TV REVIEW : Moyers Series Studies the World of Poetry

Bill Moyers is going to civilize us all, if we can be. Having introduced us to the persistence of heroic myth through the writings of the late Joseph Campbell, Moyers now commends or commands our attention to the sadly underconsumed art of poetry.

Moyers’ six-part series on poetry, “The Power of the Word,” premieres tonight at 9 along the PBS network, including Channels 28 and 15.

Poetry, the Mexican poet-diplomat Octavio Paz says during the program, was once the central art of society. Today it is at best a marginal art. He adds that the United States has in the 20th Century produced some of the great poets of the world. Paz hardly needs to point out that not one would qualify as a household name.

Moyers offers a graceful and low-key introduction. “When I tell you this series is about poetry, some of you are going to reach for the dial,” he says with fair accuracy. And yet, Moyers argues, the poets have “told him what they felt about falling in love, facing death, leaving home, losing faith, finding God, or seeing Magic Johnson do ballet with a basketball” (Quincy Troupe’s “A Poem for ‘Magic,’ ” to be heard in the second program of the series).

Having made his personal case for the pleasures of listening to poetry, Moyers turns the program over to five poets, observed reading their work and talking about it during the 1988 session of the biennial Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in New Jersey.

The first program, subtitled “The Simple Acts of Life,” makes no attempt (nor does the series as a whole, evidently) to assess the state of poetry. A marginal art it undoubtedly still is, yet there are plenty of signs of vitality--readings, recordings, radio appearances, small press publications, organized pressure on newspapers to print more poetry and reviews.

Direct expression--immediate experience conveyed in language intended to be heard more than read--seems central to a renewed popularity of the poetic word. And accessibility, relatively plain speech spiced with warmth and wit, is a linking chord among the first show’s performers: Robert Bly, Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds, Paz and William Stafford.

Olds, who heads the creative writing program at NYU, and Kinnell, the 1983 Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry, who also teaches at NYU, are both impressive in the candor of their poetry itself and for their unpretentious and concrete talk about the making of the poetry.

Yet Olds, giving a poem about her father a first public reading, is clearly taken aback at the end by the reawakening of the strong emotions that inspired the poem in the first place.

Olds and Kinnell conclude the program with an antiphonal reading of excerpts from their work on the common theme of sex. It is wonderfully affecting, neither coy nor within miles of prurience, but the private experience made universal: sex, and poetry, at their best.

The program’s background music is by The Paul Winter Consort. Dominated by flute and soprano saxophone, it is wispily, mournfully elegant. But it does reinforce the image of modern poetry as esoteric and elitist, which the poets themselves have been doing a fine job of contradicting.

Save for some pretty shots of the autumnal East, the program is talking heads in the oldest PBS tradition. But the talk is what matters, and the faithful who don’t reach for the dial are likely to have an illuminating if not an exhilarating time.