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SPEAKER 1: You're listening to Minnesota Public Radio. We have some light snow and it's 28 degrees at KNOW FM 91.1, Minneapolis and Saint Paul. We can expect some flurries, maybe some freezing drizzle into the middle of the afternoon in the Twin Cities. High around 30 degrees where it is cloudy tonight, then partly cloudy tomorrow with a high in the mid 30s.

KORVA COLEMAN: From National Public Radio news in Washington, I'm Korva Coleman. Defense Secretary William Cohen is returning to the United States after touring the Persian Gulf region and Russia over the last week. Cohen met his Russian counterpart, Igor Sergeyev, today at a military base outside Moscow.

These talks were less frosty than yesterday when Sergeyev told Cohen the United States was too harsh on Iraq. He had also warned against using force to settle the dispute between Iraq and the United Nations. Cohen's trip was intended to bolster support for any possible military action against Baghdad. President Clinton says Russia's opinion will not deter the Allies from acting.

At least a dozen people were arrested and several injured in Jordan today when police broke up a pro-Iraqi demonstration. NPR's Eric Weiner reports from the Jordanian capital, Amman.

ERIC WEINER: About 1,000 Jordanians gathered for Friday prayers at Amman's main mosque. Afterwards, they chanted slogans in favor of Iraq and its leader, Saddam Hussein. "With our soul and our blood, we sacrifice for you Iraq," the crowd shouted. A few of the protesters also shouted anti-American slogans. Hundreds of riot police then dispersed the protesters, beating some with batons while police helicopters flew overhead.

Several protesters were arrested, as well as three journalists. Jordan's main opposition parties had requested permission to hold today's demonstration, but they were turned down. On Tuesday, Jordan banned all demonstrations that show support for Iraq. That's a marked change from Jordan's position during the Gulf War, when the government openly expressed support for Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Eric Weiner, NPR News, Amman.

KORVA COLEMAN: President Clinton travels to Philadelphia today for a speech on tobacco legislation, and money for scientific research and a fundraiser for Democrats. NPR's Mara Liasson reports.

MARA LIASSON: President Clinton is sticking to the schedule he agreed to late last year, three to five days every month spent raising money for Democrats. Today in Philadelphia, he will raise money for House Democrats and challengers. Yesterday at a pep rally for Democrats on Capitol Hill, the president laid out his agenda for 1998, a list of popular issues designed to unify Democrats and draw contrasts with the Republicans.

BILL CLINTON: Save Social Security first. Establish the patients bill of rights. Let people buy into Medicare. Reduce average class size and build more schools and school rooms. Raise the minimum wage.

MARA LIASSON: The president is calling for a $1 raise in the minimum wage by the year 2000. Republicans oppose the proposal, but Democrats believe they will prevail as they have in the past with this issue. Mara Liasson, NPR News, the White House.

KORVA COLEMAN: Forecasters are predicting light rain for California today, but heavier storms could follow tomorrow. Storms amplified by the weather pattern called El Niño have pounded California relentlessly during the past several weeks. On Wall Street, the Dow is down 23 points at 8,345. This is NPR.

SPEAKER 2: Support for NPR comes from Borders, Books and Music, a place to satisfy existing curiosities and discover new ones. Location information at 800-644-7733.

GRETA CUNNINGHAM: Good afternoon. It's four minutes past 12 o'clock. From the Minnesota Public Radio newsroom, I'm Greta Cunningham.

A proposal to transfer ownership of the Minnesota Twins to the public has resurfaced at the State Capitol. The legislation would allow fans to buy 75% of the team's stock. One of the bill's authors, Saint Paul Senator Ellen Anderson, says given the public control over the team should come before any discussion of financing a new baseball stadium.

ELLEN ANDERSON: The issue is whether we should be deciding on a stadium first and whether we have any business even talking about building a stadium until we know that the public wants the team to stay here and is willing to put their money where their mouth is.

GRETA CUNNINGHAM: The public ownership bill has the support of a key Senate Committee Chairman who has agreed to use a procedural maneuver to keep it alive past a legislative deadline today. Tim Pawlenty has bowed out of the governor's race. The Republican representative from Eagan says he's giving up in the face of the momentum of the Lieutenant Governor Joanne Benson's campaign, combined with Saint Paul Mayor Norm Coleman's likely entry into the race.

TIM PAWLENTY: I need to be realistic about how much further we can push this message in terms of resources and opportunities to deliver this message. And so I think we've taken it as far as we effectively could.

GRETA CUNNINGHAM: Pawlenty says Norm Coleman seems to have the best chance among Republicans of winning non-Republican votes in November, but he stopped short of endorsing the mayor. Coleman is expected to announce his gubernatorial plans Sunday. The forecast for Minnesota calls for cloudy skies statewide with partly sunny skies forecast for Northwestern Minnesota. Highs today from 25 to 35 degrees.

Around the region at this hour. Duluth reports some light snow in 22, light snow falling in International Falls in 19 and scattered light snow in the Twin Cities 28. That's the latest news from Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Greta Cunningham.

SPEAKER 1: Six minutes past 12 o'clock. And time now for today's Westminster Town Hall Forum with poet Rita Dove. Local and regional broadcasts of the Westminster Town Hall Forum are supported by the Springhill Center Fund of the Minneapolis Foundation supporting public discourse and civic engagement.

DANIEL LITTLE: Welcome to the Westminster Town Hall Forum, originating from the Westminster Presbyterian Church in downtown Minneapolis. My name is Daniel Little, acting moderator of the Town Hall Forum. The theme of the Town Hall Forum is voices of conscience, key issues in ethical perspective.

