Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/hunter-discusses-reshaping-shopworn-language Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript Paul Hunter, a poet, musician, instrument-maker, teacher, and editor and publisher, has produced letterpress books and broadsides under the imprint of Wood Works Press in Seattle. He talks about his works. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. GWEN IFILL: Finally tonight, another in our occasional series on poets and poetry. Tonight, Paul Hunter of Seattle. His latest collection of poems is called "Ripening." PAUL HUNTER, Poet: I'm Paul Hunter, and I'm a letterpress publisher, and poet, and a writer, and an explorer in various ways, and I also make musical instruments, repair them. All of those are modes of expression and contacts with the world.I mean, for most of my adult life now, I've been finding broken instruments or people give me broken instruments, and I fix them, and they get another life. There's a part of me that's so cheered by that, and it may be part of the same thing that happens with words, with language, that you take a phrase, you take a phrase, you take a set of phrases that are shopworn, that people have had around them and not recognized, and take them and put them into a context that gives them a sharpened meaning of freshness."For the Miracle."In the shop its bench work-scarredlong planks run under the windowwhere grease meets paint meets sawtooth chiselwhere an engine would be heaved to take apartand at one end vise jaws partedhaving said the final word let goand on shelves underfoot rows of coffee cansto sort by size wingnut from locknutfrom wood screw machine screwbent nail fence steeple hose clampand beyond all around broken thingsbrought here for the miraclealongside things in their rude beginningsthat may yet be finished and praisedamid things in the way once too oftenthat may become raw materialsand out of their great beyond serve in turn aspatch or knife blade or chair rungto be of use once againMy father grew up on a chicken farm in Erlanger, Kentucky. As a kid, we spent a few weeks in the summer on my Uncle Edwin's farm. And then I started working on farms myself. Most of my adult life has not been spent on farms, but it's the lens through which I see the world. It formed who I was in a very immediate and real way.And I think my father let me do it because he thought I would learn a lesson about staying away from effortful drudgery, and I learned exactly the opposite lesson, that most of those people led modest lives, virtuous lives. Those people were substantial and modest in ways that I try to emulate."This Failure."Say spring too wet for plowingruns axle-deep into Julyor the August oven never quite fires upbefore an early killing frostsay it rains the whole summeror you catch root mold or blightgo a parching year without a dropThere you stand in the fieldone with all the othersfrail tottering headless at a lossthough still with work to be doneto clear away or turn undermow rake or burn off this failureif there is to be another cropThe way that I tell if it's a poem is, when I'm finished, if it's still mysterious. Does it remain mysterious? Has it exhausted its subject or, in some way, is its subject perennial and fresh?