiting their Web site at www.films.com.

Funding for FOOLING WITH WORDS WITH BILL MOYERS and SOUNDS OF POETRY was provided by the Herb Alpert Foundation, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and Mutual of America Life Insurance Company. Funding for the educational materials and the Web site was provided by the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.

A Production of Public Affairs Television, Inc. with Tatge/Lasseur Productions, FOOLING WITH WORDS WITH BILL MOYERS is presented on PBS by Thirteen/WNET in New York. Executive Producers: Judy Doctoroff O'Neill, Judith Davidson Moyers. Executive Editors: Bill Moyers, Judith Davidson Moyers. Director: Catherine Tatge. Producer: Dominique Lasseur. Editor: Joel Katz. Director of Photography: Joel Shapiro. Program Consultant: James Haba. Director of Production: Felice Firestone. Director of Special Projects: Deborah Rubenstein.

Photos by Lynn Saville