Today's speaker is Ms. Rita dove, one of the best honored poets of the late 20th century. Her distinct and rich writing style, heavily influenced by her African-American roots, has brought her national and international accolades. Her poetry was heard during the Atlanta Centennial Cultural Olympics in July 1996 as the text for composer Alvin Singleton's work for orchestra and narrator "Umoja, Each One of Us Counts."

In 1993, the United States government recognized the talents of Rita Dove by appointing her poet laureate of the United States and consultant on poetry at the Library of Congress, making her the youngest person and the first African-American to receive this highest official honor in American letters. She held this position for two years. In October of that same year, Rita Dove read her poem "Lady Freedom Among Us" at the ceremony commemorating the 200th anniversary of the United States Capitol and celebrating the restoration of the freedom statue on the Capitol's dome. She was also the recipient of a 1996 Charles Frankel Prize, the US government's highest honor for writers and scholars in the humanities.

Her extensive list of honors and awards includes The Great American Artists Award from the NAACP, the Folger Shakespeare Library's Renaissance Forum Award for leadership in the literary arts, and the 1996 Heinz Award in the arts and humanities, one of the largest individual achievement prizes in the world. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Humanities Center. The recipient of 14 honorary doctorates from colleges and universities throughout this country, Ms. Dove currently holds a chair as commonwealth professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia. Please join me in welcoming to this town Hall forum, Rita Dove, poet laureate.

[APPLAUSE]

RITA DOVE: Thank you. Thank you. Today, I thought I would share with you the genesis of a poem. What I'd like to do is to talk with you about how one particular poem came into being.

And I'm going to take you through several drafts of this poem. But first, I'd like to start by saying that this poem was different from many other poems that I write, because I think a poet often begins with an emotion or a line and proceeds from there. With this poem, it began with a fact.

For me, part of the trick to writing poems is to pretend that poetry is the last thing on my mind. The faintest whiff of self-consciousness, the slightest touch of that dread word, portent, and the poem scampers away like a spooked deer. And so the task of describing how this one poem came to be snared on the page is a mission that's charged both with equivocation and doomed to partial failure. I can proceed with anecdote and allegory at best and try to lead you through the course of the creative journey by insinuation and examples.

It began one Saturday in 1980. I was sitting with other writers in a bookshop in West Berlin when a book on the opposite side of the room caught my eye. I might not have noticed this book if I hadn't been slightly bored by the literary gossip of the group, many of whom had been meeting for brunch every Saturday for years. And actually, this brunch consisted of nothing more than champagne and strong coffee laced with the strains, the pungent strains of chain-smoked, unfiltered cigarettes. So gasping for fresh air, I got up and crossed the room.

The book was an oversized one, displayed at hip level on a shelf of art books. I was intrigued not only by its striking coloration, brilliant green on white, but by its peculiar title as well. The title was Petersilie, which is German for parsley. What could a book with such a title possibly be about?

The author was a respected German novelist by the name of Hubert Fichte, and the book was studded with photographs of palm trees and of tanks. The accompanying text chronicled the atrocities committed during the reign of General Rafael Trujillo, longtime dictator of the Dominican Republic. And that title, well, on the frontispiece, finally, I found Fichte's laconic explanation. On October 2nd, 1937, Trujillo had ordered 20,000 Haitian Blacks who worked in the cane fields executed because they could not roll the R in perejil, the Spanish word for parsley.

That was it. No further explanation of why the general chose this particular word or what the Haitians were doing in the Dominican Republic in the first place. No mention of the French Creole that the Haitians spoke, which rendered their Rs softly guttural, incapable of fluttering at the tip of the tongue. No description of the kind of execution, what was used and how quickly the terror proceeded.

No clue to the general state of mind at that time. Just the bald facts, 20,000 dead over one word. I jotted this into my notebook. I had no intention of writing a poem on the subject. The magnitude of the horror, coupled with a graduate school acquired dislike of political poetry, frightened me off.

But I do have one rule concerning anything that I put in my notebook, and it is this-- no matter how arcane, or silly, or scary or unsuitable an event or a detail might be, if it can stop me in my tracks, it goes into the notebook, no questions asked. Each time I stumbled onto this entry during the next few months, I was troubled anew. I simply could not skip over the story and forget about it. The sheer inventiveness of the cruelty, the supple brilliance of the deed stunned me.

I had always felt that evil was some monstrous, but essentially alien power. I had not counted on evil being interesting and creative. And since I could not reconcile these notions with my perception of the world, I knew that I needed first to double check Hubert Fichte's scholarship. It took me a while, finally, but I found corroboration of the Parsley Massacre in an American historical text. And now that I knew that the incident was undeniably true, I realized that I had to confront it poetically in order to put it to rest in my mind.

But how? For once, I had the facts before starting the poem. I was not imagining a dramatic situation or recasting a personal memory into imagery. This was as real as it could get.

How could I grasp something this big, this monstrous? Well, by going back to the beginning and by starting small. I remembered what first attracted me to Fichte's book. Its colors, white and green, not Kelly, or pee, or Nile or lime green, but that elemental, vegetal hue cut with a bit of sunlight.

What else was parsley green? Not grass, actually, not leaves. I found myself looking everywhere for that color. And more than a year after my first notebook entry, I finally found it.

