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BILL SIEMERING: Poetry that private expression of inner feeling is finding a new public through a Minnesota State Arts Council project called Poetry Out Loud. Groups of poets tour the state, giving readings where the people are-- in parks, homes for the elderly, museums, and even small town bars.

Marisha Chamberlain is one of the poets who toured in the Moorhead area. She's also a full time poet for the city of St. Paul. She tells of the response to the public readings.

MARISHA CHAMBERLAIN: A lot of people are nervous about poetry, but they're coming anyway. The kids are great. They giggle and they say, oh, that's dumb. And they stick right in there and joke. And they get up and shake our hands and ask for our autographs and stuff like that. So that's real relaxed.

With the adults and the senior citizens, sometimes, things are quite formal, but there's a lot of reaction in people's eyes and in their facial features. I think, since poetry deals with our private feelings, that it gives recognition to that. And that's a deeply felt need. And it's not met by very many things. Religion begins to meet that a little bit, but I tend to think that that's what's going on. It's the personal touch, I think that--

BILL SIEMERING: That's both a strength and a problem of poetry, it seems, in that as you write your name, as you affirm your own unique vision of life and of the world, drawing upon dreams and inner feelings so much, it has a very unique imprint. And at the same time, that makes it difficult, perhaps, for others to relate to it. So is that why poetry, perhaps, will always have a small audience?

MARISHA CHAMBERLAIN: Well, it's important to realize that that's been true in the United States to an extent, but it's not necessarily true in other countries. For example, someone like Yevtushenko gets absolutely huge crowds. I mean, he practically packs football stadiums. So it's partly our culture. But I'm beginning to realize, through some of my oral history work and stuff, that people used to learn poetry by rote, recite it to each other. And that it was something very much attached to an old fashioned way of doing things and of people entertaining themselves without things like television.

And so I think that a lot of people are hearkening back to those days because there's such a stress these days on quality of life. And that's one of the reasons that there's a real renaissance in poetry now. But what you say is really a problem. The poems that are very private and don't reach people really, if they're read aloud or if they're put in a forum where people who are not accustomed to listening to poetry out loud, if they appear there, they often do a disservice to poetry because people get turned off.

BILL SIEMERING: One of the aspects of quality of life is certainly a life that's examined, a life that is lived in a thoughtful way. And that's one of the virtues of poetry, it seems, is that it enables us to become more aware of how our objective world is, perhaps, a projection of our inner world, and the interplay of the two. You draw from your poetry, sometimes, upon your dreams. And how important are your dreams to your poetry|?

MARISHA CHAMBERLAIN: Somewhat important, but not very important. I record my dreams as often as I can remember them, and that's fairly often, sometimes, as many as four or five dreams a week. And the reason for that is what they tell me about what's happening in my life. And it's only rarely that a dream will have such a strong storyline and such obvious symbolism that it will make a poem.

So besides, see, I think it's fun to tell my own dreams, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the dreams themselves are interesting to other people. Usually, it's terribly private and terribly confused. So I don't write dream poems per se. My dreams have an indirect relationship to my poetry. And they're not a direct source of, very often, they're an indirect source. They inform me in all sorts of ways and give me ideas, but I rarely record a dream as a poem.

BILL SIEMERING: You've developed an awareness for primary sources of your poetry just in your experience more.

MARISHA CHAMBERLAIN: Well, yeah. I think of something Galway Kinnell said about where a poem starts. And he says, it's like you're walking down the street, and there's a popular song or a song that you sang. It starts going over and over in your head. And well, it can get to be annoying, but it's really pleasant at first.

And that happens too, with words, with all sorts of people. A certain phrase will just catch in your mind and it'll play over and over a few times. And that's really the beginning of a poem. Even if you don't know it, it is. And for me, that's where I start.

And I feel that what I need as far as a source is a starting place. And if there's a strong enough feeling in connection with that, other things fall into place. So I don't really feel like I have any one source that I go to, but I need a strong starting point.

BILL SIEMERING: So you begin with feeling and then work out from there.

MARISHA CHAMBERLAIN: Feeling in connection with a certain word, with a phrase that seems to hold power for me, like that. And then there's something about-- and then if you look at Walt Whitman and just consider his first lines in Leaves of Grass, you really get a sense of how that is true because the lines themselves are practically poems in the line. You can see why the poem would follow from that first line. I don't know how he wrote, but that's--

BILL SIEMERING: Since each of us strikes on a different set of words, it enriches all of us then to share that. One of those phrases will then inspire further thought in another direction as we work through some thoughts of our own.

