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BILL SIEMERING: Why do you think it's important that we hear poetry out loud?

SPEAKER 1: Well, I think it's the language of the soul, isn't it? So I enjoyed it. Yes, I did. I think it's interesting. It's certainly very original. And I think we need to have this. I used to love or I still love-- sometimes, though, I'm alone, I read poetry to the walls not, you know--

[LAUGHS]

BILL SIEMERING: Many poets have read their work to the walls, like this elderly Moorhead resident. But now, through a Minnesota State Arts Council project, poetry is being read out loud to audiences of children, elderly, and everyone in between. And they're hearing it in parks, art centers, libraries, and even bars. John Calvin Rezmerski of Saint Peter is a coordinator of the project. During a recent visit to Moorhead, I asked him why poetry is important.

JOHN CALVIN REZMERSKI: I'm really not sure that it is. I think the important thing is that it can be if they give it a chance to be. And I think most of the time that most people aren't really aware of what's there and how much it's really about the things that go on in their lives as well as the things that go on in the lives of the poets.

One of the nice things about poems is that a person reading a poem can compare notes with a poet, sort of. And the poem becomes a kind of an instrument of two-way communication in some sense. And I think that's one of the important things about these tours too, is that it gives us poets a chance to get some feedback from the audiences and know what kinds of things are important to them, what kinds of things they respond to, and helps us write a kind of poetry that goes more directly to them.

And I guess that's what's important about poetry generally, not just to the people of Minnesota, but that poetry, as it's been taught in schools for too long, has been considered a kind of an artifact, an object of language that's out there for study. And I think it's important to have poetry be an act of communication rather than an artifact.

Whitman once said that in order to have great poetry, we need to have great audiences. And I think that that's not going to happen until the poets and the audiences are talking to each other. So it's important for us to hear things from the audience, too.

BILL SIEMERING: What kind of things do you hear from the audience as you travel around the state?

JOHN CALVIN REZMERSKI: We hear all kinds of things. But generally, the response that we've had has been a very favorable one. A lot of people saying that they wish there were more of this kind of thing. Or that my husband dragged me out or my wife dragged me out and I never thought that poetry could be that much fun. Or I always thought that poetry was all stuff about flowers and things like that. And I didn't know it was about real experiences. If I had to say anything as a kind of a generalization about people's reactions is we learn something and it was fun.

BILL SIEMERING: You write about your grandparents' with great affection and so on. Has that process enriched your memory of them considerably?

JOHN CALVIN REZMERSKI: Yeah, I think so. I think the process of writing those things, it heightens my awareness of them as people. It heightens my awareness of the kinds of relationships that I had with them in a way that, say, a photograph can't do. And a photograph seems to me is so static in many ways.

Whereas a poem kind of captures what it is that goes on between them and me, and not just them, they're looking into the camera. The poem that I wrote about my grandmother was done up from-- I had about 30 pages of notes that I made during those days after she died. And then that became a kind of a-- about a five or six-page eulogy sort of at a memorial service for her later on.

And then that five or six-page eulogy was then reduced trying to get the real nucleus of it, the real core of that experience into a poem. So the whole thing was a process of taking this jumble of impressions and gradually finding what are the really important things in there for me. And that's finally what gets into the poem, I guess.

BILL SIEMERING: Do you think that's a good way that everyone could enrich their own life, add meaning to it by capturing, by reflecting, by writing down their impressions of memorable events like that?

JOHN CALVIN REZMERSKI: I suppose everybody could, to some degree. I'm not sure that everybody should. I think partly, the poet's job is to do that for people in some sense and say, well, maybe I'll write a poem about my grandmother. OK, somebody else's grandmother dies, and they and they might have seen my poem somewhere and they might remember it and reread it.

And while it doesn't give their experience exactly, it triggers some emotions that make their own memories of their own experience more vivid, more vital for them. And that's what I would hope would happen. And I guess I think that's a good part of the poet's job.

"In her house, I learned to listen to seashells. A house full of the smells of raisin bread, chicken soup, blackberry wine, lavender sachet, laundry bluing, and coal smoke. The smell of work. Bronchial pneumonia is a dying old person's best friend, according to the doctor. 106 degrees for three days, but cold hands.

She seems to remember everyone all right. But who knows what she knows? Who knows what she forgets? 'What do you think of an 80-year-old woman having a baby?' she asks. 'I'm beautiful,' she says. It's finally her day off. Her home-made rag rugs lie on the gray linoleum. The blank TV faces potted plants.

Her wedding portrait rests in the closet, young and narrow waisted, holding blue carnations. She comes forth like a flower and withers. Blue carnations in her casket. Rosary in her hands. Her last wishes, 'I want my children to take what they gave me. I won't need it any more. Maybe I missed something, so forgive me.' She has stopped working. She got sick picking up apples on the hill behind the house so they wouldn't rot.

Her house is full of medicine she will not need. An electric clock. buzzes, the refrigerator hums. I learned to listen to seashells here. Her last confinement. With the skill of a woman who has done it a dozen times, she Bears down steadily, gives birth to the spirit she has carried full term. Coming in from both coasts, the family closes around her like a flower closing for the night.

After the burial Friday morning, we open up, enjoying each other's company we have not had for so long and settle her estate in an hour or so and keep what we had given her and sing and look through old photographs. And some who have been feuding for years sit down to dinner together. And I listen to seashells in the attic. She has not stopped working. It seems as though we are gathered around to see her new child."

BILL SIEMERING: John Calvin Rezmerski of Saint Peter, coordinator of the Poetry Out Loud Project sponsored by the Minnesota State Arts Council, recorded during a recent reading at Moorhead. I'm Bill Siemering.