It was by now 1981. I was living in Arizona, a month or so into my first full time University teaching position. Friends had invited us to a picnic on the Pima Indian Reservation just South of Phoenix. And it was while sitting in Betty Perez's trailer waiting for the ice chests to be loaded into the back of the pickup, that I looked at their pet parrot and found among the red tipped wings that precise green.

Betty's parrot was amazing. It could imitate anyone and anything. It imitated other birds, water dripping from the faucet, the slam of a screen door.

Suddenly, a line floated into my head. The parrot imitated spring, that was the line. I went to the bathroom and wrote it down in my notebook. I won't write in front of people. I'll always do it discreetly.

I also wrote down the equation parrot equals parsley green. I had no idea what to do with that. So I shut the notebook, joined the picnic and waited, waited for fate to call.

Now, I don't believe in divine intervention or anything like that when it comes to writing poems. I merely hope that if I kept my eyes and ears open that the details would gradually accrue, which would help me find my way into the poem. Whether I was up to the challenge of writing that poem, in the end, remained to be seen. First, though, I had to discover the hinge that would swing open the door onto its psychic landscape.

I entered the world of the poem through color and then through the image of a parrot imitating spring for itself. Later that week and a flurry of free association exercises produced a few more possibilities, which I shaped into a rather shabby silhouette. And I'll read you the first draft of this poem.

The parrot imitated spring. It was as green as parsley. El General rehearsed it all morning until he even heard the swish of eucalyptus.

He'd been once to Italy. He was an average man in average shoes, no boots, no whip. In fact, he even bit his thumb when he wasn't thinking. He favored inspiration, pale starred petals shattered on a rough pine box, grit and scintillans.

That was it. This was a kind of a writing without thinking about punctuation, or sense or anything like that. And except for a halfhearted attempt to humanize the dictator, this version really delivered nada, nothing but a few ill-conceived images of coffins and military boots, and a rather predictable mix, I think, of beauty and gore.

I was looking over my own shoulder while I was writing. In the margins, I scribbled notes to myself like, ignore the facts, and too pretty and the curt reprimand verbs because there weren't enough verbs in it. Then I paper clipped these drafts together, which I always write for ballpoint pen on college-ruled notebook paper. And then I put them in the desk drawer for a while.

About once a week I'd leafed through the poem fragments in that drawer, each time trying to continue but failing. I began to then obsess on another question of fact. My opening line by this time had developed into, there is a parrot imitating spring in the palace, which I thought had a nice musical lilt to it. But then I was stumped again.

Were there totally green parrots? I could not continue until I knew for sure. I scoured the library stacks and skimmed enough ornithological texts to satisfy a lifetime of bird watching, but no green parrot could I find. There were blue black mynas and blue gold macaws. There were yellow-fronted amazons and even the green, and violet imperial parrots native to Dominica, but no pure green parrot far and wide.

Then came one of those moments you dare not dream of. One afternoon, before my creative writing class, a student called my office. She was in downtown Phoenix, stuck at a pet shop where she worked because the store owner was late and the new parrot could not be left alone in the shop. And she asked if she could bring the parrot to class.

[LAUGHTER]

He's very well behaved, she assured me. Of course, you can bring him, I replied. But there is one catch.

Well, that parrot was a perfect, gentle bird. He paraded up and down the length of the conference table, occasionally picking up a stray pencil and depositing it before the student, and the class was enchanted. A couple of days later, the trainer student called to report that she had done her part of the bargain and had checked into the existence of green parrots. And indeed, there was such a species in Australia, which was entirely, deliciously parsley green.

SPEAKER 3: Hurray!

RITA DOVE: Yeah. Great, I said. And thank you, I exclaimed. And then I immediately sunk into despair. Australia, how in the world was I going to get an Australian parrot into the Dominican Republic?

[LAUGHS]

What an extravagance that would have been. What a mad display of power. Most likely, the parrot would have been shipped in an equally extravagant container, a cage of gold or even ivory. And then came another little draft, just a few lines.

The parrot, who has traveled all the way from Australia in an ivory cage, is coy as a widow practicing spring. At this point, I dove into the soothing waters of further research, studying the geographical and climatic conditions of the Lesser Antilles, learning more than I'd ever hoped to. I'll need to know about the growing and harvesting of sugar cane.

Some of that newfound knowledge, such as the fact that knowing sugar cane can erode your teeth into sharpened points, made it into the final version of the poem. But most of that research merely stoked the embers. In order not to be overwhelmed by the abomination of the actual historical event, I had latched on to the reassuring scaffolding of research and also form, deciding to use a very strict poetic form in order to get further into the poem.

The first form I decided to try was a villanelle. A villanelle is a form which repeats, has two lines which keep repeating. They alternate. And then there's always a line that does not repeat.

And I wanted to use that form because I thought it would echo the repetitive horror of the execution. The idea that one person would come up, say the word die, and then they'd call the next. So I began to work on this sestina.

And I thought I'd read you a sestina. Not my own, but another one so you can hear the pattern. This is Dylan Thomas's sestina. Do not go gentle-- I'm sorry, villanelle, "Do not go gentle into that good night."

"Do not go gentle into that good night, old age should burn and rave at close of day; rage, rage against the dying of the light. The wise men at their end know dark is right, because their words had forked no lightning they do not go gentle into that good night. Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, and learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, do not go gentle into that good night. Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, rage, rage against the dying of the light. And you, my father, there on that sad height, curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

So you see the two sentences, two lines which repeat are, do not go gentle into that good night and rage, rage against the dying of the light. I also try to do a sestina, which is a torture form. It is a six-line stanza, which the end words are always the same, but they go in different orders. There are about five or six stanzas and you have to keep ending each line on one of these words.