MARISHA CHAMBERLAIN: Yeah, right. Yeah, that unexpected turn. That gets back to what we were talking about earlier, though, about things that are private and things that end up touching other people. And that's a major problem for any artist. And I guess, where I am now is that I don't think that that's something I can judge well in my own poetry. I can pick it up from the way an audience responds to it. And that's one of the great things that an audience does for a poet, lets them know when it's working and when it's not.

But something I do know that when it does work, it has something to do with losing self-consciousness and not thinking about yourself so much, but being moved by something that's happened so strongly that you have feel so much that you have something to say or something to tell, that it's like a poem moves through you. I have that feeling, I can almost be sure that that poem is going to strike other people that way. It's just a feeling. And it seems strange and just arbitrary, but you know,.

BILL SIEMERING: It's one of those responsive chords that you have, whereas some of them are private, there are others that can touch others from a common experience, perhaps. And it's through that that we enlarge our own vision, our own experiential field. And I guess, that's one of the reasons of art, isn't it?

MARISHA CHAMBERLAIN: Well, the thing is that now, though, Doris Lessing's quote to Kate Millet that's been-- I've heard quoted so many times is that when Doris Lessing said of her own novels that when she was most afraid that she was being the most private and most unintelligible, people would write her letters and say, that's when you're touching my life.

So poetries definitely comes from the inner life. I think the most poetry really does come from the most private sources. But the question is, can the poet put it in a form where it's understandable? Can the poet explain it without making it be in some diagram but still be a living thing? And that's where you need to find the appropriate metaphor, something, a vehicle to-- I don't mean to make it sound so complicated. It isn't. It's an organic process that happens. And you hear it in speech. And if you go out in the farm communities, you hear people using metaphors to describe, in a few words, something that's really a strong emotional thing and complicated, too. It's like--

BILL SIEMERING: You have some examples of that?

MARISHA CHAMBERLAIN: Well, I was just thinking of one, and that is that I was working for this farmer in a sorghum operation. And he said to his friend, these greenhorns are as clumsy as a cow with a shotgun. And then he came over and showed me something. But that spoke so much. It's so much show. It showed even the way I was standing, my tension and my clumsiness with the tool I was holding. It was funny, too. Really enjoyable.

BILL SIEMERING: You've done a number of jobs out in the farm or out in the country. Is that a rich source of imagery for you?

MARISHA CHAMBERLAIN: Yeah, it still is. There's something about having a lot of space around you and not having other people right close to you that makes it possible for you to lose that self-consciousness. And I really think that that's essential in order to be able to write well.

You can't be-- I mean, I have no problem with writing out of my own life and experience, that's what I do. But I don't know. It's like the gossip in the head has got to get cleared away before you can write or write well. Or maybe you write through it. Maybe you start with gossip and then get to something that has something to do with the heartbeat, something to do with the body, and not with the chatter and the kinds of things that are always distracting us.

This last poem of mine is in celebration of the beginning of apple-picking season that's just started in Minnesota and Wisconsin. It's called The Stars are Apple Clusters. I wrote it the first night after I joined an apple-picking crew.

My hands reach up to pick. I put them away in my pockets. Exhaustion is no word enough for the maze of branches behind the eyes of the first day apple-picker. Darkness unleashes visions of this in harmless, endless repetition. A studded branch, my arm connects. Stars no more than begin to burn than I make connections, branch-wise. The stars are apple clusters.

I turn this over to sleep, to the slip of dream outside a jungle of gleaming ladders. My hands, my mouth smear apple red and apple green. I climb several ladders at once. I straddle everything. I pick apples into my mouth to collect in my half bushel stomach with the zippered trap door.

The Orchard pays by the bushel, so I get a crate the size of an acre for my one tree with the three apples. Night falls down on my head like a tarp. I rip a hole in the night and reach up to pick the stars.

[APPLAUSE]

BILL SIEMERING: Marisha Chamberlain, a full time poet employed by the city of St. Paul. She recently gave a reading in Moorhead as part of the Minnesota State Arts Council project, Poetry Out Loud. I'm Bill Siemering.