I took certain key words-- parrot, spring, general, green in order to build the skeleton of a sestina. While the villanelle part practically wrote itself, I already had the opening of one and a half lines. And since I was missing the conclusion of the middle line, I simply skipped to the third line, which then sprang almost full blown from my pen without a bit of help from me. So here's how it began.

There is a parrot imitating spring in the palace. A big blank, because I didn't know what the next part was. And the next line is, out of the swamp, the cane appears.

After that, the Haitians began to speak for themselves, their terrifyingly gentle and patient whispers rising from the rain-soaked fields. I now read you that right now. I'll read you the first part of the poem, which is the villanelle part. The poem is called "Parsley" and the villanelle is called the "Cane Fields."

There is a parrot imitating spring in the palace, its feathers parsley green. Out of the swamp the cane appears to haunt us, and we cut it down. El General searches for a word; he is all the world there is.

Like a parrot imitating spring, we lie down screaming as rain punches through and we come up green. We cannot speak an R-- out of the swamp, the cane appears and then the mountain we call in whispers Katalina. The children gnaw their teeth to arrowheads. There is a parrot imitating spring.

El General has found his word-- perejil, who says it, lives. He laughs, teeth shining out of the swamp. The cane appears in our dreams, lashed by wind and streaming.

And we lie down. For every drop of blood, there is a parrot imitating spring. Out of the swamp the cane appears.

That villanelle took about five or six drafts to get it to that point. The sestina, on the other hand, was rapidly turning into a disaster. I've never been able to write a decent sestina, but I keep trying. So here, for the sake of humility, is an early draft of the sestina.

Who is singing in the palace? What is it that stands so green among the curtains? Out in the cane fields, the Haitians pause their knives. Spring is still half a world away.

El General must be in love or is it a parrot that imitates the voice of a woman? A parrot who sings of love in the palace whose world is a large brass ring. El General paces furious and bored. The green ribbon he wears in his lapel is a reminder of the spring his mother died, a simple soul with a cane who never learned Spanish, who gnawed on sugar cane in secret, who wept when he went out in crowds.

The parrot was hers. It reminded him of spring, and yet he cannot bear to throw it out of the palace window and watch it flock, watch it flock, a green bouquet out over the swamp. Furious, the general paces and so on, ad nauseum.

But embedded into this convoluted narrative, this self-conscious array of semi-precious images are several essential elements which were not there before. The general's mother comes in, her cane, and that green ribbon in his lapel. So I abandoned this sestina and reread the villanelle aloud to convince myself that it was enough.

And then I typed it up and put it on my husband's desk for his no-nonsense prose writer's eye. He's a novelist so I give it to him. He emerged from his study, head cocked slightly to one side, and I could tell that something was wrong. He handed back the page. I caught myself clenching my fists and tried unsuccessfully to fight down the belligerence, which was rising to cover my frustration.

It's beautiful. He paused. But that's not all, is there?

What do you mean that's not all? I blurted. How can there be more? They're all dead.

Yes, I know. Another pause. But don't tell me that's everything.

I stomped back to my room, but I knew he was right. And he, dear man, let me stomp away. Years before, we had made a pact concerning the critiquing of each other's work. All tantrums and protests were not to be taken personally.

[LAUGHS]

The tantrum thrower, for his or her part, was never to resort to personal retorts such as, what do you know? You're just a fiction writer or a poet.

[LAUGHS]

And if either of these rules were ever violated, then we would stop critiquing each other's work. Well, time passed, and I was back to my weekly review of the poem, whose drafts were now numerous enough to earn their own red plastic folder.

Now, I'll never be so arrogant as to pretend that I really know how a poem finally comes into being. But I had just about resigned myself to failure with this one, when one evening, while alphabetizing the books in my study-- I was very frustrated-- I muttered to hell with poetry, took out my notebook and began to write in prose. I was hunkered down next to the bookshelf, scribbling madly away until my aching knees forced me to continue at the desk. And this is part of that prose segment.

The word the general's chosen is parsley, perejil. How he found it is-- there's a blank because I didn't know. It is spring when thoughts turn to love and death.

And in the spring, the general thinks of his mother and death. How she died in the spring, and her cane planted above the grave flowered each spring its stolid four-piece blossoms. So the general pulled on his boots to make his thighs strong.

He stomped to her room in the palace, the one with no curtains and a parrot in a brass ring, in parentheses, brought by boat all the way from Australia. And he paced as he wondered, who can I kill today? And the little knot of screams in his throat is still for a moment.

After that evening, as my father used to say, it was all over but the shouting. Oh, there were still revisions ahead, but I had cracked the barrier. Even though I had no idea how the poem was going to end, how I was going to explain the general's choice of that particular word, I wrote toward the ending I had to believe would be there, heartbreaking and inevitable, whenever I would be strong enough to meet it. And now I will read to you the entire poem, including the villanelle again.

"Parsley." The Cane Fields. There is a parrot imitating spring in the palace, its feathers parsley green. Out of the swamp the cane appears to haunt us, and we cut it down. El General searches for a word; he is all the world there is.

Like a parrot imitating spring, we lie down screaming as rain punches through and we come up green. We cannot speak an R-- out of the swamp, the cane appears and then the mountain we call in whispers Katalina. The children gnaw their teeth to arrowheads. There is a parrot imitating spring.

El general has found his word-- perejil. Who says it, lives. He laughs, teeth shining out of the swamp.

The cane appears in our dreams, lashed by wind and streaming. And we lie down. For every drop of blood, there is a parrot imitating spring. Out of the swamp the cane appears.

The Palace. The word the general's chosen is parsley. It is fall, when thoughts turn to love and death. The general thinks of his mother, how she died in the fall and he planted her walking cane at the grave and it flowered, each spring stolidly forming four-star blossoms.

The general pulls on his boots, he stomps to her room in the palace, the one without curtains, the one with a parrot in a brass ring. As he paces he wonders who can I kill today? And for a moment the little knot of screams is still.

The parrot, who has traveled all the way from Australia in an ivory cage, is, coy as a widow, practicing spring. Ever since the morning his mother collapsed in the kitchen while baking skull-shaped candies for the Day of the Dead, the general has hated sweets. He orders pastries brought up for the bird; they arrived, dusted with sugar on a bed of lace.

The knot in his throat starts to twitch; he sees his boots the first day in battle splashed with mud and urine as a soldier falls at his feet amazed-- how stupid he looked-- at the sound of artillery. I never thought it would sing the soldier said, and died. Now the general sees the fields of sugarcane, lashed by rain and streaming. He sees his mother's smile, the teeth gnawed to arrowheads. He hears the Haitians sing without Rs as they swing the great machetes-- Katalina, they sing, [SPANISH]

God knows his mother was no stupid woman; she could roll an R like a queen. Even a parrot can roll an R! In the bare room the bright feathers arch in a parody of greenery, as the last pale crumbs disappear under the blackened tongue.

Someone calls out his name in a voice so like his mother's, a startled tear splashes the tip of his right boot. My mother, my love in death. The general remembers the tiny green sprigs men of his village wore in their capes to honor the birth of a son. He will order many, this time, to be killed for a single, beautiful word.

[APPLAUSE]

Thank you. Thank you. And so nearly two years after that first sighting in the bookstore, I returned to Hubert Fichte's title, the one which first pulled me away from that circle of chain-smoking writers that spring day in Berlin. Petersilie, perejil, parsley, a single beautiful word. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

DANIEL LITTLE: You can tell by the reception that you have touched our hearts and our minds. And we thank you, Ms. Dove. You are listening to the Westminster Town Hall Forum, originating from Westminster Presbyterian Church in downtown Minneapolis.

Today's speaker is one of the most honored poets of the late 20th century, Rita Dove, speaking on the poet's voice. Today's program is co-sponsored by the McKnight Foundation. And now, while the ushers collect questions from the audience, those of you who are unable to stay for the question and answer period, please feel free to leave as you must.

Ms. Dove, I have a question. And I was warned ahead of time that, as the questions from the audience are coming forward, I will have a chance to ask it. So I'm going to move to that microphone, and you'll please come to this one and I'll ask you a question.

RITA DOVE: All right.

DANIEL LITTLE: I notice a group of children over here. And I've read your sketch of your own life and beginning as an author and an avid reader. What would you say to these children, among whom surely is a future author?

RITA DOVE: I know surely there are future authors among those children, and I imagine also some dormant authors among the older members here. The first thing that I would say is to read as much as you can. I don't believe that you can become a writer developed to your full potential if you don't read, and I mean read everything.

I'm quite a democrat when it comes to that. From comic books to the Iliad, read whatever strikes your interest. Don't let anyone tell you that you're too young to understand it.

I think that one of the disservices we can do for our young people is to assume that they cannot read something because it's above their level. If they want to read it, that desire is going to let them understand it. And if they don't understand it, they'll stop.

And I think that one of the things that was essential in my development, such a lucky break, was that I started to read Shakespeare when I was 10 and 11. It was a book. It was the thickest book on the shelf in my parents' house, and I wanted to read the biggest book. And so I started to read this.

No one said to me, you can't do this. I didn't understand a lot of things. But there were a lot of things that I did understand because I wanted to read it so badly.

DANIEL LITTLE: Who decides who becomes poet laureate of the United States? And as a part of another question from this person, do most of your poems take so long to gel?

[LAUGHS]

RITA DOVE: The first part of that question, the poet laureate is chosen by the librarian of Congress, who assembles a group of critics and writers from all over the country to advise him on this. It's a bit of a mysterious process. I did not know I was being considered until I got a phone call one day in May and they asked me if I'd like to be poet laureate. And I'm still trying to figure out who put them up to that. That's how the poet laureate is chosen.

The second part of the question, thank goodness most of my poems do not take that long to gel. There are some, the very, very few, which can happen almost overnight. And when I say overnight, I mean the first reasonable presentation of the poem happens very quickly. But I believe that you cannot sit under a tree and wait for inspiration to strike. Because inspiration or the muse, as she flies by, will look and see that you're lolling under a tree and will say, I'll go someplace where someone's already working.

[LAUGHS]

So it takes-- usually, there's no usual time, but I would say generally a few months. And I tend to work on many poems at once so that I don't get depressed as a poem takes long to gel.

DANIEL LITTLE: In your book, Thomas and Beulah, there are many vivid details. Did you get these firsthand from your grandparents or secondhand sources?

RITA DOVE: That's a wonderful question. My grandparents had both died by the time I began writing Thomas and Beulah. But both of them were great storytellers and had told us many stories when we were young and sometimes over and over. So there are lots of details from those stories.

When I began writing the poems in Thomas and Beulah, which is a book about my grandparents, the first part is told from my grandfather's point of view, and the second from my grandmother's point of view. When I began writing those poems, I realized that there was so much I didn't know. And it was a combination of research again. I really went back to books to find out what their lives were like in Akron, Ohio, in the 1920s.

But I also talked with my mother, who was wonderful. I talked with her. I was living in Arizona at the time and we spoke every Saturday when the rates were cheap. And I told her I was writing poems about her parents.

She never asked to see a poem, though I was prepared with a few safe ones, I thought to show her. Not that there was anything risque in them, but it is a very tricky matter when you are talking-- when you are presuming to speak for someone else. And at first, she tried to focus-- she asked me what I wanted to know, but I didn't know what I wanted to know.

And so we ended up just reminiscing. She told me about her childhood. Sometimes I would ask a question.

If I asked her suddenly, what color was the scarf? She didn't say, why do you want to know? She simply said, I think it was yellow or I think it was blue. And then there were things I made up.

[LAUGHS]

DANIEL LITTLE: Can you-- should you separate our artistic and aesthetic elements from politics, racial and ethnic elements?

RITA DOVE: You can. I don't think one should. I think that a poem has several obligations to itself and to the audience that it will reach.

I think a poem has, first of all, the obligation to be honest. But I say honest to itself, which means that sometimes honesty is not biographical truth, but an emotional truth. In other words, I'm not fretting the details whether a scarf is yellow or blue, but whether the moment has been honestly looked at and recreated. That's the first thing.

That necessarily implies moral honesty, I think, and political honesty, which gets us to the next part. A poem, any art form, I think, has the responsibility to engage its medium as much as possible. With poetry, it is words, but it's also silence. This is what you use to make a poem.

With painting, its color and absence of color, and it's also the surface of the paint. In other words, to pay as much attention to how something is said, the meaning of every word, the sound of every word, the sound of the silences at the end of the line, all of these things go toward shaping one's emotional response to the poem. Even the fact that a line may be very long and may take a long time to say affects us because then we'll have to take a deep breath at the end of the line.

All of those things are important to get to the honesty of the poem and the moral truth. When I say that these things can be separated but should not be separated, when one has a program to get across in a poem or any other art form, a message, and allows the artistic integrity to be compromised simply for the message, then I think it ceases to become a poem or that art form. It becomes a hybrid of sorts. This is not to say that a political movement or a political expression is not important. But if you're writing a poem, you're writing a poem, and you owe it to be truthful to both ends of the spectrum.

DANIEL LITTLE: Here are three profound questions from the children. First one is this, how do when you've got a good poem?

RITA DOVE: This is the hardest question in the universe. Thank you, children. Wallace Stevens said that a poem is never finished. It's abandoned in despair.

[LAUGHS]

There is a lot of truth to that. I guess one-- really, you may have an inkling that this is pretty good, but I don't know if we really know ever if a poem is great. Time is one thing. When I finish a poem, I will often put it aside, read it a week later, not even look at it, and then read it a month later just to see if it wasn't the flush of that first moment of getting it on the page, to see if it still works for me.

And I don't think there's a single poem of mine that there isn't a word I wish I could change. There's always something that I think is not quite right, which is fine. It just keeps me writing on.

But I don't know if you can ever tell if it is great. I'll leave it up to the critics and they disagree. So there we are.

I don't write in order to write a great poem. I write because I have to I think, because I need to get it out, because I love working with language. And because if it can touch somebody else, then it's communication at the deepest level. That's why I write.

DANIEL LITTLE: How did you become interested in poetry?

RITA DOVE: I became interested in poetry because I was reading a lot when I was young, when I was your age and even younger. And I read an anthology, it was called The Anthology of Best Loved Poems, I believe, edited by Louis Untermeyer. I picked up the book because it had a purple and gold cover. I'm very color oriented, as you can tell. And I browsed through the poems.

What I loved about poems was how they made the language sing. It's the most amazing expression of something that-- it seems that humans are one of the few species on this Earth that can do communication through a language. And that something written on the page could actually sing out at you, and whisper at you and do all of these things was magic. That's how I became interested in poetry above all the other written forms.

DANIEL LITTLE: And finally, on this series, it assumes that poetry helps your troubles. How does it help?

RITA DOVE: I think that one of the most difficult things for human beings to do is to work through our troubles and to articulate them. And when we don't articulate them, when we cannot find a way to communicate them to others and to explain exactly how we feel, to a certain extent, we feel alone. We feel alone and we feel lost in that emotion.

Now, if you're happy, you usually don't care. If you are sad or if there's something that's troubling you, there is nothing more empowering, I think, than to share that with someone else and to have them understand as precisely as possible how you feel. When I write poems, what helps me-- two things is that it finally, in being able to articulate as closely as I can what it that is haunting me or bothering me, helps me become less afraid of it, or less depressed by it.

In the case of the "Parsley" poem, I had to write the poem in order to come to terms with how someone could think up such a creative way to execute people. And it is a modern day shibboleth, but I wanted to be able to imagine-- to get inside that dictator's mind, to imagine how he came up with this. I needed to do that.

It is not comforting to come to the end of such a poem, but it does help deal with and be able to deal with it. It becomes more graspable. And then to be able to read a poem or to have someone else read a poem and say or respond and say, yes, I understand what you mean is an enormously wonderful and warming experience.

DANIEL LITTLE: Here's one about reading versus speaking poetry. Poetry is hard to read on the page, wonderful to hear aloud. How do you use speaking and reading aloud in your writing?

RITA DOVE: Well, poetry did begin as an oral art. And I believe that most poems should be able to speak for themselves on the page. I'm going to digress just a little bit and just say I think that when you have difficulty reading a poem on the page, the best thing to do is to read it aloud. Just read it aloud to yourself. And I mean actually read it aloud, not just whisper it.

But to feel the words in your mouth and then sense because the sound is part of the poem. When I write poems, I try to write them in such a way that I give you indications of when to pause, how much emphasis a line is supposed to have. And that's why certain lines are shorter or longer.

And also the sounds of words, the very sound of the word. For instance, in the poem "Parsley," near the end of the poem, there are lots of Rs in it. In the bare room, the bright feathers arch in a parody of greenery. There are all these kind of Rs that happen, which you won't notice if you hear it, and maybe even if you look at it.

But if you let your ears open and if you say it in your mouth, you let it come out, then suddenly all of those Rs come out and the significance of the key that's going to kill all those people comes out. So all of those things are inherent in the poem. And I try to think of those things when I write them.

DANIEL LITTLE: Here's a double-edged question, what, in your view, is a writer's responsibility to her readers? And conversely, what is America's responsibility to our writers?

RITA DOVE: Ooh!

[LAUGHS]

If a writer decides to publish their work and to have other people read it, I think that the responsibility of the writer is, first of all, not to whitewash anything, not to tamp down on emotions because they seem to be maybe not quite appropriate. I believe that if we have an emotion, to deny it only allows it-- if it's a negative emotion or something like that, to deny it only allows it more of an opportunity to grow in the dark and to eventually take over. We have to confront every aspect of ourselves. And the poet's obligation is if that is, part of the poem, to bring it into the poem. And to bring it into the poem in such a way also paying attention to the discipline, the aesthetics of the art.

Our country's responsibility to the poets is to listen. And that sounds very simple, but it's a lot deeper than that. We are not listening to our poets and our artists. Some of us are, but our government certainly isn't. And it is to realize that we can suffer from a malnutrition of the spirit just as easily as we can suffer from other kinds of poverty.

[APPLAUSE]

Thank you. To recognize that art is not frivolous, that it is essential to our souls, and that we have to feed our spirit, as well as our bodies. And that means federal support of the arts. Other countries do it.

[APPLAUSE]

They're proud of it. Art is really-- Beverly Sills, the opera diva, once said that art is the signature of civilizations. It's what remains of us, what remains of our spirit more than anything else. And we have to recognize that and I think our country needs to simply listen.

DANIEL LITTLE: How are we to understand what a poem is about if we don't know what inspired it, the story behind it?

RITA DOVE: I think you can know what a poem is about, even without knowing the story behind it. Today, I wanted to show you how hard it was to get to that point in the poem. And this poem is-- there's a note, a footnote to this poem in the book. But I also think that when I wrote the poem, I wanted you to be able to understand it without knowing the historical details as well. Just from the poem itself, you understand that something is being-- something is happening, that people are dying because of a word.

If you can let poetry wash over you like music, if we can stop thinking, oh, I've got to get the interpretation right, which I think is one of the reasons why many of us are afraid of poetry, if you let it wash over you like music, I do believe you understand it at first reading, at first hearing, much like you understand reading with your elbow or something. You don't understand it with your head, you understand it with your with your body. And then to read it again and again as to live with a poem, you do begin to understand what it's about.

One of the most-- I'm sorry. I'm going to tell a little anecdote. One of the most valuable things that happened to me in my life happened in ninth grade with an English teacher who broke us into small groups and gave each of us a poem didn't tell us, the author didn't tell us any background, and asked us over the course of the next two to three days to come up with an interpretation. And he picked the hardest things he could find, Ezra Pound.

The section that we had, had French, and Greek in Greek letters, and some English. And it was so impossible for us to translate the French or the Greek that we decided this is impossible, let's just make up something. So we began to riff off of this poem and said, well, maybe this French word means this because it's close to the English.

And we just started doing that, and read it aloud, and came up with our interpretation, as did the other groups. And at the end, the teacher read interpretations from established critics, and every single group was right on target. And it showed you that you know more than you think you know when you read a poem.

DANIEL LITTLE: I think this will be our last question. In your interview with Scott Robinson in the Pioneer Press newspaper, you spoke about the collaboration with composers and the effect, which this has on your poetry. Do you enjoy the such collaboration and plan to pursue this creative avenue?

RITA DOVE: I do enjoy collaborating with other artists, and particularly with musicians. I've been an amateur musician all my life. I've played cello and then I sing occasionally with local opera groups. And so I love music.

And yet when I write poems, I don't think of them necessarily as that kind of music. It's a different kind of music. What I love about collaboration is that it pushes me to think about the words as being sung. And then it also stretches what I-- the own cages that I have built around myself in terms of language and what language can do.

Most of the time I do tend to write a poem and then it is set to music. I don't write for a piece of music. But in the case of the piece, which was mentioned earlier, "Umoja," that was done at the Olympics, I did that specifically for that occasion. And it taught me a lot about the public utterance and what that can do, and also music and how that unites an entire group of people just simultaneously in that instant in a single note. So I love doing it, and I will continue.

SPEAKER 1: Poet Rita Dove, speaking at this week's Westminster Town Hall Forum. Rita Dove was the poet laureate of the United States. Local and regional broadcasts of the Westminster Town Hall Forum are supported by the Spring Hill Center Fund of the Minneapolis Foundation supporting--

[MUSIC PLAYING]

SPEAKER 4: It's 6:29 and you're listening to All Things Considered, the last moments of it, that is. Marketplace comes your way in just about a minute. Stay tuned.

In the Twin Cities tonight, a few clouds down to 62 tomorrow. A lot of sun and a lot of humidity, up to about 88 degrees. The time now, 6:30.

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PAULA SCHROEDER: Hi, I'm Paula Schroeder. Coming up on our next Mid-Morning, national political analyst Chris Gilbert assesses President Clinton's budget proposals and efforts by Congress to cut spending. Mid-Morning, 9:00 to 11:00 on the FM news station, KNOW FM 91.1.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

SPEAKER 6: From Los Angeles, this is Marketplace.

SPEAKER 7: Manindra Pal walks down a dirt path between long stretches of rice paddy toward the workers bending over in the bright sun.

[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

SPEAKER 7: An old man in a turban and loincloth, then women in saris and scarves separate the rice husks from the grain. 25 years ago, this paddy would have been infused with chemicals. In fact, Pal used to be a Green Revolution farmer, but pesticide spraying made him sick. So in the heyday of the Green Revolution, to the astonishment of other farmers, Manindra Pal abandoned all chemicals and set out to prove in his 100 acres of rice just how much you could grow organically.

MANINDRA PAL: Once upon a time, people used to call me a crazy fellow. But the fact, it exists so nobody can deny the fact that it can be done with high productivity, much higher. My yield is increasing every year.

SPEAKER 7: Pal says, all you have to do is look around your farm and see what's lying there getting wasted. His ingredients are simple-- cow dung, cow urine and leaves. Every ounce of cow manure is used, pumped into biomass pipes to fuel the farm kitchen, then washed back out into the fields as a natural fertilizer.

MANINDRA PAL: So your manure is available always.

SPEAKER 7: But this practice hasn't spread very far into the fields of India. Many farmers prefer fertilizers. The price is heavily subsidized by the government.

Also, Pal's 100 acres are much larger than the average Indian farm. Even he admits, on many smaller farms, there's competition for cow dung. It's used also as cooking fuel, and there's simply not enough to go around.

So if Manindra Pal's model of organic farming cannot be translated to the rest of India's farms, what about the other end of the spectrum? Genetic engineering of plants? Back in Delhi at the university named after the nation's first president, Jawaharlal Nehru, I find geneticist Krishna Tewari.

KRISHNA TEWARI: No matter what happens, what people talk, India's population one day will be 2 billion. There is nothing to stop this population growth. So that's a given. Can we do something?

SPEAKER 7: His population estimates may be a bit high, but the point remains the same.

KRISHNA TEWARI: Now we have to really redesign the plant in such a way that it will be dramatically more productive.

SPEAKER 7: Using genetic fingerprinting, Tewari and his colleagues identified a particular chromosome resistant to a common insect that attacks rice in India. Tewari says with breakthroughs like this, scientists could engineer a whole new range of plants that fight off pests, and use less water, and stay rooted in high winds and grow on poor soils. In theory, this could increase food production, but that's not the direction agricultural biotechnology appears to be headed in. Food geneticists and seed experts around the world worry that because of the privatization of agricultural research, sustainable food production is getting shunted aside. Most research of genetic engineering of seeds is in the hands of multinational chemical companies, and most of their research is in developing seeds that are able to withstand heavy doses of herbicides.

VANDANA SHIVA: What they're really looking for is larger sales of chemicals.

SPEAKER 7: This is the noted Indian social critic Vandana Shiva.

VANDANA SHIVA: They're very clear about their investments not being for meeting the food needs of the large numbers of people on this planet. I see no indication that there will be a solution to hunger because they're not addressing hunger.

SPEAKER 7: And hunger exists in abundance in India. Despite the success of the Green Revolution in growing more food and despite India's many programs to distribute food cheaply, there are still more hungry people in India than there are people in the United States.

[NON-ENGLISH CHATTER]

SPEAKER 7: Back up in the Punjab, a row of mud houses stands at the edge of a prosperous wheat field. 14 families live, 8 and 10 people each, in rooms slightly larger than tool sheds. 40 people crowd around us staring at the microphone as my interpreter, Gagan Gill, speaks to a slight man in an open shirt and rolled-up pants.

INTERPRETER: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

SPEAKER 8: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

INTERPRETER: I am [? Gurnam ?] [? Massih ?] from Sherpur village in Batala district of Punjab.

SPEAKER 7: Like nearly 200 million other people in rural India, [? Gurnam ?] [? Massih ?] and his wife [? Pyarih ?] have no land. Former untouchables, they converted to Christianity to try to escape their fate. For this family, the availability of food grains in the future is not the issue. It's the availability of work and money today.

SPEAKER 8: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

INTERPRETER: We still do the traditional work of scavenging. This is all we can do. We cannot do anything else.

SPEAKER 9: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

INTERPRETER: My name is [? Pyarih ?] I remove the cow dung from the cattle places. I clean the place. I remove the trash from the homes.

SPEAKER 7: [? Pyarih ?] shapes the balls of cow dung into fuel for the ovens of her higher-caste neighbors. For 25 years, this has been her work. Her pay is in wheat, about a pound a day, sometimes less. It depends, she tells us, on how well she's worked.

SPEAKER 9: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

INTERPRETER: We can survive for two to three months on this wheat. After that, we have to fend for ourselves.

SPEAKER 9: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

SPEAKER 7: Before we leave, I ask [? Pyarih, ?] how can you describe hunger? She looks at me as if to say, what a strange thing to ask. And then she tries to answer.

SPEAKER 9: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

INTERPRETER: I think it is impossible to describe hunger.